<p>National Universities
1 Harvard
2 Yale
3 Princeton
4 MIT
5 Stanford
6 Penn
7 Duke
8 Columbia
9 Brown
10 Cornell</p>
<p>LACs
1 Pomona
2 Williams
3 Carleton
4 Cornell College
5 Bowdoin
6 Wellesley
7 Colgate (tie)
7 Bryn Mawr (tie)
9 Wesleyan
10 Reed</p>
<p>I think the LAC rankings look a bit weird (there's clearly some problem if Amherst isn't in the top 10, I think), but the national university rankings look pretty legit.</p>
<p>It’s based on the revealed preference ranking system which have been the subject of many CC threads and will ultimately attract the same adherents and detractors. What I like especially about this website is the comment section; the creators seem pretty well-informed and willing to engage critics (unlike, the editors at USNews.)</p>
<p>There seems to be an awful lot of up/down movement to satisfy the “stability” criterion. Pomona for example is up 42 points, Michigan up 111, Vanderbilt down 58. I’m assuming these numbers represent movement in Elo points from 2009, not movement in places, right?</p>
<p>Hah! Amherst definitely deserved to fall 144 places after rejecting my sister :-)</p>
<p>But yeah, I looked around and I think their problem with LACs is that they don’t have enough people. I think they should say how many people their rankings are based on, so we can get a better idea of whether the rankings are fluctuating due to having a seedy sample size or due to some <em>ahem</em> “real” change. If you guys are listening, prove it by making the fix!</p>
<p>I actually think this is a pretty decent ranking. HYPSM are pretty much always going to be top 5 unlike USN&WR and most on here agree with that. Berkeley gets moved up a few notches to #11. It helps public universities in general since many people choose to attend IS publics for less money than go out of state and pay for expensive privates. Caltech at 23 seems quite low, but it’s a niche school that most high schoolers would not be a good fit for and thus choose not to attend. In situations like that, the revealed preferences may be a bit flawed, but no system is perfect and it’s certainly an interesting technique. Sample size may be causing some issues too.</p>
<p>noimagination: I agree. I’d like to see how this would look if they had more responses. Looking at those schools on their site, it’s clear that a lot of people don’t report where they got in.</p>
<p>silverturtle: Yeah, that’s way off, then. I wonder where college navigator and mychances are getting that number? I don’t think it affects these rankings though.</p>
<p>A list of whose preferences??? Preferences change greatly as you move around the USA. </p>
<p>Walk around San Antonio or Denver or Phoenix or Indianapolis or Seattle or New Orleans or even Atlanta and ask people about almost any of the schools listed in this thread’s Top 10 and most would not care a whit. They’d have their own Top 10, nearly all of which would be within 500 miles of where they were standing. Walk around Boston and/or talk to the private school boarding kids and they would probably be the ones who created the list in the first place. </p>
<p>In addition to geography, I think that ethnicity and understanding of America also can play a major role in determining preferences. Asians are notorious prestige hounds as are 1st generation Americans or recent immigrants into the USA. For example, I recently had a funny and enlightening encounter with a CEO of medium-sized US company. He’s a highly educated European (2 Masters degrees from Ecole des Mines) who has been raising his family in the USA for the last 10 years. He was insistent that the Ivies were about the only reputable schools in the USA and he’d only consider those schools for his children. LOL. I informed him about several other places including some of my faves (Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame) and he did some digging. Needless to say, his view was materially broadened and his tune was quite a bit different in our next conversation. I think he now wants his sons and daughters to go to Stanford or Duke. </p>
<p>Anyway, the preference rankings are bunk. The only preference that matters is yours and your choice should be driven by what is important to you.</p>
<p>I think you’re right, but, that sort of is the point that drives of lot of these disccussions, isn’t it? Everyone has their idea of what consitutes the conventional wisdom and it very seldom involves what people in the local barber shop care or think about.</p>
<p>But where is the local barber shop? Is it in Wellesley, MA or is it in Charlotte, NC or is it in Oklahoma City or dozens and dozens of other cities? Different answers in each locale.</p>