<p>I am intrigued by a recent article entitled "A Revealed Preference Ranking of US Colleges and Universities" that was written by researchers at Harvard, Boston U, and U Penn. Here is the link:</p>
<p>I don't think this is a definative study of "win ratios" but the method is interesting and the results of this effort are informative. The method involves math that I do not understand but the concept is that you can rank colleges according to who wins the head-to-head competitions for applicants admitted to both schools. </p>
<p>I'd like to hear what others think about this approach. What does it actually indicate? To what extent do head-to-head choices reflect quality? What role do factors play that have nothing to do with quality, such as religious affiliation and cost/financial aid, and proximity to population centers? Is it more an "economic indicator" than "quality indicator"? In other words, what does this ranking mean? </p>
<p>Here are the top colleges according to this ranking approach. The numbers are called elo points and measure head-to-head "wins". The method is borrowed from chess ranking methods. </p>
<p>Harvard 2800
Yale 2738
Stanford 2694
Cal Tech 2632
MIT 2624
Princeton 2608
Brown 2433
Columbia 2392
Amherst 2363
Dartmouth 2357
Wellesley 2346
U Penn 2325
U Notre Dame 2279
Swarthmore 2270
Cornell 2236
Georgetown 2218
Rice 2214
Williams 2213
Duke 2209
U Virginia 2197
Northwestern 2136
Pomona 2132
Berkeley 2115
Georgia Tech 2115
Middlebury 2114
Wesleyan 2111
U Chicago 2104
Johns Hopkins 2096
USC 2072
Furman 2061
UNC 2045
Barnard 2034
Oberlin 2027
Carleton 2022
Vanderbilt 2016
UCLA 2012
Davidson 2010
U Texas 2008
NYU 1992
Tufts 1986
Washington & Lee 1983
U Michigan 1978
Vassar 1978
Grinnell 1977
U Illinois 1974
Carnegie Mellon 1957
U Maryland 1956
William & Mary 1954
Bowdoin 1953
Wake Forest 1940
Claremont 1936
Macalester 1926
Colgate 1925
Smith 1921
U Miami 1914
Haverford 1910</p>
<p>It is not indicative at ALL about the quality of a school. More high schoolers invited to go to drinking parties versus non-drinking parties choose to go to drinking parties. Does that make it the better choice? Nope.</p>
<p>yeah i know, people please stop posting this useless list
if you have a brain of your own, use it to choose a school, rather than relying on the choices of others</p>
<p>Actually, I beg to differ. This is one the best rankings out there...and this is coming from someone whose not the biggest fan of college rankings in general.</p>
<p>Revealed preferences actually puts colleges in head to head competition with each for cross admits. Its a very market driven approach, and gives one a sense of how top students feel about one college vs. another. </p>
<p>"It is not indicative at ALL about the quality of a school."</p>
<p>Surely the quality of a school has at least something to do with the college choices of high school seniors who have the option of attending one school over another.</p>
<p>High school seniors don't know anymore about a college than the average Joe walking out in the street does. They may THINK they know, but they really don't. You actually have to go to a school to know something about it.</p>
<p>Exactly. The only head-to-head ranking that would have merit would be transfers from one school to another, since you are actually EXPERIENCING them. And I'm sure that, for instance, Harvard wins over Princeton a lot of the time because of the better location. Does that mean it's a "better" school? Not at all.</p>
<p>you are forgetting a natural geographic bias....I know of many top kids on the west coast of the US who have absolutely no intention of going to school where you can't wear shorts all year.</p>
<p>prettyfish: a LOT of folks would disagree that city-like Cambridge is better than suburban NJ. It just depends on what a kid is looking for. If you want city, then schools like Chicago, Columbia, are wonderful. If you want a rural, close-knit experience, then Dartmouth and Williams come to mind. Niether location is 'better'.</p>
<p>I'm not forgetting geography at all. Geographic biases work both ways, and lets face it, location is an important consideration in choosing a school. There are people at NYU would don't want to be anywhere but Manhattan, and there are people at Stanford who wouldn't set foot on the east coast. There are die hard southerners who consider it sariligious to go north of the mason dixon, and there are those who think the north east US is the center of the entire planet...so the biases cancel each other out. </p>
<p>UC Benz, regardless of your opinion on what high school students may or may not know, students are the market force (ie the consumers) in undergraduate admissions. The revealed preferences ranking was done on the preferences of top cross admit high school students who all had perfect information (eg published rankings, general rep. of the college in the community, this site, etc.)..and based on that info. you have the list.</p>
<p>"High school seniors don't know anymore about a college than the average Joe walking out in the street does. They may THINK they know, but they really don't. You actually have to go to a school to know something about it."</p>
<p>So I suppose the entire Peer Assessment part of USNWR should be thrown out?</p>
<p>And shouldn't all the factors of a college be taken into consideration when selecting a school, not just solely academics?</p>
<p>If you want to get into stats, I submit geographical bias did not skew the rankings to help colleges in a particular region...unless you have something show me the sample was tainted with bias (ie top students in the north east were oversampled..though its pretty clear thats where the top colleges are in disproportionate numbers). </p>
<p>Furthermore, the revealed preferences rankings were also broken down by region, and even then did not change considerably.</p>
<p>I have no idea whether or not any ranking is an accurate or valuable ranking, including this one; however, I would think that this particular ranking would at least allow you to know which schools compete for which student and what school this particular student chooses to attend. From that I would think that you would at least know:</p>
<p>1) Lets say 8 schools prefer one particular student based on their own standards for a desired student.
2) This student in turn chooses only one school to matriculate in (thus the preferred school by that student)
3) If a pattern is formed amongst those preferred students for one school over another, we can assume that this school is getting more of the students that were preferred by the universities themselves and thus that universitys student body will be the preferred student body as judged by the universities themselves (through offers of admission).</p>
<p>This would be especially true at schools that did not give merit aid (ivies, perhaps others).</p>
<p>This does not mean that the university itself is objectively better, but that the students at the preferred university are "preferred" to other students and are more likely to be "top" prospects in the eyes of multiple universities.</p>
<p>The students at any particular school are a major part of the value of the school itself.</p>
<p>The ranking is a great guage at how top students view the colleges. Correct me if I'm wrong, but students are the consumers here...and this guide is essentially a consumer report.</p>
<p>I think the more significant lists are those that are broken down by region. They show that, after the first ten or so schools, the revealed preference rankings (for the entire country) are, in fact, skewed by the number of respondents in different areas and by the fact that the largest number of top respondents will be located in the Northeast area.</p>