Ranking of best USNews schools in terms of probability of admission

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I flipped the USNews rankings upside-down to take into account the probability of admission. I took the second number to the right of the school's name (the admissions rate) minus the number to the left of the admissions rate (the school's USNews rankings). The results reveal which schools are the best in light of a given individual's chances for admission, ranked according to the difference between those two numbers (the number on the far right is this difference). Not surprisingly, Ivy League schools move down towards the bottom of the list. This ranking is for those students who don't want waste resources by sending futile applications to schools like Harvard, but who still want to go to the best school possible.</p>

<p>1) U Chicago 9 38 29
2) Michigan 25 47 22 (take into account residency)
3) Northwestern 14 30 16
4) Emory 17 32 15
4) Vanderbilt 19 34 15
6) UVA 23 37 14 (take into account residency)
7) UPenn 5 18 13
7) Duke 8 21 13
7) Cornell 12 25 13
7) Johns Hopkins 14 27 13
7) Wake Forest 30 43 13
12) CalTech 5 17 12
12) CMU 22 34 12
14) Princeton 1 10 9
14) WashU 12 21 9
16) Notre Dame 19 27 8
17) Harvard 2 9 7
17) Stanford 4 11 7
17) Rice 17 24 7
20) Yale 3 9 6
20) MIT 7 13 6
20) UNC 28 34 6<br>
23) Dartmouth 11 16 5
24) Berkeley 21 24 3
25) Columbia 9 10 1
25) UCLA 25 26 1
27) Brown 14 14 0
28) Georgetown 23 22 -1
28) Tufts 28 27 -1
30) USC 27 25 -2</p>

2

<p>Interesting; but a more meaningful index would be:</p>

<p>Acceptance rate * (Score/100)</p>

3

<p>what does that do exactly?
here's the results from that formula</p>

<p>U Chicago 9 38 29 11.02
Michigan 25 47 22 10.34
Wake Forest 30 43 13 5.59
UVA 23 37 14 5.18
Vanderbilt 19 34 15 5.1
Northwestern 14 30 16 4.8
Emory 17 32 15 4.8
CMU 22 34 12 4.08
Johns Hopkins 14 27 13 3.51
Cornell 12 25 13 3.25
Duke 8 21 13 2.73
UPenn 5 18 13 2.34
Notre Dame 19 27 8 2.16
CalTech 5 17 12 2.04
UNC 28 34 6 2.04
WashU 12 21 9 1.89
Rice 17 24 7 1.68
Princeton 1 10 9 0.9
Dartmouth 11 16 5 0.8
MIT 7 13 6 0.78
Stanford 4 11 7 0.77
Berkeley 21 24 3 0.72
Harvard 2 9 7 0.63
Yale 3 9 6 0.54
UCLA 25 26 1 0.26
Columbia 9 10 1 0.1
Brown 14 14 0 0
Georgetown 23 22 -1 -0.22
Tufts 28 27 -1 -0.27
USC 27 25 -2 -0.5</p>

4

<p>Fun with Excel!</p>

5

<p>Woot, let's perform arbitrary calculations involving unrelated units.</p>

6

<p>I was talking about Overall score; where did you get 29, 22, etc?</p>

<p>This index is your acceptance rate "subtracted" by loss of "prestige" compared to the number one school.</p>

<p>And would you mind posting your excel sheet if possible?</p>

7

<p>you mean the overall score as in the USNews rank? the 29 is the (admissions rate) - (the USNews ranking) for the University of Chicago. So for UChicago that is 38-9= 29. the 29 number, was then initially used as the number to sort all of the results, the highest differences between rank and acceptance rate being ranked the highest. for the last rankings i did what i thought you told me to do i took the (acceptance rate) * ((the difference between the acceptance rate and the USNews rank)/ 100). is this not what you meant? i don't know i'm no math whiz, i'm just trying to distract myself from finals for the moment.</p>

<p>follow this link for the excel file:
YouSendIt</a> - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement</p>

8

<p>..........null post</p>

9

<p>thread you mean?</p>

10

<p><a href="http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4063/screenshot3uo0.jpg%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4063/screenshot3uo0.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>A. School Name
B. Overall USNWR Score
C. Admission %
D. Index: Admission % * Overall Score/ Avg Score
E. Peer Score
F. Peer Adjusted Index: Index + (Peer Score - Avg Peer Score) * 20. 20 is purely an arbitrary number, but it is a number that will give a decent amount of weight to peer assessment score, which is most objective "prestige/research" ranking available to us. Above average score will add point; below will subtract. If anyone have a better solution that could replace this value and is justifiable, please post here.
G. USNWR Rank for reference</p>

<p>Comments? Thoughts?
I personally believe that this list represents some school that are not HYPSM difficult to get into while having a solid reputation, if not prestige. The top 6 of the list imo makes a lot of sense.</p>

<p>Chicago is solid school with great reputations and great(to some negative) acceptance rate.
Michigan; few reasons to go out of state for private
JHU; another solid research school like Chicago
UVA; few reasons to go out of state for private
Cal; few reasons to go out of state for private
Cornell; Ivy with high admission %, Cornell might get bashed a lot on CC for being an "easy" Ivy, but it is still an prestigious school in the real world.</p>

11

<p>That Chicago acceptance rate is gonna go waaaaay down the drain this year.</p>

12

<p>wow -_- must've taken you guys quite awhile</p>

13

<p>For what kind of candidate to these rankings hold? </p>

<p>Acceptance rates are partly a function of the applicant pool. How big is it, how qualified are the students in it, how self-selective are the people in it. Acceptance rate can't be compared from place to place without regard for things like this. You can't pluck a kid out of a lineup and say, based solely on USNews information, "you have xx% chance at this place, and xx% chance at this place."</p>

14

<p>What I want to know is how many people apply to elite schools, honestly when they look in the mirror...., solely because of their elite status as defined by the admissions rate/avg. SAT scores? In other words, its all about prestige?</p>

<p>Or, if you polled kids at the Ivy League Schools and Top30 and asked them confidentially if the reason they are at that school is for prestige, how many would answer yes? </p>

<p>To some extent, prestige is a factor in every kid's decision about application/attendance at schools. </p>

<p>Or is the prestige factor really just a fear factor about getting a high paying job when they graduate? Or into a good medical or law school?</p>

<p>Its an interesting psychological and sociological question, it seems to me.</p>

<p>I would hope that the vast majority of kids pick colleges for fit...a variety of factors including personality, culture, academic programs, faculty (both their credentials and their teaching skills), dorms, facilities, sports, social scene, socio-economic background of the average student there, diversity, compassion (or its evil twins: arrogance and condescension) , work ethic on campus, party scene, safety, geography, weather, size of campus, size of student body, financial aid/scholarships, etc. </p>

<p>Not that kids should not pick the "best school they can get into." I support that notion...to a degree. But the "best school" may be more than just its USNWR ranking or avg. SAT score or admission rate.</p>

<p>For example, for some kids Wake Forest would be the perfect school regardless of their SAT score. For others, it may be a poor choice. For some Princeton would be the perfect school, for others a poor choice. For some WashU would be the perfect school, for others a poor choice. For some kids Michigan would be the perfect school, for others a poor choice.</p>

<p>And for all these kids they may have similar stats. But then again, that is my own bias towards "fit" and deemphasizing "prestige".</p>

15

<p>In my view high rate of acceptances at CalTech and U of Chicago is only due to selectivity of the applicants.</p>

<p>I've not come across even a single applicant to CalTech who applied there just because it is a very high ranking institute.
This is due to the fact that it is a tough institute to graduate from even if you are really good.
So there is an inherent fear of failure for many applicant.
I heard the same about U of Chicago being very tough to graduate with good GPA.</p>

<p>Since a lot of students just apply for the sake of applying but knowing that if they get accepted they will be able to go thru at Ivies but it may become very difficult for some to graduate from CalTech if they are not really good.</p>

16

<p>I always feel that Chicago is depicted as the crazy cat lady of the elite schools, and it seems to turn a lot of people off for whatever reason. Sometimes it turns students who wouldn't like it off from it, but it often turns off students who really would like it, they're just timid because nobody else seems to like it.</p>

<p>Oy, the pain of being the crazy cat lady.</p>

<p>Anyway, what I do think this "rank" indicates is how easy it is for credentialed applicants to get into a certain school. My impression is that most credentialed students (when I say "credentialed" I mean students who fall in or above the midrange....in the case of Chicago, I'm referring to 2100+ SAT scores, 3.6+ GPA. etc.) who want Chicago get in, as most credentialed students who want Wake Forest, Emory, and Northwestern get in, while students who are credentialed for Brown, Georgetown, and Tufts are much less likely to get in.</p>

<p>That makes sense to me simply from an anecdotal level-- I'm not sure this data really proves that trend though.</p>

17

<p>
[quote]
What I want to know is how many people apply to elite schools,

[/quote]
</p>

<p>
[quote]
I would hope that the vast majority of kids pick colleges for fit...a variety of factors including personality, culture, academic programs, faculty (both their credentials and their teaching skills), dorms, facilities, sports, social scene, socio-economic background of the average student there, diversity, compassion (or its evil twins: arrogance and condescension) , work ethic on campus, party scene, safety, geography, weather, size of campus, size of student body, financial aid/scholarships, etc. </p>

<p>Not that kids should not pick the "best school they can get into." I support that notion...to a degree. But the "best school" may be more than just its USNWR ranking or avg. SAT score or admission rate.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Well, I think you're confounding 2 processes here. You have the process of applying to a set of schools. And then you have the process of picking from the subset that admits you. They are not the same thing. For example, what if you do indeed carefully weigh and assess a bunch of schools in order to find the school that is absolutely perfect for you, with the perfect fit for your personality, the right teaching style, the right weather, the right everything.... only to get rejected from that school? Then all that time you spent verifying that that school was a perfect fit for you was just a big waste of time. In fact, psychologically speaking, you're probably worse off than if you had never spent that time at all, because now you know what you'll be missing and that knowledge will haunt you. You'll be stuck at some other school always thinking about how life would be if you had gotten into your perfect fit. Sometimes it's better to not know what you could have had. </p>

<p>Hence, before each student can even pick which school to attend, he has to first confront the initial problem of deciding which schools to which he is going to apply, and this decision is inherently based on imperfect information as no student can possibly visit every single school before deciding which school to which to apply. Yes, he can make some generalizations that certain schools are probably not his cup of tea, but at the end of the day, that set of schools is going to be chosen based on highly imperfect information, and hence will by nature be an imperfect choice set. Then, some of those schools within that set will admit him and only then will he get the opportunity to "pick".</p>

18

<p>@catfishin
Never have I said that these lists should help any student in choosing their school. Of course noone should select schools based on admission rates. KI simply think that it would be interesting to see which schools are "easier" to get in with criteria that I felt was important.</p>

19

<p>You can probably see some prestige/acceptance arbitrage going on right now...witness the 42% jump in UChicago apps.</p>

20

<p>One of the problems is that we don't really know how many applicants to top schools were "plausible" candidates. I think it's safe to say that some candidates to HYP have almost no chance of getting in but do so because a) they didn't know better or b) they thought it was worth trying for the lottery anyway. If they get in against the odds, they have a good shot of graduating. In contrast most applicants to Caltech who know anything about the school probably realize that's it is no gift to be accepted and find out you're much worse (in terms of stats and prep) than the bottom fifth of the class. The flip side is that some students who would do fine at Tech turn it down/or don't apply because they're scared of doing poorly. My guess is that a random student at a top state school would be able to make it through HYP in some majors. The same cannot be said for Caltech.</p>