<p>On a more serious note, could we ask who will purchase the next edition of the much maligned magazine? Oops, I meant the next edition of the ranking edition of the magazine. </p>
<p>After a decade of subscribing, I canceled the 2012 edition. Probably never got the refund, but that is another issue. </p>
<p>I do not plan to ever resuscribe as I believe that the outfit has gone massively downhill, refused to make their data REALLY searchable, and introduced moronic “tools,” and obviously focused on the lowest denominator of their readership. And that means the readers who look solely at the first two pages of the rankings and the most basic numbers.</p>
<p>The reality is that despite pretending to be research organization, Bob Morse’s outfit is merely part of the media. And that says it all!</p>
<p>So why did you bother to send your daughter to an elite magnet school over your public high school, and why aren’t you just sending her to the local community college instead of a 4 year college? Obviously you believe there are differences in educational environments.</p>
<p>Is the Uchicago admissions office aware of which of the top applicants got into ‘more prestigious’ schools? Or are they just assuming that applicant X will get into at least one of HYPSM and will definitely go there instead? And doesn’t UChicago offer merit based aid including some really substantial ones? Why don’t they try and hook those applicants in instead?</p>
<p>Here we go again - rather than address the voluminous data about the effect of colleges on students, PizzaGirl tries to twist the discussion about a decision one family made about where to send their kid to high school.</p>
<p>Oh. but now you’ve expanded it to where my daughter chooses to go to college. Okay, I’ll answer - (1) because she wants to go away, and we can afford to send her there without anybody taking on any debt, and (2) there is data that shows (a) there is an advantage to a student being involved in the community life of a college, and (b) living at the college (especially at a small college) enhances that involvement (Pascarella and Terenzini, 89-90), and (3) from the standpoint of cost, for the last two years at least, going where she’s going as a residential student is just about a wash from a cost standpoint compared with living at home and commuting to NIU.</p>
<p>Now that I’ve answered, please leave my daughter out of the discussion. Thank you.</p>
<p>What if there weren’t data that showed there was an advantage to a student living at the college, but she still really wanted to go away (and she was a good student, you wanted to please her, she worked hard, etc.)? Would you try to make it work, or not?</p>
<p>Because I find it hard to believe that your desire to send her away is SOLELY based on some data saying it’s good. She wants to go away and have a traditional residential college experience versus living at home and commuting! What’s wrong with that? Nothing. But at least be honest - you want to give her an experience she wants, and has worked hard for, and “deserves” (in the sense that she’s been a wonderful daughter, takes academics seriously, etc.).</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - why do you even bother? OP uses whatever data he could to justify what he is doing for his kid. Some of us do not need to do that because we are perfectly happy with our decisions. As pointed out by Blossom in another thread (different title, but same topic), there must be a lot of turmoil in Anna’s house right now.</p>
<p>For a red wine drinker, he/she could always find studies (data) to say it is healthy, but you could find just as many studies to say it is not, same for eggs, meat, coffee…</p>
<p>Excuse me, but what the heck are all of you talking about? Have there been posts dropped, or something? I honestly can’t follow this thread, and I am pretty confident about my reading comprehension.</p>
<p>What will tend to happen to a college if it aggressively pursues higher USN rankings?</p>
<ol>
<li>Its endowment per student would grow</li>
<li>Its average class sizes would shrink</li>
<li>It would pay its faculty more</li>
<li>Its students would enter with higher average SATs and GPAs</li>
<li>4-year and 6-year graduation rates, and freshman retention rates, would improve</li>
</ol>
<p>How is any of this bad? </p>
<p>Can I cite a controlled scientific study proving that the result will be more effective learning at that college? No, I cannot. And I do know that some lower-ranked CTCL schools achieve modestly higher NSSE “engagement” scores than a few higher ranked LACs (such as Middlebury and Grinnell). Do I conclude from this that the factors driving US News rankings are completely irrelevant? No. Certainly, it may be true that other factors are more relevant to learning outcomes. An average (but engaged) student surely could get a better education at the opposite end of a log from Socrates than a brilliant (but lazy) student can get at Harvard. On the other hand, even if we could find a school full of teachers as good as Socrates, I’d still prefer they had good facilities, decent salaries, and small classes.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, Chicago had all that even when its admit rate was 40%. Is the average student less “engaged” now that the rate is ~13%? I really don’t know.</p>
<p>And annasdad, if you’re happy with the criteria you’ve used to send your daughter where she is going (and I wish her nothing but success), why would you care what elite schools do or don’t do? Is it to “educate” people on CC, or to try to convince yourself that because you couldn’t provide her certain opportunities, that there weren’t any extra ones there to begin with? I mean, I couldn’t afford to send my kids to the Latin School of Chicago or to the U of Chicago Lab Schools or Parker, but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend that those places didn’t have advantages over our suburban public hs just to make myself feel better.</p>
<p>Here are some other things it could do to manipulate its US News ranking:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Spend a lot of money on fancy brochures and other promotional materials directed to HS Guidance Counselors, whose reputational ranking now counts for 7.5% of the college’s total US News score.</p></li>
<li><p>Spend a lot of money encouraging HS students who don’t stand a snowball’s chance to apply, so as to artificially deflate the colleges acceptance rate (1.5%).</p></li>
<li><p>Place overriding emphasis on SAT/ACT scores (7.5%) and class rank in top 10% (6%) at the expense of HS GPA, rigor of HS curriculum, awards, honors, ECs, and other “soft” (not counted by US News) indicia of achievement; admit only from the top 10% of any HS that ranks, regardless of the school’s rigor and competitiveness, but go deeper into the class at schools that don’t rank, because it can’t hurt you.</p></li>
<li><p>Go test-optional or test-flexible, on the theory that then only the applicants with high SAT/ACT scores will submit such scores, while those with lower scores can be admitted without reporting their scores, artificially inflating the school’s reported middle 50% scores.</p></li>
<li><p>Pay entering freshmen to re-take SAT or ACT after enrolling, to boost reported SAT/ACT medians. (At least one school has actually done this).</p></li>
<li><p>Admit a larger percentage of the student body as transfer students, whose SAT/ACT scores are never reported because they’re not “enrolled freshmen.”</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t include the SAT/ACT scores of certain schools or colleges within the university in reported SAT/ACT medians (Columbia does this). </p></li>
<li><p>Raise tuition to raise faculty pay (7%) without necessarily improving faculty quality (not measured by US News); hire and retain more senior (i.e., old) faculty even past their prime years of productivity and ability to connect with students rather than up-and-coming and typically more energetic younger faculty, because the older folks cost more per capita and therefore are more valuable in the school’s US News ranking.</p></li>
<li><p>Cap a lot of classes currently in the 20-25 student range at 19, even if it means some students are unable to get the classes they want or need, because it improves your class size < 20 percentage (6%). Consolidate 2 classes currently in the 20-25 student range into a single class in the 40-49 student range (and cap it at 49), because as far as US News is concerned a class with 20 students is the same as a class with 49 students, and by decreasing the number of classes in the 20-49 range you indirectly boost the* percentage* of classes in the <20 range (which US News measures) even without increasing the number of classes in the <20 range (which US News doesn’t measure). It may mean students actually end up in bigger classes and have fewer options for scheduling purposes, but US News will count it as an improvement.</p></li>
<li><p>Consolidate those two 55-person sections of an intro lecture class into one 110-person lecture, because then you’ll have a lower percentage of classes >50 (2%)–and, indirectly, a higher percentage of classes <20. Better yet, consolidate 4 55-person lectures into a single 220 person lecture, because every class of 50+ students carries just as much weight, whether it’s 50 students, or 500, or 1300 (the size of Cornell’s largest lecture class). Again, it may mean students are actually in bigger classes and have fewer options, but US News will still count it as an improvement.</p></li>
<li><p>Relax graduation requirements and grant more waivers of otherwise-applicable requirements to artificially boost your graduation rate (16%, plus 7.5% bonus for “graduation rate performance”).</p></li>
<li><p>Raise tuition and spend lavishly, even if most of the additional revenue needs to be plowed back into additional need-based FA just to allow students to tread water, because spending-per-student is richly rewarded by US News (10%). Avoid economies of scale. Or any economies, for that matter.</p></li>
<li><p>Spend lavishly on promotions to solicit even very trivial alumni contributions, because US News cares about the percentage of alumni who contribute (5%), not how much actual revenue the alumni giving effort nets. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I’m not saying any one college or university does all these things, but they’ve all been done, and none of them contribute to real improvements in educational quality, though they do contribute to higher US News rankings.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Have your administrators trash your nearest competitors in the reputation survey to lower their ranking and boost yours. </p></li>
<li><p>As the Millsaps president said in the quote I provided upthread, limit the amount of need-based aid for needy middle-of-your-range students so you have the money to buy the well-to-do top-stats kids away from your competitors. </p></li>
<li><p>Don’t even consider publicly questioning the validity of the USNWR rankings, lest you incur the Wrath of Morse.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Well, we have wandered very far afield, here. I really just want to say that I do not believe that NU is engaging in these things. I really do not even believe NU’s interest in demonstrated interest of applicants has a thing to do with USNews. I sincerely believe it is simply the desire for an excited and cohesive student body who are enthusiastic to be studying there.</p>
<p>But, wander away. It’s the slow season on CC, afterall. ;)</p>
<p>Neither do I, for most of them. I just wanted to counter the naive view that higher US News rankings = better education. Ain’t necessarily so.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, there’s something to having a student body composed largely of people for whom the school was their first choice. A lot of LACs have done that for a long time. On the other hand, nothing says “I love you” to a college or university quite like that ED application, and it sure doesn’t hurt that filling a larger percentage of their class ED helps them manage yield and improve their admit rate and appear to be super-selective, which only makes them that much more attractive to the prestige-conscious. I’m going to give the administration at NU credit for being savvy enough to understand that.</p>
<p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>No, I didn’t forget. I just think that has approximately zero effect. Sure, some people do it, but it’s stupid, because any given school’s PA rating is going to reflect a composite of hundreds or thousands of scores, and for any particular school to single out one or two or a handful of its competitors for lowball treatment isn’t going to even register a blip in that composite score. Besides, chances are someone else is doing exactly the same thing to you, and the same holds for just about every every school on the list, so at the end of the day it’s all pretty much a wash. Just irrelevant. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, you could do that, but more effective is to target merit aid (or the most generous “need-based” aid packages) to admits just above your average SAT/ACT scores, to pull up your average. That’s probably cheaper and more effective than trying to buy the very top scores, because the tippy-top kids may have multiple rich offers, including some from more prestigious schools. Note I said average scores, not 25th and 75th percentile medians. US News data tables feature 25th and 75th percentile medians, but its ranking methodology says the ranking is actually based on a composite of average SAT CR, SAT M, and ACT scores. (One big reason SAT W scores still don’t count for much at many schools). If you’re above the school’s average, you help them; if you’re below their average, you hurt them. Of course, the higher you are above their average, the more you help them, and the lower you are below their average, the more you hurt them. If you’re below their average, I’d consider it a reach.</p>
<p>Isn’t post 114, point 15 your sticking point, Annasdad? That’s your particular ox that’s being gored - high-stats kids being courted (via $) over less-high stats kids who are more needy. So you’re no different from anyone else - what doesn’t benefit your particular kid is the worst thing ever.</p>
<p>Cornell and Brown both admit large numbers of transfers, though I think (at least in Brown’s case) that this is to limit financial aid expenditure, rather then improve student statistics.</p>
<p>I think in Cornell’s case it is due to number of beds in North Campus, where they house most of their freshman class. Cornell does not guarantee housing beyond freshman year, and most upperclassmen live off campus. Many Cornell juniors also study abroad, which opens ups a lot more space.</p>