<p>By most obvious quantitative measures of school caliber (average test schools, acceptance rates, etc.), the best state schools tend to definitively lag behind the best private schools. However, college rankings, such as the infamous usnews, repeatedly see their top 50 rankings densely populated by private schools.</p>
<p>While there is a strong correlation between average test scores and rankings for institutions in each category, they aren't comparable between the categories. In order to accurately predict the relative rankings of private and public schools, the public schools' stats need to be heftily weighted upward. </p>
<p>Why is this? Are rankings determined by the top tier of students at each school (boosting the state schools, with much more students with much greater academic diversity)? Is the government simply really effective at paying for schools? Do state schools have an increased tendency to improve the quality of their accepted students, rather than leaving them at the same level at which they arrived? This corellation is hard to chalk up to chance, so Ithink there must be some explanation -- what is it?</p>
<p>Why don’t you google the methodology used in determining the ranking</p>
<p>@GMTplus7
The sciences, where this effect is perhaps most noticeable, are ranked by peer assessments from other universities, which, of course, has no direct influence from the things I mentioned. However, the correlation I mentioned does still exist; Harvard > Columbia > Duke > Vanderbilt. Is this just a case of correlation being mistaken for causation? Either way, the trend is still there.</p>
<p>OP: it’s hard to follow your logic. What the heck are you trying to say?</p>
<p>Give examples.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
Sure.
For an example, consider UC Berkeley and Rice University. Berkeley’s average SAT and ACT can’ come close to Rice’s, but Berkeley is in the top 3 in every science ranking by us news, while Rice never reaches the top 20.</p>
<p>On the more macroscopic side of things, 21 out of the top 50 schools in mathematics (by my probably slightly flawed count) are private, while 29 are public. However, not a single one of the top 20 schools by average SAT is public.</p>
<p>Granted, one of these ranks undergraduate schools, and the other graduate schools, but undergraduate school rankings tell a similar story.</p>
<p>??? What are you talking about by “similar story”? The USNews undergrad and grad school ranking criterias are almost completely different. Did it ever occur to you that several state schools are powerhouses in different fields and that the overall SAT of the undergrads tells you nothing about how good department faculty may be or even how good the undergrads in certain departments may be?</p>
<p>Departmental strength at the PhD program level does not necessarily correlate to undergraduate selectivity. However, undergraduates with top-end ability and motivation at schools with strong departments in their majors despite lesser undergraduate selectivity could still find a wealth of academic offerings suitable for them (rigorous undergraduate course work, sometimes as honors courses, plus graduate level course work and the potential of doing graduate level research as an undergraduate). A bigger university could have the size to have all of these more rigorous and advanced offerings while still accommodating the students who entered with the slightly to somewhat lesser levels of academic credentials.</p>
<p>A small school with a student body that is significantly weaker academically may be less satisfying for an academically high achieving student, since it may not have enough “outliers” to be worth offering more rigorous or advanced courses to.</p>
<p>Of course, checking the actual departmental offerings of courses and research activity at each school will be more helpful than generalizations, if you are pretty focused on a given academic area (math?).</p>