The 600 Smartest Colleges in America

College Confidential Community
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<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/smartest-colleges-in-america-2014-10#comments"&gt;http://www.businessinsider.com/smartest-colleges-in-america-2014-10#comments&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>It appears to me that the top ten or twenty schools from this year are practically the same as those from last year. (I did not bother to look at last year's data.) I guess those schools are pretty consistent in picking their respective students on these metrics. </p>

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<p>What I find more interesting is the schools below the top 20. It’s pretty clear that scores and selectivity are not always correlated.</p>

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<p>Well, some schools care more about test scores than others. Yet certain schools that are in the top 40 or even top 20 by test scores aren’t nearly as impressive when you rank by percentage of alums who have noteworthy acheivements (and of course, even top state schools see as their mission serving all segments of their state population, which brings down their test scores): <a href=“Ivy-equivalents - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1682986-ivy-equivalents.html&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>Note also that those universities who do well in the test score ranking but not in the achievements ranking also don’t do nearly as well as the schools who do rank high by achievements in LinkedIn’s rankings by career progression: <a href=“https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/edu/rankings/us”>https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/edu/rankings/us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>USC above Berkeley? Holy cow. And I have literally never heard of #8 Harvey Mudd, lolwut</p>

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<p>@BassGuitar:</p>

<p>Let me repeat again:
“and of course, even top state schools see as their mission serving all segments of their state population, which brings down their test scores”.</p>

<p>Yet look at the percentage of high achievers from both schools, however (the LinkedIn rankings as well the WSJ ranking and Forbes alumni achievement subrankings).</p>

<p>Furthermore, it’s not as if USC is a bad school.</p>

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<p>The current ranking also does not account for sample size, which likely impacts the average brainpower of the student body. For example, large state schools, such as UC Berkeley, likely have a group of students in the right tail of the distribution with similar SAT or ACT scores as some of the top Ivy League and other elite schools (e.g., see discussion in Pinker, 2014), however, their average is lowered by the large number of students with lower scores which are typically admitted. Therefore large state schools, if anything, are likely slightly penalized in the current ranking relative to smaller private schools which draw primarily from top students.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/56143/1339-us-colleges-ranked-average-student-brainpower.pdf”>http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/56143/1339-us-colleges-ranked-average-student-brainpower.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;