The Tyler09 Ultimate College Rankings

College Confidential Community
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<p>Breaking USNWR's monopoly on college rankings around this time of year, I've decided to construct a ranking of colleges that gets down to the basics of what I, and many other students look for in a top university. My intention is only to offer a different perspective; feel free to probe, criticize, disregard, accept, applaud, or even create your own ranking in response! If you just want to see the ranking and skip through my pseudo-scientific ramble feel free to scroll down. </p>

<p>When it comes to important decision making, I've found the best path to take is to rely on as few variables as possible, focusing only on what is truly important and tangible. Based on my own intuition, my time on CC, and the results of the CC "what's most important to you in a college" poll, the three criteria I sought to measure were academic prestige, academic opportunity and faculty strength, and whether or not students were enjoying their time! I only ranked (for time and relevance's sake) universities ranked in the top 30 on USNWR. I tried to pick measures which were not biased for or against large or small, public or private, coasts or midwestern/southern schools. Interestingly enough, the different categories leveled the playing field between undergrad-focused and more research-focused schools. I believe the distinction between each of those categories is a matter or personal preference, and thus didn't find them relevant in the ranking. </p>

<p>Academic Prestige: For the academic prestige portion, I used none other than the famed USNWR peer assessment ratings. As these rankings definitely correlate with University, and thus adcoms of graduate and professional schools, opinion and likely correlate with employer opinion on a national scale, I believe the PA score to be the most readily available and accurate assessment of academic prestige. Potential problems with this measure include potential bias against schools without strong graduate programs or focus on research. </p>

<p>Academic Opportunity and Faculty Strength: National Research Committee rankings of departments. The NRC ranks academic departments based on research production, a measure of faculty strength. The strength of departments dictates how much "opportunity" you may have to be involved in groundbreaking research with faculty at the top of their field, and to learn from the best. I debated between using the average of nonzero scores, which slightly discriminated against larger research and tech universities with a large number of departments, some of which may be weaker by sheer volume, and using the average of all scores, which more heavily discriminated against smaller, non-research focused institutions which may not have a wide array of departments. While I believe that having a wide range of individual departments is a huge plus (more specialization), I ultimately concluded that the lesser of the two evils was the nonzero averages. Once again, potential problems include bias towards science-driven research institution, with MIT coming out on top. Though, schools like Cal, Cornell, Michigan, and Stanford with strong departments across the board had their strengths much more adequately reflected by this piece of the ranking. </p>

<p>Student Experience: This is the most intangible, and thus the most likely to be flawed measure of the rankings. To calculate student experience, I simply used the percentage of students who say they would choose their school again based on Students Review. This actually served as a huge equalizer for those more undergraduate focused institutions and conformed with what many of us know to be universities with "happy students". Students at Yale, Chicago, Duke, Brown, Stanford, WashU, and UVA, to name a few, were especially happy. One potential outlier may be that according to Students Review, only 51% of those who attended UNC would attend again. </p>

<p>Other notes:
-Tufts and Tulane are missing from the ranking as it became clear that they were severely lacking in every piece of the criteria, and were not even ranked among the top 60 universities according to NRC. You can assume that by this method they are unranked and likely behind other USNWR top 50 schools. </p>

<p>-I calculated the ranks using normalized Z scores in Excel. As soon as I have the time I'll format a table to see the actual data. </p>

<p>-Weighting: PA 40%, NRC 30%, Students Review 30%</p>

<p>and now for the ranking! (drumroll)</p>

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<ol>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Berkley</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Hopkins</li>
<li>UVA</li>
<li>WashU</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon </li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>Emory</li>
<li>Georgetown</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Vanderbilt</li>
<li>USC</li>
<li>UNC</li>
</ol>

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<p>Give them equally weights to start with. You can acutally determine the weighted factors by polling the CC.</p>

<p>That being said, I would consider the order of importance (1-least, 2, 3 - most important) as</p>

<p>Prestige:1
Faculty :2
Student Experience: 3</p>

<p>Eventually take average and normalize it to see how CC people view this.</p>

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<p>wow how much more fcking rankings obsessed can CC get?</p>

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<p>You didn’t even spell Berkeley correctly. Your rankings, sir, are a ruse!</p>

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<p>"Potential problems with this measure include potential bias against schools without strong graduate programs or focus on research. "</p>

<p>Actually, there are two very tangible problems that should invalidate peer assessment 100%:</p>

<p>1) there is NO way for the deans of ANY college to know squat about the Hundreds and Hundreds of other colleges they are asked to accurately rate. They are concerned with their “peer” institutions, or competitors as part of their job. Outside of that, there just isn’t time, nor is there reason for one to “study” the slew of other institution’s quality. Therefore, at best, their answers are good for only about 5-10 schools out of Hundreds. </p>

<p>2) It is a flawed concept to ask an institution to rate competitors. In an anonomous survey, it is human nature to rank your institution highly, your closest competitors lowly and those you see as not a threat more highly in order to make your competitors look relatively average or low. What do you think would happen if K-Mart were asked to rank the quality of Wal Mart and other competitors?</p>

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<p>Unfortunately, the latest NRC ranking is almost 15 years old. We are eagerly waiting for the updated ranking, which may come out before the end of 2009.</p>

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<p>I hope so, it should highlight schools like Florida that have come light years in the past 15 years.</p>

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<p>Well, his rankings are as good -or bad - as the USNWR’s. Can we give it a try to put your inputs in regarding the order of importance?</p>

<p>Prestige:?
Faculty :?
Student Experience: ?</p>

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<p>Can you really give any weight to the Students Review surveys? My impression from perusing that website was that many of the people contributing were not credible students; rather some seem to be slandering particular schools, perhaps because they were not admitted (?) Using that source as 30% of your ranking completely delegitimizes it for me.</p>

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<p>LOL. hilarious… and yet so cc</p>

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<p>Nice rankings.<br>
CC just has a lot of biased idiots. I liked looking at your list.</p>

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<p>lolwut
uchicago ahead of harvard?</p>

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<p>If it is “human nature” as you say, then all schools should be affected equally, on average, by this bias and it should have no effect in the ultimate RANKING of schools. Since I normed the data using z scores whether all the scores were lower as a product of this bias, it should not have mattered because the standard deviation would remain the same. </p>

<p>And while I agree that PA scores are biased against schools universities may not know that well, Rice and Emory in the south for example, I believe that within the USNWR top 30 the top schools will have as decent and impression as we’ll be able to statistically find. </p>

<p>Additionally, whether or not PA concretely measures anything about the academic accomplishments of a school, it does measure prestige and reputation, as it was intended to. </p>

<p>*Haha, and sorry about “Berkley”, it was auto-corrected for whatever reason.</p>