@sapper119 “How can Colby have a 94% 6 year graduation rate when its first year retention is 93%. This has a pretty significant impact on overall ranking and it is obviously an error.”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Maybe it is the percent of your incoming freshmen who graduate from somewhere in 6 years? lol
Students consider rankings as only one factor in their decision where to apply and attend. Even if Northeastern were ranked 25 you should not attend if you don’t like the concept of experiential learning/coop or if you are not comfortable attending college in an urban environment. You should also not attend if you are looking for a classical liberal arts education.
6th best public in the South? I can totally deal with that.
For those wondering about the UCSD ranking drop, it looks to me like their graduation rate is hurting them. US News has UCSD’s 4 year rate at 58% which is a lot lower than UCSB’s 70% and UCI’s 72%. UCSD also has a higher percentage of classes over 50 students and fewer under 20 students compared to UCSB and UCLA. UCLA appears to be doing a tremendous job based on those stats considering they have the largest student population among the UCs. The US News ranking does not reflect the general perception of UCSD, at least in our area. A couple of points in the ranking really isn’t a huge difference though.
“@doschicos H’s Z-list offers are very small, only about 25-50 IIRC; to compare it to NUin (~15% of the incoming class?) is incorrect. As you say, lots of schools do this, but Harvard is not one of them, and very few do it to the extent that NEU does.”
@ormdad Then why do it at all? If any school can afford not to worry about such things (reputation, endowment, etc.) it would be Harvard. But they choose to do it, even if it is a smaller number than some schools.
@ormdad I was thinking of selectivity, not yield.
It is almost impossible to measure “teaching quality” except by reputation among peers. Niche rankings are easily gamed, and even if they were not, students have virtually no basis for evaluating what the teaching is like at another school that they do not attend.
And it is almost impossible to measure “outcomes” because certain colleges serve different purposes and salary alone is a very poor proxy for those outcomes. For example, curating a respected art museum might be the rarest and most difficult job in the world to get - but it pays less than selling real estate or life insurance, something that literally hundreds of thousands of people do without any upper level education.
In sum - the US News rankings stink - and so do all other rankings. We are trying to quantify the unquantifiable.
@doschicos I have read that the Z-list at Harvard is only for legacy applicants. It may be a way to avoid alienating alumni who may be donors in the future. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Could be just legacies but also development cases as well, is my understanding. Regardless, Harvard benefits from having their stats not included. Otherwise, they could just take them in the normal cycle.
@Much2learn where did your daughter end up?
Z-listers are waitlisted students that Admissions (or someone who knows someone in admissions) believes they dropped the ball on. Most often it is legacies, children of large donors & foreign dignitaries, etc who also can make a call and get Fitzsimmons to put them on the list. But sometimes it’s just a regular student that they feel like they goofed on but “don’t have a bed for” (I know one such student).
I don’t want to get into a “gaming” discussion, but if this is the extent of Harvard’s ploy, it is FAR less than schools not 3 or 4 miles away.
“There is a ranking out there that does what you guys are discussing. Parchment preference ranking. It actually compares what university students pick when they have multiple choices, but it too has odd results that don’t align with what folks would expect”
Right. Parchment has the right Idea, but flawed execution.
First issue is that the data is self-reported by students which means any school that wants to can get a bunch of students to stuff the data and move up. That means the data is only valuable, as long as no one thinks it is valuable. lol. Heisenberg’s principle, sort of?
Second, it only considers schools where a student was cross admitted, but doe not reflect that many schools were eliminated before even applying. You would need to know all of the schools that each student investigated/visited, and then why each one was eliminated, in order to be more accurate. So eliminating Chicago because you don’t think you will get in would need to be considered differently from eliminating it for being too nerdy.
“Selectivity” as defined by USNWR? So acceptance rate, class standing, and sat scores of entering freshmen? I still don’t get how this would impact a schools decision to put an applicant on a waitlist. Applicants who get in off the waitlist are included in the reported stats.
Classmate of my S1 got into Harvard on the z-list. His father was an alum, a well known Wall Street banker, a big donor, and on the board. So both legacy and development. Father had the kid doing all sorts of amazing ECs in high school, like micro banking in India where he met w leading govt officials. His grades at a leading NYC private school were decent but not exceptional and he didn’t have an exceptional SAT score despite expensive tutoring ($700 an hour!). He spent his gap year traveling the world. According to son, he posted pictures of himself on several continents, including riding a camel through a desert.
Gotta say, changed my perception of these schools. Years ago, before my kids where in high school, I thought the most selective schools were all about admitting the most intellectually curious, fascinating, talented kids. Not naive anymore, especially after helping some kids with their college applications, and seeing others from my kids’ high schools getting accepted to USNWR top schools. Five years ago helped a kid who was accepted to Chicago. She wrote on a middle school level and couldn’t stand reading, but she applied to Chicago bc she had legacy. Her dad had been recruited as an athlete and his coach is still at Chicago and met with them during their visit, although the daughter didn’t play any sports at all. Helped a kid this year who’s now a freshman at Yale. Applied as an English major but told me he’s never read any book independently. In high school, he only read what had been assigned to him. A classmate of my younger son, who attended our local public school, was caught cheating and kicked out of national honor society, but evidently, this wasn’t mentioned on his college apps either by himself or in his recommendations and he’s now a junior at Wharton.
So, after these experiences, these rankings and the associated prestige don’t mean much to me. I still think that the majority of kids at these schools are talented in some fashion, but I also believe that there’s some good portion that aren’t all that.
Ditto, @RenaissanceMom. I know several Z list admits. Most fit the description of legacy/development case combo. Not dummies but not as good as many others at the school that got rejected. With Harvard’s endowment, they don’t need to do it.
A lot goes into admissions, it has never been a completely level playing ground. Legacy definitely makes a difference.
@londondad “@Much2learn where did your daughter end up?”
She ended up at Lehigh.
Decision executive summary
Northeastern
For her the co-op at Northeastern seemed less valuable because Lehigh has an engineering placement rate that is close to 100% without the extra year. I think it is work more in majors that are have lower demand.
Wisconsin, Illinois and Purdue
These school that they all constrain access to majors, and/or movement among majors. If you can’t get into a major you want, you may need to major in something else or transfer. In contrast, Lehigh and Case Western allow a student in good standing to choose any major and to change their minds and transfer easily to any other major later, if they change their mind. She is still wobbling between Chem E and CS so that flexibility was valuable to her. She may even discover another option. Who knows?
Lehigh vs. Case
Case vs. Lehigh was a difficult decision. She was also a recruited athlete at Case, and thought the engineering facilities slightly better at Case. However, she liked Lehigh smaller, more beautiful campus, and felt a significantly stronger social connection with the Lehigh students. She also thought that Case was more academic and Lehigh was more practical, so Case could be better if you wanted a Phd. but she has no interest in that.
Again, each of these schools could be the best one for a certain student. This is how D2 thought through the process and came to her decision.
@Dimnarion, yes and no. Oldest son was deferred and then admitted to Brown with legacy. He had outstanding SATs and SAT2s…all 750-800, great rigor and grades from a tough school, and ECs that included selective stem summer research programs and Shakespearean acting. Same week he was deferred from brown, he was accepted EA to Chicago & RD to Penn w no legacy. So yes he was accepted w legacy, but clearly merited that acceptance.
Younger son had 2260 SATs and SAT2s that ranged from 760-800, but his SAT and GPA (92) were lopsided…great humanities but a B+ math student (his scores reflected that too…800 cr, 690 m, 770 w) & terrific ECs that included winning national awards. He was deferred from brown while 2 of his classmates with better grades were accepted, as it should have happened. His GPA made him an outlier on our school naviance for Brown, although he still experienced success in college admissions: admitted to tufts ED2, USC as a finalist for full tuition merit, WUSTL as a finalist for their writing merit award (his dominant EC was creative writing). As a legacy family, we completely understood why he had been deferred and probably wouldn’t be accepted, and knew that the kids who were accepted ED from his school were better candidates. No hard feelings. I believe that legacy kids who are accepted should present with the same competitive stats as their classmates, and hopefully just as fascinating.
I wasn’t trying to attack legacy kids, I was just pointing out that people that have studied it systematically have shown that legacy is a noticeable factor in admissions. Of course many colleges freely say that legacy is a factor in their admissions, so it isn’t a surprise. http://www.businessinsider.com/legacy-kids-have-an-admissions-advantage-2013-6
But admissions are complicated. Geographic diversity, being an athlete, being a first generation college student, being a URM, so many things go into admissions other than the numbers. I personally don’t mind it actually.
And elite college admissions are so competitive these days that all admission decisions seems nearly random, it is hard to predict how things will turn out.
But going back to the topic at hand, I don’t have a problem with colleges admitting whichever students they want to. I do have a problem that students can be “hidden” so they don’t count in the ranking.
Well here are my rankings – I do them in tiers (and, sometimes, tears). These are based on my ideas regarding overall undergraduate quality and rep. Really, it’s just a way to pacify some time – and it’s really hard to draw these hazy, gray lines…
National Privates
Tier 6: Miami(FL), SMU, Villanova, Pepperdine, GWU, Fordham…
National Publics
Tier 2: UNC, UCLA, Wisconsin, Georgia
Tier 4: UCI, Rutgers, TCNJ, Michigan State, Iowa, VA Tech, Georgia, Alabama…
National LACs
Tier 4: Barnard, Bates, Bryn Mawr, Macalester, Kenyon…