US NEWS Rankings: What Would They Look Like Without Peer Assessment Score?

College Search & Selection
141

<p>Blah2009 wrote:

</p>

<p>That’s because the USNews top schools need to perpetuate the current system. </p>

<p>They profit from it, so they need to support it. They need to believe that the reputation of the educator should be considered more important than the actual performance of the educated.</p>

<p>This is why USNews does not include any metrics for the success of the graduates and this is why the “top” graduate schools will always favor, above an individual student’s performance, student’s from other “top” schools.</p>

142

<p>

</p>

<p>It certainly passes the conventional wisdom test. A better explanation might be that Anthropology majors at College X have a better placement office than College Y. Either way it would be good information to have.</p>

143

<p>Here is why I think the PA ratings are a very necessary component of the ranking scores: Imagine they were eliminated and all you were left with were those “objective” type measurements. There would be a much greater incentive to manipulate each one of those criteria to obtain higher outcomes. Selectivity of students? Just accept the top scoring/ranked kids without any consideration of other attributes. Graduation rates? Just offer a less-rigorous program and push kids through with lower standards. Alumni Giving? Just insinuate to alums an even greater advantage in admissions for their kids. Financial and faculty resources? Easy to shuffle things around to put the school in the best light. The fact is manipulating any of those measures just for ranking purposes and without the goal of improving the education offered and student body, will soon degrade the quality of the school which would and should be reflected in peer assessments.</p>

<p>I believe bclintonk when he/she says that provosts etc. have enough information about peer schools that either filters up to them through the faculty or they obtain through the daily requirements of their jobs to be able to give many colleges a general overall quality rating on a 1-5 scale. Hopefully, they are allowed to leave blank the question on schools they are not sufficiently familiar with. These college officials would also be the first to know which schools look better on paper than they deserve given the actual experience they offer students.</p>

<p>I agree that including GC opinions which started only a couple of years ago is useless and may be counterproductive.</p>

<p>No one measure is really good but since rankings are not going to go away any time soon, at least there should be some counterbalance to those lies, damned lies, and statistics.</p>

144

<p>

</p>

<p>Exactly. And Wildwood, I think you give far too much credit to university administrators for having meaningful information to work with. Universities send officials at other universities marketing materials touting their great research, faculty accomplishments, etc. for the specific purpose of improving “peer awareness,” which in turn will lead to better assessment scores. It’s all spin.</p>

145

<p>

</p>

<p>The graduate admissions committees at top universities couldn’t care less about the USNWR rankings. They disdain them even more than we do.</p>

<p>In my experience, what they do care about, beyond an individual’s grades and scores is rigor of undergraduate program, experience and recommendations. Where snobbism can creep in is that faculty in PhD programs thinking about taking on a graduate student do care about what their peers say about a candidate and they take the word of a well-known expert in their field from, say Yale, over the word of someone they’ve never heard of from Evergreen State. All other things being equal (and they rarely are) they’re also more likely to take the student with the 3.9 from a school with an extremely low admit rate than one from a school with a higher admit rate, figuring, right or wrong, that the student from the more competitive school had to do more to prove himself along the way than the student from the less competitive.</p>

146

<p>Sue22,</p>

<p>Rigor at top schools? Very questionable. The only thing we can hang our hat on is the low admit rate, but that is no indication of the rigor of the school.</p>

<p>If you examine the stats, their students tend to graduate with high honors at a rate much higher than in other institutions. This would indicate one of two things.

  1. The rigor you mention is simply not present.
  2. The rigor is there and grade inflation is being applied.
    In either case, a 3.9 from the low admit rate schools becomes highly suspect. A sad but true state of affairs. Another one of the dirty little secrets of the education industry.</p>
147

<p>

</p>

<p>The “top” law and medical schools admit students from scores of colleges (most of which are not household names.) The college brand name seems to rank far, far below GPA and test scores as an admission factor. </p>

<p>Top PhD programs may be more in thrall to college prestige. I really don’t know, because the only evidence I’ve seen is a few anecdotes. But again, the colleges whose alumni have the highest rates of earned PhDs are not necessarily the most famous colleges.</p>

<p>I’d be interested in more details about the data maikai is getting from career placement offices. However, I’m not sure what that data really tells us. I can easily believe that the quality of career placement services does not necessarily reflect school prestige … or even academic quality. Students at Stevens or Babson may well be demanding better career placement services than students at Oberlin or Brandeis. For the ultimate in career placement services, you can’t beat the service academies. If you apply yourself and stay out of trouble, the desired career outcome is virtually 100% guaranteed. Their academics apparently are quite good. Does a guaranteed career outcome tell us they’re the best?</p>

<p>Anyway, if you really want an outcome-oriented college ranking, Forbes probably is the best we currently have. However, its list of top schools isn’t consistently all that different from the USNWR lists.</p>

148

<p>

</p>

<p>Sally, I encourage you to reread bclintonk’s detailed and informative post #43 for a college professor’s point of view on how administrators are in a position to evaluate their peers. His/her closing statement:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>maikai said:

</p>

<p>Or it could be since the concentration of top students is so high at those schools that their work actually does merit higher grades in greater proportions. </p>

<p>I have a daughter at Princeton (with grade deflation policy) and I assure you that it has extremely rigorous academics. She is among a cohort almost entirely composed of very high academic achievers and I have no doubt that raises the rigor of, and professor expectations in, all her classes. As this is not a discussion about grade inflation/deflation (of which you can find many on CC) I won’t go into why it is disingenuous to assume that grades at weaker schools are equivalent to grades where the average student comes in at a higher level. There is no fixed rule of thumb or direct correlation but the general level of the study body is a factor in the classroom experience and what ends up designated as “A work”.</p>

149

<p>

</p>

<p>They’ll usually only take the top 1, or maybe 2, students from those schools. And many schools which may get a student or two in a year don’t do so every year. Some years the CSUs will be represented in HLS, and other years they won’t. That’s probably largely dependent on the LSAT scores of those students who are applying.</p>

<p>If you like those odds, then go ahead and matriculate to those schools. But lets not pretend, or imply, that admissions for these ‘scores’ of other colleges are the same as they are for the top 25.</p>

150

<p>The question isn’t whether the top 25 schools are better represented at the top N medical or law schools. We know that they are. The question is how much the college brand weighs in the admission decision against GPAs and test scores. We don’t really know the answer to that unless we have good comparative data on admit rates for various combinations of GPA, test score, and college.</p>

<p>But if law and med schools do put a thumb on the scale for the top N colleges, are they simply adding points for prestige? Are they in cahoots to maintain the status quo? Or, are they normalizing GPAs in a principled way?</p>

151

<p>As always, this discussion has turned into those trying to speak logic and those emotionally invested in their ranking system.</p>

<p>To imply the USNews ranking is not a self-serving elitist ranking system is to be in denial.</p>

<p>To suggest that Ivies have much more rigorous curriculum, yet produce high honor grads at a rate higher than other schools because their kids are that much brighter is an attempt to have your cake and eat it too. :wink: The academic prowess of of Ivy kids do not significantly outpace those of the next level of schools, yet we see a step function in high honor degrees between the two groups of institutions. So much so, it’s actually made the news in the past.</p>

<p>The system is pathetically broken. That’s why the data, from all ranking systems needs to be discounted (not entirely dismissed) and used as a minor data point in the decision process. As difficult and time consuming as they are, visits and interviews are still the very best way to figure out which college is the best fit for a child.</p>

<p>In my humble opinion, the USNews rankings have become more about impressing our friends and neighbors than preparing our children for successful lives. That has to end.</p>

<p>I remember taking my child to a bunch of schools in 10th grade, not to evaluate the particular schools. The schools didn’t matter. It was just to get a feel for small, medium and large schools… to see what he might feel most comfortable in. No other parents I spoke with even began to think that way. It was as if the rankings meant everything and where their kid felt the most comfortable was wasn’t just secondary… it wasn’t even on their radar.</p>

<p>Nor was finding out what kind of physical and mental health services were available. Was there any monitoring of grades to catch a falling star? And tutoring services… how they were set up, the number of tutors, was it a pool or were people individually assigned? Can everyone get a tutor?</p>

<p>I don’t know about you guys, but my kid didn’t go to an Ivy, so he’ll actually have to work for his magna cum laude. :-p Cheap shot, I know. The devil made me write that! ;-)</p>

<p>But it just amazed me at how much faith people put in a ranking. If USNews ranked a school highly, then they just assumed it must have all that good stuff. There was just so much more I needed to know before I sent my kid to a school.</p>

152

<p>Some anecdotal evidence it doesn’t matter where you go to UG for Law School acceptances: My one nephew graduated from a State Flagship last year with top scores, but in some ridiculously easy humanities major. He was admitted and is now attending one of the top elite law schools in the country. He had a good LSAT, not great, but an almost perfect GPA. Second Nephew went to a top school for engineering (ranked much better than the flagship) and got a GPA significantly lower than other nephew but a similar LSAT. He was rejected by all of the elite law schools he applied to, including those ten elite schools ranked lower than the one my other nephew is attending, so he chose not to go to law school at all. Clearly the name brand school attended by nephew 2 meant nothing in his case, nor did the law schools consider the much more difficult major of nephew number 2. Apparently, all they cared about was the ultimate GPA and the LSAT. So if you want to go to a top law school, major in basket weaving in UG, study for the LSAT, and you will be fine. Especially today, when smart students are avoiding law school in droves.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Its pretty clear from the posts on CC that this is NEVER going to end. As you infer, the ranking systems are a brand of prestige and status, and many people here buy into the system. Whether it is logical or not, whether it means a better education regardless of cost, whether the graduates of the elite schools are better adjusted, happier, more successful on almost all scales excluding income is irrelevant. They are just another way for people to try to distinguish themselves from the hordes to think they and their children are somehow better.</p>

153

<p>

</p>

<p>You’re assuming that those questions aren’t interrelated. Is the fact that CSU’s, or similar schools, are occasionally able to get one or two students into TLSs evidence that college branding doesn’t matter, or evidence that it does?</p>

<p>I agree with you that it’s hard to say. Some argue that it’s completely determinate on GPA/LSAT scores and that the reputation of the undergraduate college itself means nothing. But are the reasons that students at many of these non ‘household name’ colleges occasionally get just one or two students into these schools a result of the fact that students who go to these schools are typically weaker? Or is it evidence that these students are generally rejected, but occasionally, the very best students at these colleges, with very high scores, will be accepted? I don’t think we have enough evidence to say either way. What we know, like you said, is that students from the top 25 are better represented at the top med./law schools. What we don’t know is why.</p>

<p>Certainly, a powerful brand name college is not sufficient to get an entry into a TLS. But, all else being equal, how would adcoms decide between two applicants with similar GPA/LSAT scores, when one went to a household name, and the other did not? I don’t think anyone assumes that the rigor at all colleges in the U.S. is equal, and I imagine that would include adcoms. Is rigour of undergraduate education taken into consideration when deciding whether to select an applicant? Again, we don’t know. </p>

<p>Given our lack of knowledge, I don’t think we can just say that ‘undergraduate reputation doesn’t matter.’ There are a number of anecdotes out there that say that it does, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this extends to top professional programs as well.</p>

154

<p>Yes, the most selective colleges are well represented at the top medical and law schools. There’s a simple explanation that doesn’t involve conspiracies or elitist bias. Top law and med schools quite possibly get relatively many high-stats applications from the most selective colleges (whose students have a proven history of both high average test scores and inclinations to apply to prestigious schools.)</p>

155

<p>

</p>

<p>I did read it. The post you cite focuses on his expertise in evaluating peers IN HIS PARTICULAR FIELD, not overall. A chemistry professor is not going to know the best programs in classics or Swahili or bassoon performance. A university administrator will have more general knowledge but, again, his or her perspective is going to be influenced by many subjective factors.</p>

156

<p>Guys, there is a definite sizable difference between going to a top public and a top private for law school admissions (it’s not all GPA/LSAT as some are saying - the undergrad matters, otherwise GPA and LSATs of admits should be roughly equal between say Cornell or Northwestern or Hopkins vs Berkeley). </p>

<p>See as follows FOR HARD EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE for law school admissions between a top public and a top private (please use numerical data if you’re going: to refute the information below or my points above)</p>

<p>Let’s compare Berkeley and Hopkins undergrads applying to Law schools:</p>

<p>Some of the differences are glaring:</p>

<p><a href=“Pre-Professional Advising | Student Affairs”>Pre-Professional Advising | Student Affairs;
<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/law/lawstats.stm#schoolto[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/law/lawstats.stm#schoolto&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to University of Michigan Law School:
45% accepted, 3.43 GPA, 168 LSAT
Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to Michigan Law:
14% accepted, 3.80 GPA, 170 LSAT</p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to Columbia Law School:
27% accepted, 3.77 GPA, 169 LSAT
Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to Columbia:
16% accepted, 3.86 GPA, 173 LSAT</p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to Harvard Law School:
17% accepted, 3.77 GPA, 171 LSAT
Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to Harvard Law:
13% accepted, 3.92 GPA, 173 LSAT</p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to UCLA Law School:
56% accepted, 3.43 GPA, 169 LSAT
Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to UCLA Law:
35% accepted, 3.82 GPA, 168 LSAT</p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to NYU Law School:
47% accepted, 3.52 GPA, 170 LSAT
Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to NYU Law:
28% accepted, 3.77 GPA, 173 LSAT</p>

<p>The only exception (sort of with - look at GPA) to this is seen ironically with Berkeley Law:
Admitted Applicant comparison from Johns Hopkins to Berkeley Law School:
14% accepted, 3.72 GPA, 171 LSAT</p>

<p>Admitted Applicant comparison from Berkeley to Berkeley Law:
14% accepted, 3.89 GPA, 169 LSAT</p>

157

<p>Excellent numbers Blah2009.</p>

158

<p>

</p>

<p>I"m sorry, I meant bclintonk’s post 9, which talks about why administrators have a lot of knowledge about peer schools. It seems obvious and I don’t know why it should be controversial—this is their business. Their job is to look for the best ways to improve their own schools, so like any good businessman they are going to become familiar with the competition and see what others are doing right and wrong, see what hires they’ve nabbed and how they compare to their own, and see what kind of customer base they attract. It is at least enough information to end up with a general view that can be summed up in a 1-5 rating. They are no asked to evaluate which program would be better for which individual kid!</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>You know, nobody who knows me has ever suggested my emotions skew my logical thinking. I have never thought that rankings were an appropriate way to prioritize a college list and certainly believe there is no such thing as a “best” school, as fit is very specific to each individual’s priorities and goals. We’d probably agree on things like using rankings as a rough general tier reference when looking at quality. But when you suggest that kids at top schools are not working as hard for their high grades as those who attend a school with a less competitive cohort, I believe it is you who are speaking out of an emotion-based opinion and lacking logic. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Well if by Ivies, you mean more highly selective schools, I would expect those schools to have the same proportion of exceptionally achieving students as the proportion they admit. The same is so at any level in the rankings. Look, I think we all agree that academic outcome is determined by the student rather than the school and that high achieving kids will do really well, generally, wherever they attend. But that doesn’t mean that the overall academic ability of the student body doesn’t shape the quality of classes and the atmosphere in a way that may or may not appeal to individual applicants. There is great disparity in the quality of high schools based on the level of the students, teaching (yes, even good teachers tend to prefer to go where the money is) and general resources. At these schools the rigor of content and grading can vary widely, why not (to a lesser degree) at colleges?</p>

159

<p>Blah2009,</p>

<p>Are you sure the numbers you’re comparing for John Hopkins and UC Berkeley (post #156) are for the same year? I have my doubts. If not, they’re not comparable. In 2013 law school applications fell off a cliff, forcing law schools to go deeper into a smaller applicant pool, dragging down LSAT and GPA medians. But even apart from that, these figures sometimes swing considerably from year to year.</p>

<p>Even if they are for the same year, I wouldn’t read too much into those figures. The UC Berkeley numbers for 2012 admits to top law schools are right about where you’d expect them, i.e., at or slightly above the enrolled first-year student LSAT and GPA medians for each law school. The JHU numbers appear to be slightly below the LSAT medians for most of the law schools cited, and well below the GPA medians. But we’re operating in a very small-N environment here: JHU shows 14 admits to Michigan, 10 to Columbia, 10 to UCLA, 5 to Harvard, 5 to UC Berkeley. With such small numbers, it’s entirely possible that just a couple of URM candidates with stats toward the lower end of the admit range for these schools got the benefit of the doubt and pulled down JHU’s average LSAT and/or GPAs for admitted students. </p>

<p>I have several good friends who are law professors, and I’ve actually spoken to several law school deans about law school admissions in the course of investigating this for my daughter, who has expressed some interest in law school. The consistent message I get is this: except for Yale and Stanford Law Schools and to a lesser extent Harvard Law School, law school admissions is now strictly a numbers game, driven by intense competition for US News law school rankings. One of the few variables top law schools feel they have some control over is admission statistics. Top LSAT scores are rarer than top GPAs, and they count for more in the rankings, so the fiercest competition is for top LSAT scores. And if you look at the posted medians, you’ll see there’s a pretty sharp drop-off even among T-15 law schools: #1 Yale’s LSAT median is 173, equaled by #2 Harvard. But #3 Stanford is at 170, #4 Columbia 172, #4 Chicago and #6 NYU at 171, #7 Penn and #7 UVA at 170, #9 Michigan at 169, #9 UC Berkeley at 167, and so on.</p>

<p>But they also need to keep up their GPA medians, which count for a bit less but still a lot in the rankings. At the top, Yale doesn’t need to worry; it gets so many high-LSAT/high GPA applicants and such a high yield that it can cherry-pick the most “interesting” applicants. Harvard, with a much bigger class, needs to work harder to maintain its stats and is more numbers-driven. Stanford has a small class and so many other strengths that it can afford to be more quirky, and it sacrifices a bit in LSAT scores to get an interesting and eclectic blend without damaging its overall ranking. After that, it’s almost purely numbers-driven, with LSAT scores the top priority, and GPA next. But because there aren’t that many high-LSAT/high GPA applicants, you don’t need to go too far down that list before schools will start to flip-flop, admitting a certain number of high LSAT/lower GPA applicants, and balancing them off with a similar number of high GPA/lower LSAT applicants in order to maintain both medians simultaneously. And remember, it’s only the median that matters to US News, so a high-LSAT candidate has a good chance of getting into a very good law school even with an unimpressive GPA. For high GPA/lower LSAT applicants it’s tougher, because they’re much more common.</p>

<p>There’s absolutely no reason any law school would favor graduates of an elite private undergraduate college like JHU in this competitive environment. The only places it could make a difference are at Yale, Stanford, or Harvard Law Schools, but it apparently doesn’t help them much there, with 2 reported JHU admits to Yale, 1 to Stanford, and 5 to Harvard for whatever period is covered by the report cited by Blah2009.</p>

<p>Most of these law schools will make exceptions to their purely numbers-driven approach to get URMs whose stats are in the ballpark of their enrolled students. And it’s also possible that in all the flip-flopping on LSATs and GPAs, JHU’s <em>mean</em> LSATs and <em>mean</em> GPAs came out below the <em>median</em> figures reported for each school, the mean and the median being very different figures. </p>

<p>Finally, I’d note that Blah 2009 omitted reporting on some other law schools where both JHU and UC Berkeley provide data. At USC, JHU admits had the same average LSATs and higher average GPAs than UC Berkeley admits. At UC Davis, JHU admits had higher LSATs and lower GPAs than UC Berkeley admits. Granted, these law schools are not quite as high up the pecking order as those cited by Blah2009, but these results suggest this is mostly just a small-N question; the numbers of schools reported on and the numbers of admits to any particular law school are just too small to allow sweeping conclusions.</p>

160

<p>Seems like a lot of overthinking here. In the final analysis, USNews rankings rate prestige, AKA desirability, nothing more or less. Selectivity and average GPA/SAT scores reflect the applicants’ perception of the desirability of the college, and high stat applicants can choose the more prestigious schools (which the lower stat applicants can’t.) It’s well established that high achievers will succeed whether they attend State U or an Ivy League college, but more high stat students will chose a high prestige school because it has high prestige, and lower-stat applicants can’t. So the rich get richer, as it were.</p>

<p>It doesn’t matter what the prestige is based on. High prestige schools attract high stat applicants, who spend quality college time amongst other focused and talented high stat students, and are more likely to graduate, thrive economically, etc. Prestige is self-ratifying and self-reinforcing. </p>

<p>So what the rankings should rate is prestige. And they do, testing it by several mutually-reinforcing and related factors, including peer assessment, selectivity, etc. I don’t see what the issue is. The rankings do their job pretty well, as far as I can tell.</p>