US News to Nondorf: Drop Dead

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities

1: Woodrow Wilson’s Ivy League School for Southern gentlemen
2: Hahvahd
3 (tied): The Republic of Coloumbia
3 (tied): Oops, we took (M)oney from known pedoph(I)le Jeffrey Eps(T)ein
3 (tied): Yale Lock Manufacturing Co.
6 (tied): Sports, Tech, And Nice Fulsome Options for Relaxation and Downtime
6 (tied): We don’t talk about that Wharton alum.
6 (tied): University of California hicago

Hope nobody in Admissions had plans for that end-of-year bonus.

Seems like recent trends at the college did not jibe with the new social mobility index; UChicago snagged the coveted #335 spot in a pool of 381 schools.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/social-mobility

Other top 20 schools ranked #335 or lower:

-Caltech (#12 nationally, #345 in social mobility)
-Washington University in Saint Louis (#19 nationally, dead last in social mobility)
-End of list

@dunboyer - Chicago had a very nice rise from a low of #15, circa 2003-2005. Its admission rate went from >40% to <8% and its yield went from <33% to >75%. This is exceptional in a 15 year period. Given that HYPSM is arguably the top 5 by most objective metrics, Chicago should be ranked somewhere between 6-8 (with Columbia and Penn). Chicago cannot really justify a top 5 ranking. Whatever it did in terms of 2 ED rounds, SAT optional, mass marketing, etc. has absolutely worked but at some point, it cannot sustain a top 5 ranking. I think #6 is absolutely fair. If USNews replaced Stanford with Columbia, it would be spot-on in my opinion. I would also replace Cornell with Vanderbilt. And I would replace Rice with Notre Dame.

Clever Dun, but StanfordGSB00 has spoken!

I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems I’ve been OWNED with FACTS and LOGIC.

@StanfordGSB00 What objective metrics “justifiably” place HYPSM at top 5 and Chicago at 6-8 and fairly at #6? I am not sure even USNews would argue that their rankings are that successful in discerning such tiny differences.

“nondorf” sounded like a derogatory term to me so I had to look it up.

@ccdad99 - I think the only objective stats are: PA scores and the admissions stats. The rest is noise. An argument can be made that graduation / retention rates are important too but I would argue that there is a HIGH correlation between admissions stats and graduation rates / retention. Look at the Peer Reputation Scores determined by University Presidents and Deans below. According to the methodology, 43% of academics responded from 4,815 sent out.

Max = 5.0
HYPSM - 4.8 - 5.0
Columbia / JHU - 4.7
Chicago, Penn - 4.6
Northwestern, Duke, Brown - 4.5

I think that HYPSM are the only 5 schools that can legitimately say they are top 5 schools.

The issue with peer reputation surveys is that they assume the crowd knows best. That’s an approach all but guaranteed to penalize schools that do things differently. Whether that’s still true of UChicago or not is a separate debate, but it’s by no means an objective metric.

Of course, the case can be made that a most inputs to rankings, and/or the weight assigned to them by any particular ranking, are also pretty subjective, which gets at the broader point that these rankings are not as scientific as they purport to be.

(And lest anyone accuse me of Chicago boosterism/nitpicking the rankings the minute we dropped in them, my posting history will show that I have been pretty ranking-skeptical during Chicago’s recent high as well as its very recent drop.)

Wth, Stabford can not be tied with UChicago.

Objectively speaking, Stabford should be be tied with Northwestern!

Ha ha ha ha

Dont worry, this too shall pass. Wait until next year. (Stanford would be tied with Northwesten then)

Ha ha ha ha

Ivy League School for Southern gentlemen?

Thats Dook, right?

The concept of a univocal ranking of schools is absurd. It leaves out all the unmeasurable differences of character and emphasis that truly define a place. Those qualities, which are the most important ones in choice of a college, cannot be ranked in any event. But no publication ever went broke selling absurdity. And notwithstanding its pretense of methodological rigor, fawning on big names - and tweaking them annually for no good reason - is what this failed mag is all about. It’s all so, ugh, middlebrow.

That social mobility criteria crushed UChicago (dropped them one spot), be prepared for the huge recruitment of students qualified for Pell grants at UChicago.

Despite having as many bones to pick with USNWR as anyone, I appreciate its good-faith attempt to what marlowe1 correctly says is impossible, and in the process make somewhat more transparent the muddled prestige system in American higher education. I grew up in a huge extended family where everyone went to college, all the smart, nonrebellious people went to Harvard (except for my parents, who went to LACs and then Harvard Law School), and there were lots of snobs. So I had a very nuanced map of college prestige practically from birth. It was no doubt wrong, but not in any important way.

By contrast, a lot of kids in my children’s high school class were immigrants or first generation. They and their families had heard of Harvard, Penn, Temple, and Penn State, and sometimes MIT and Pitt. They had no idea what LACs were, except that their guidance counselors kept handing them brochures about LACs. USNWR, for all its flaws, does a pretty good job of opening up the world to people who have never heard of Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, or Northwestern (or for that matter the University of Chicago), not to mention places like Santa Clara University. Sure, no ranking system adequately communicates the triviality of any difference between #1 and #10, but that’s a lot more of a flaw on the first page of the rankings than it is for the rest, where I think anyone can tell that it’s not appropriate to worry about picking #40 over #30. (When their oldest daughter applied to college, our best friends, Midwesterners with very limited understanding of East Coast schools, were terribly upset that she wanted to apply ED to Amherst, then the #3 LAC, rather than #1 Williams. We had to tell them that no one in the world could tell the difference between Amherst and Williams.)

@JHS , perhaps there is useful information to be had about the schools that participate in this exercise (almost all schools), but how important is it that that information comes in the form of a ranking of the schools?

That’s not an entirely rhetorical question. The people at the magazine who spend all these personhours collecting this info have to be paid, and they will only be paid - and the information therefore only be collected - if lots and lots of people buy the mag or digital equivalent thereof. Why would they do this if it were not that Americans - and perhaps the human race itself - like beauty contests? The dubious meaningfulness of the results - if not the foregone conclusion of them - matters not.

You could call it a tip sheet for high school kids, but my suspicion is that it is not just any such kids who read the mag but rather those with some idea that they have wares to sell and want assurance that they aren’t selling themselves cheap. Perhaps a better analogy is to the stock market. If you’ve got money to invest in the form of intellectual capital, you don’t want to put it into a dog of a stock! Put it in the best of brand. How do you figure this out if you’re not an old stock American for which this knowledge is bred in the bone? --You need a tip sheet or investment guide.

Are the USNews rankings therefore a useful tool in an upwardly mobile democracy? I see the argument for it. But isn’t there also a sense that it is an oversimplification of a very important question: What education is right for you with all your personal eccentricities, strengths, weaknesses and peculiar aspirations?

It’s not necessarily fair for you (or me) to impose our “old stock American” (but in my case not so very old stock) educational values on everyone else. We believe that it is possible to find an education that is “right for you with all your personal eccentricities, strengths, weaknesses, and peculiar aspirations.” But I’m sure both of us have noticed that there are plenty of people on CC who care a lot more about other things, including how an institution is generally regarded (and of course how much it is going to cost). It’s a little unfair to say that’s not worth knowing by our lights.

It’s also awfully hard to figure out what education is right for you, if you care to do that and don’t have a lot of information. Do you rely entirely on colleges’ marketing materials? Do you look for research on factors that affect student outcomes and try to match them to specific institutions? Isn’t it worth having some sort of check on whether a college is worth taking seriously? Not that USNWR is perfect on that score – hardly – but I think it’s in good faith, and it’s a little more better than nothing than any other comprehensive rating system I have seen. It gives some weight to factors that actually affect student experience, vs. stuff like number of faculty citation or peer reviews, but without indulging in the fantasy that class size is all anyone cares about.

Finally, you probably remember, as I do, the dizzying feeling of opening up a Barrons guide (or Princeton, or whatever you had) and realizing that there were hundreds and hundreds of colleges and you knew very little about most of them. It helps to have some way of orienting yourself.

The USN rankings can help in putting together a list of reaches/matches/safeties. They are no substitute for a visit, of course, but they do serve as a handy guide when you are first putting your list together. Nowadays if you are reaching high, you need Plans B, C and D just in case those paper odds are at all representative w/r/t your application. Other than that, they tend not to contain any new information from year to year unless the school has momentum in either direction. Personally, I’m not all that concerned that UChicago currently has five schools ranked ahead of it. Over the long term I do think it belongs in the top five, and there are five other schools I can name which also belong there (IMHO). So no new information there. But traveling from #15 or #20 to a top five (or even top six) would tend to signal something substantial about the place. Likewise if it went the opposite way.

@JBStillFlying - I might be biased, of course, but I respectfully disagree. Chicago, in my opinion, does not belong in the T5. It is a very solid T 10. HYPSM are T5. I would say that UChicago and Columbia have a legitimate claim to being #6-#7. But, how can UChicago claim to be “better” than HYSPM. Alternatively, how can it claim to be better than Columbia? US News helped elevate Chicago over the last 8-10 years. Remember, it was a very solid back-up school prior to 2005 for all of the ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Northwestern. And now, it competes with all of these places and in some cases, even wins cross-admits.

@StanfordGSB00 , It sounds like you reached that conclusion via a sort of “blink” reading of prestige and name-recognition. Many employ that methodology. It’s not all wrong if one believes that that sort of thing is important. Of course there is the possibility that mere snobbery has placed a grubby finger on the scales.

I have no doubt that Chicago belongs in the T5 category academically speaking. Dare I say, it may even surpass Harvard in that regard.

Along with everyone else, I do have high regards for Harvard, but what with all their recruiting of high-profile families, celebrities, and athletes in their continued pursuit of ‘leaders’ (nothing wrong with that, they’re a private institution, so they can do whatever they want), there must be some dilution of the school’s academic prowess; in addition, many of those types of students and faculty do pursue the extracurriculars that necessitate being a high profile person, and therefore less time spent on academics and research.

Chicago, however, attracts many more serious-minded faculty and students. It has many academic accolades (which can be easily researched) paralleling any elite school in the world. The student body is also one of the highest caliber academically speaking, and the resources available in the school enables them to carry on their studies/research. Chicago is a powerhouse and heavyweight.

I’m not saying that one school is better than another, but each school has some subtle differences.

All that being said, I’m also a fan of education in general, so even though a person may not be able to attend a t20 or t100 school, the fact that we in the United States, no matter our standing in life, have choices in where we can attend school is so amazing. To be splitting hairs over a few spots on a list is probably just an exercise in ‘fun.’