<p>Lehigh 1270 51 40
Penn 1273 41 51
Carnegie Inst of Tech 1304 74 40</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure Penn stats are just Arts & Sciences. All of Penn's colleges were broken out separately, and that college was the highest one. At the time, Wharton and other business schools were in disfavor.</p>
<p>Similarly Carnegie Mellon is just Carnegie Tech. The Mellon College of Sciences was broken out separately I recall; possibly other colleges were also broken out. I can't be sure exactly what I entered into my spreadsheet; it was just for my own purposes at the time.</p>
<p>The thought process, Cal isn't the only school that was consistantly ranked in the top 10 between 1983 and 1990. Michigan was also ranked between #5 and #9 in that period.</p>
<p>pretty sure the spreadsheet has been done, search the archives.</p>
<p>Thanks monydad. This afternoon I was able to locate and order a '71 Cass and Birnbaum (sounds like a vintage car or wine).</p>
<p>"Those were the good old days hmm?" ---acceptance rates sure look nice....btw don't forget to add about 80 points to get today's equivalent after SATs were recentered about 10 years ago.</p>
<p>OT--I was pretty sure my entering Lehigh freshman class had 1280 avg SAT which apparently is about right (about 1360 today). LU alumni publications repeatedly tout "highest SATs ever" for recent Classes of '08, '09 etc of 1320 or so....I had thought they weren't being entirely honest and my suspicions have been confirmed.</p>
<p>While not at all like today, admissions back then was no lock either. The twenty most selective schools accepted fewer then 1/3 of their applicants. Cooper Union accepted 17%, Brandeis accepted 20%. And these were the days before the common app, there was a whole separate, individual application for each school. Which had to be custom-written, typed and mailed, not emailed. And schools were not actively drumming up applications so they could reject more people and look better to US News.</p>
<p>THe '71 book might have data for the class entering in '69, I don't recall exactly any more. My dates are give or take a year.</p>
<p>I've always had in my mid that the recentering number was to add 70 points to the verbal score. Of course, this depended on where you are in the scale as a 750V old scale would only have 50 points added to it, but a 410V old scale (about the 50% range) was moved up to 500 (a 90 point change).</p>
<p>Just look at how absurd the rankings are.... between 1999 and 2000 Caltech went from 9 to 1. Other schools make laughably large spot movements also... I’m sure people will contribute that to methodology changes, but come on…</p>
<p>The rankings are a joke. Sure, they may be fun to speculate about, but they're a stupid thing to be basing any decisions on. Do you really think that much changes in a year that a school could go from #9 to #1, or from #3 to number #11? Of course not.</p>
<p>Besides, there really is very little, if any, difference between the educational quality at any of the schools in top 100. If you think about it, there are over 3,000 colleges and universities in the US. The top 100 of them is the top 3%, which is pretty f'ing elite, if you ask me. Trying to argue that someone should choose Dartmouth over UVA or Columbia over Cornell or even UT over Texas A&M based on the idea that one is ranked higher is just stupid. The biggest difference you'll find at those schools is the caliber and attitude of the student body, and even then, the difference won't be massive. You will find geniuses at A&M who preferred its tradition and spirit to Harvard's, and retards at Harvard who are coasting by on daddy's money (or jerks and a-holes who will crush anything and anyone to get ahead). </p>
<p>There are only two things that a college decision should be truly made based upon. The first is your general area of interest. It's probably not a good idea to attend CalTech if you want to major in history, and it's probably an equally poor idea to attend Oberlin if you want to major in biochemical engineering or mathematics. The second is that you feel comfortable and at home. You're going to be living there for four years, so it's best to choose somewhere you love. If you truly want to attend UF, for example, but go to Harvard because you think it will get you ahead in the job market, you're probably wrong, and you'll probably be miserable. (The people who can get into the Ivies don't need the Ivies.) </p>
<p>What I'm trying to say is, choosing Penn over Cornell or Berkeley over Texas or Columbia over Tufts just because one is ranked higher is idiotic. The difference is TRULY miniscule, and in two years, they might have even switched positions.</p>
<p>People who say that "rankings are stupid" are the same people who attend top 25 schools not satisfied with their ranking, who will later discredit a school because it's not top 25.</p>
<p>Example: Student A attends Michigan. Student A states that rankings are stupid. However, Student A refuses to acknowledge Iowa as a good school, because it's ranked in the 60s.</p>
<p>It's interesting reading all this analysis and speculation, but the bottom line is really quite simple: USNews is a publication that's having a very hard time staying profitable. (If it even is profitable, as opposed to being a pet project for its owner Mort Zuckerman.) Anyway, it's one successful franchise is its Top Colleges (and the spinoffs.)
How would it look if the "list" (which many people in these forums seems to view as a sacred document) was always the same? Pretty unremarkable. No buzz for the new list. Nothing for the magazine's PR people to tout in their press releases.
So you're an editor and you need to create buzz. What do you do? You change the methodology to mix things up a bit. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong or even journalistically questionable about that. There are lots of valid ways to measure an academic institution. It's just pretty important to use different ones so things don't get boring....</p>
<p>Rankings do mean something but are only accurate to a certain extent. Generally, I think the top 1-25 schools are ranked accurate within 10 places. So I don't consider caltech going from 9 to 1 to be that significant, since that's within the margin of error. For schools 25-100, maybe accurately ranked within 20 places.</p>
<p>The top 25...hell, even the top 50 schools on that list are all great schools. I'm sure to attend any of those would be phenomenal even if it wasn't a "top 10". The differences between the top programs in those schools is largely exaggerated. Arrogance or ignorance as a result of a news magazine publication seems silly to me.</p>
<p>"Rankings do mean something but are only accurate to a certain extent. Generally, I think the top 1-25 schools are ranked accurate within 10 places. So I don't consider caltech going from 9 to 1 to be that significant, since that's within the margin of error."</p>
<p>-But if what you say is true, then Harvard and Princeton could be ranked 10th and you would be ok with that?</p>
<p>I think no matter what contrivances are currently being used in the rankings that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford are generally considered the 1-4 schools in some order. To me, it's tough to place where MIT and CalTech belong on the list because they're so specialized and are the most suitable to some students and completely inappropriate to others. In fact, I think it would be more justifiable to include LACs on the same list than trying to include MIT, CalTech, RPI type schools on the list, but that's a story for a different thread. After the aforementioned top four, I would generally agree that the rankings are usually ranked reasonably well within 10 places.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think the advent of rankings really brought MIT and CalTech into being more generally acknowledged, instead of thought of as having only a narrow bent. Acceptance rates for these two have really dropped in comparison to HYPS in the last 15 years. MIT even has undergrad business now, which is unbelievable to me.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>"MIT even has undergrad business now"? Uh, what do you mean by "now"? The MIT Sloan undergrad business program has existed in its current form for at least 50 years, and before that existed as the engineering administration program since 1914.</p>