USNWR 2009: Looking at the Data XVIII (Student Body Depth via CR scores)

<p>^ afan, are you related to xiggi by chance? :)</p>

<p>hoedown,
The data that I have posted is all drawn from USNWR whose data I believe is supplied to them by the colleges themselves. There are differences in sample sizes at all schools as not all will have large representative populations. People may differ on what constitutes a materially relevant population. My personal guess is that if a school has 25% submitting either a SAT score or an ACT score, then that is likely a useful number. </p>

<p>bclintonk,
I think you present a good argument about the merits of an Honors College within a large public. The beauty of this arrangement lies in the structure of an Honors College (immediate association with peers of similar academic achievement, small class sizes, priority registrations, etc.). I think it should be noted, however that such features are commonplace at top privates. Still, the larger resources available at many top publics and the potentially more exciting and vibrant social and athletic scenes at top publics make them attractive choices to some top students.</p>

<p>hawkette, I don't understand why you think the denominator question is simply a matter of readers differing over what is sufficient. It's math, not opinion, that drives what happens to the percentage. </p>

<p>Consider College X with a freshman class of 1000, which reports that 25% submitted the SAT, with a median of 700. Depending on the denominator you use (1000 for the whole class, or 250, for just those who submitted the SAT), you would report to CC readers that 50% of the College X's scored over 500, OR you report that 12.5% scored over 700.</p>

<p>Given the way you list colleges based on this number, this makes a considerable difference how this college would be regarded. That's where opinion comes in, sure, but how can you deny that it's a very different number that influences that opinion? Readers should be informed the denominator you choose. It's a non-issue for colleges where the vast majority submit the SAT, but for any school with a smaller proportion, choosing one denominator over another would make quite a difference in its relative position.</p>

<p>I feel now that I have a decent shot at getting into some of the top LACs.</p>

<p>I am often asked why, of the 27 key schools we recruit at, are so may of them publics. One of the reasons is shown by UCB's analysis.... there is often more talent available at them in terms of total numbers.</p>

<p>UCBChemEng always manipulate data so his school comes out #1. :D</p>

<p>UCBChemEGrad,</p>

<p>oops..my bad. i thought your number didn't include the transfers and so i was trying to be funny. ;) now that i realize that, i think it's likely the actual number for ucb is somewhat smaller since the transfers are less qualified than the ones that got in as freshmen.</p>

<p>rogracer brought up a good point. the sheer number of high scoring kids at berkeley is very appealing to recruiters.</p>

<p>
[quote]
UCBChemEng always manipulate data so his school comes out #1.

[/quote]

It wasn't exactly my intention, but I had a strong suspicion...;)</p>

<p>Anyways, it just goes to show you can manipulate data with a sleight of hand to support anybody's agenda.</p>

<p>^i am happy either way since my school magically stays around the same spot. wildcats are adaptable. :D</p>

<p>UCB makes a good point re very large schools ( UCLA, UNC, Virginia, Michigan, Ga Tech).There are lots of smart kids there. But sadly they are surrounded by an even larger amounts of avg students. That leads to a distinctly different college experience than at Williams where a smart kid is surrounded by peers.</p>

<p>Hawkettes list is much more reflective of reality than USNWR. Esp the smaller schools like Tufts, Georgetown, and William & Mary which are def top 20. This would be more helpful to a high schooler. US News would be more helpful in looking at grad programs.</p>

<p>Great work Hawkette.</p>

<p>...as an MIT grad I could easily agree with the common sentiment expressed by swish "...
There are lots of smart kids there. But sadly they are surrounded by an even larger amounts of avg students. That leads to a distinctly different college experience than at Williams where a smart kid is surrounded by peers".....but I don't. Kids select their own peer associations..and large top-tier public schools have many, many talented kids on-campus to interact with...in fact even more than many top-flight privates. Additionally,
comparing SAT averages of small LAC's with large publics that have a much more diverse set of colleges and majors is silly. Students in, say, the electrical engineering department at a large public university are interacting with a completely different peer-group than the university as a whole.</p>

<p>I cannot believe so many people still follow this guy's posts and wants to argue with him. He's just gonna post one of these "Data SAT Part # 255" once a week, of course the key word is "data". For regular people, there are only so many ways you can look at the SAT score of an incoming freshman class, for hawkette, it's just another tool to bash public Universities over and over. Hawkette never posts anything about the result, of an education. He never posts data on how students at his favorite colleges do in terms of graduate school placement and job placement. He talks about student to faculty ratio, well Harvard has a 7-1 ratio, yet students complain about large lectures taught by graduate students all the time. Don't be fooled by numbers and the so called "statistics" or rumors, talk to the students, faculty and others who know the school more than just the incoming class average SAT score. I got another question for you, do you still talk to your best friend if his SAT score is 50 points lower?</p>

<p>A better question would be: would you still want to talk to your friend if you knew her score were 500 points lower?</p>

<p>We're missing the greater argument here: that the SAT supposedly measures intelligence in the first place, and takes into account the socioeconomic background of its victims.</p>

<p>Keefer,
I think that you are attacking the messenger rather than trying to make a substantive argument to support your opinion. The USNWR threads have been data postings and have drawn exclusively from the USNWR online edition which itself is drawn from the CDS/reportings of each college. I certainly don’t see how you can accurately interpret this as “bashing public schools.” If you feel that there are neglected categories from USNWR that you feel would be helpful to others, then please post them. Better yet, why don’t you do the work and create them yourself? </p>

<p>As for your desire for threads on graduate school placement, job placement, etc., I would welcome the opportunity to do so if there are publicly-available data points that would be useful and would encompass a wide listing of top colleges (roughly defined as top 20-50 colleges). The only thing that I have recently seen that is relevant is the Payscale data that was presented in the WSJ. This data has a lot of flaws as does nearly all of the post-graduate data that I have seen. I have posted extensively on the Payscale data and created a thread that was consolidated into the following thread:</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/545472-wsj-article-payscale-100k-club-consolidated.html?highlight=payscale%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/545472-wsj-article-payscale-100k-club-consolidated.html?highlight=payscale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>As for threads on the nature of the undergraduate life (which relates to your suggestion to talk to the students at a college), I did an entire series using data from Sparknotes:</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/521038-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-nat-l-universities.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/521038-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-nat-l-universities.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/522165-part-ii-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-balanced-high-strung.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/522165-part-ii-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-balanced-high-strung.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/523116-part-iii-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-how-dorms.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/523116-part-iii-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-how-dorms.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/523823-part-iv-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-most-resemble-heaven.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/523823-part-iv-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-most-resemble-heaven.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/524464-part-v-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-faculty-instruction.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/524464-part-v-student-opinions-usnwr-top-30-faculty-instruction.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Finally, I think that the time has come to create separate rankings for public and private universities. I would agree that, given the differences in institutional mission, some of the metrics of the USNWR methodology don’t apply evenly to the publics and the privates. I have posted on this many times and also created a thread dedicated to this subject.</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/516511-time-separate-public-private-national-university-rankings.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/516511-time-separate-public-private-national-university-rankings.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Despite its frequent promotion here as as illuminative insight into post-college success, the Payscale data is a very skewed measure for colleges whose graduates have high degree aspirations. It may be a super measure for colleges whose graduates tend to terminate at the baccalaureate level, but for the kinds of colleges that tend to get a lot of attention on CC, not so much. </p>

<p>Naturally some of the top colleges will perform very well on it, but it's not a good measure of their typical graduate, who is more likely than not to get an advanced degree.</p>

<p>whatever, hawkette, you have an agenda and you know it, most people on this site know this, which is why very few have responded to your other posts, but you just keep on plowing away at it, until you suck people into it with your data manipulation, like you did on a previous post where you did some random fuzzy math with no meaning to come up with a ranking that you liked. whatever. Frankly, I'm pretty sick of seeing your posts, with consistent negativity towards some of the best schools in this country, like UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, none of which you are affiliated with, btw. You keep on telling me how classes are big in those schools, taught by grad students, when I, along with others have first hand experience with the education, those of us who have taken classes there, have told you just how wrong you are. whatever. </p>

<p>If anybody wants to see graduate school/job placement, you can go on to the career services websites of those schools, and you can see exactly how the students do, where they go, who recruits there.</p>

<p>keefer is 100% right. I wish everyone would stop encouraging hawkette and her obviously biased agenda.</p>

<p>hoedown,
I agree with your comments about the flaws in the Payscale data. Readers should not interpret the results literally. Still, some schools that are noted for their placement score well while others that claim to be excellent at placement don’t fare as well as expected. In either case, users of the data could/should use it as a springboard for further investigation in doing their own college search & selection.</p>

<p>keefer,
Lots of completely baseless charges in your latest diatribe. I actually like nearly all of the public universities that you mention and think that they offer some of the best undergraduate experiences in the country, particularly for students who might participate in an Honors College or some other pre-eminent scholarly program (bclintonk has posted eloquently on this in # 18). I also think your list neglects two of the finest undergraduate public universities in the country-William & Mary and U North Carolina. I would recommend either to nearly any non-engineering student who was interested in a top-level undergraduate education as both are renown for their commitment to classroom teaching and both have exceptional post-graduate reputations in their regions and nationally. </p>

<p>As for your charge of ranking colleges, I believe that I have done just the opposite. I have deliberately NOT listed any ranking of the colleges in the presentation of the data. Check the opening posts for any of the 19 USNWR threads created so far and you’ll see that is the case. I’m not sure what you are referring to about the “fuzzy math” that I supposedly did. Please refer me to the offending post/thread.</p>

<p>Re the class size and student/faculty ratio data, I have taken directly from the USNWR online report. The numbers are what the numbers are. If you feel that class size or student/faculty is a non-issue, then I suggest you argue that point. As I have stated elsewhere, my personal preference is for a smaller class sizes and believe that this is more easily achieved (though perhaps not uniformly) in schools with a lower student/faculty ratio. The Sparknotes data would seem to support this conclusion. </p>

<p>As for grad school/job placement data, I have yet to see a uniform presentation of data that would illuminate the performance of ABC College vs XYZ College. USNWR does provide some results on students going directly to grad school from undergrad, but not every school responds, eg, 9 of the USNWR Top 30 don’t provide this number, including your U Michigan. I am hesitant to create a thread on this data point as USNWR lacks the information for so many highly ranked colleges. Would you like to see it anyway? </p>

<p>Finally, re your comment on an agenda, I think I have been fairly transparent about my favoritism to colleges that provide highly balanced undergraduate experiences as defined by what goes on in and out of the classroom. I see college as a broad, growing experience where hopefully students engage in a variety of experiences-academic, social, athletic, etc-and graduate as better adults, with well-developed critical thinking skills and ready to live and prosper in the post-graduate world. </p>

<p>For the umpteenth time, the colleges that I think best provide the best undergraduate experience are:</p>

<p>Private Category: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest</p>

<p>Public Category: UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U Michigan, U North Carolina, W&M</p>

<p>Feel free to take some shots at any of my favorites and I’ll be happy to respond…and hopefully with a lot more objectivity that you. If not, I would expect you and/or others to challenge me.</p>