Hey All,
What do you think the predictions will be for the 2016 rankings next month? Here are my top 20 predictions:
How about these top ten?
And then all the rest.
How about top five: HYPSM
Even better 
When do the 2016 rankings come out exactly?
Sometime in September, I think.
My predictions:
Is this how you guys are spending your summer?
They won’t change much from one year to the next year.
Harvard
Stanford
Yale
Princeton
MIT
Penn
Dartmouth
Columbia
Duke
Northwestern
Chicago
Cornell
Vanderbilt
Brown
John Hopkins
UC Berkeley
UCLA
Notre Dame
Georgetown
John Hopkins
Caltech is too small to belong on this list. But it’s not a LAC. So somewhat of a very very smart orphan.
The Top 20 is pretty meaningless, none of the schools care as long as they’re there. The places where schools will actually be affected is in the 50-150 range IMO.
1). Princeton
2). Harvard, Yale
4). Columbia
5). Stanford
6). Chicago, Duke, MIT
9). Penn
10). Dartmouth
Any chance Northeastern continues its climb and passes BU this year in the rankings? NU’s average SAT scores (1390 for 2014) are now higher than USC (1380), RPI (1389), Michigan (1380), NYU (1355), BC (1360), W+M (1365), Emory (1365), UVA (1355), Rochester (1350), Georgia Tech (1360), and Lehigh (1315). BU is 1285.
I believe one of your colleagues on the NU board predicts NU will break into the top 20 in three years. That’s awesome! It will look something like this:
Wow, this makes me miss the “Prestigiousity” thread.
Hmm I wonder how the US News will change its methodology this year. Any bets on which metric will become more or less important in 2016 so as to make it appear that one top school measurably improved against another in a year’s time?
@whenhen I would imagine they would try to keep the methodology constant since changing it too many times will create a loss of credibility. But then again there isn’t a strong alternative to USNWR rankings.
^^^ Not true - they tinker with their methodology almost every year (and I believe for the reasons that @whenhen mentioned.)
Just one of many reasons that no one should take their rankings very seriously.
Not a prediction per se, but this was a ranking I posted here last month based on a formula I came up with. This is all based on 2013 data for the most part. The main reason I am re-posting it here is because I think it is interesting to see it with the graphic representation of the gaps between schools (which I forgot to do in the other thread.)
Rank, Score, Standardized test scores of admitted freshman converted to percentile rank, retention rate, graduation rate, USNWR National Universities ranking
Score = (2 * Test Scores Percentile + Retention Rate + Graduation Rate) / 4
Correlation between Rank and USNWR rank = .945
1 98.2 Yale University 98.9% 99% 96% 3
2 98.0 Harvard University 99.0% 97% 97% 2
3 97.9 Princeton University 98.8% 98% 96% 1
4 97.4 Dartmouth College 97.9% 98% 96% 11
5 97.4 Stanford University 98.3% 98% 95% 4
6 97.4 University of Pennsylvania 97.7% 98% 96% 8
7 97.2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 98.9% 98% 93% 7
8 97.2 University of Chicago 98.9% 99% 92% 4
9 96.9 Columbia University in the City of New York 98.3% 96% 95% 4
10 96.9 University of Notre Dame 97.8% 97% 95% 16
11 96.8 Duke University 97.7% 97% 95% 8
12 96.7 California Institute of Technology 99.4% 96% 92% 10
13 96.7 Washington University in St Louis 98.4% 96% 94% 14
14 96.6 Brown University 97.1% 97% 95% 16
15 96.3 Northwestern University 98.0% 96% 93% 13
16 96.2 Vanderbilt University 98.3% 96% 92% 16
17 95.9 Rice University 97.9% 96% 92% 19
18 95.9 Tufts University 97.3% 97% 92% 27
19 95.7 Johns Hopkins University 96.9% 97% 92% 12
20 95.7 Cornell University 96.9% 96% 93% 15
(Not trying to hijack the thread - the old thread about this list is available here:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1790567-top-50-national-universities-ranked-p1.html)
Do people really think this is important? I’ll admit that I skim the listings when they come out and sometimes get surprised by a school being far out of place from where I thought it would be, but otherwise isn’t it just done to sell magazines? No one really believes there is a difference between schools that are within like 10 of each other, do they?
" No one really believes there is a difference between schools that are within like 10 of each other, do they?"
Except many times comparable schools are listed way beyond 10 places of each other. That’s the real problem.