<p>Oh OK. Well, I guess that proves everything! I'd like more proof. As to money and its importance in college admissions (this was written by a friend in response to someone else. He goes to Northwestern. and keep in mind, it is percentage of students who donate, not how much):
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Money is everything for a university. It determines how much access to materials you have (endowments fund libraries; money is required to post readings online and to secure other contracts for teaching media), it determines how 'wired' your campus is to take advantage of state of the art technology for many fields, it determines how big your buildings are, how famous your professors are, and how significant and groundbreaking your professors' research is. Money even gose into those specific things which you think that USNews rankings ignore: colleges pay big dollars to hire consultants and testing centres in order to best evaluate proper curriculae for students. In the end, money produces better education which in turn produces more money: universty funding shows signs of economies of scale.</p>
<p>Furthermore, to claim that "of course the richest snobs of the most pretiguous schools are mos tlikely to donate" is bordering on assinine. People get paid, by and large, in accordance to hard they work and in accordance to how people place cash values on their performance. As such, the best schools will have the richest alumni because of their reputation of hardwork, not solely because of some blanket, patently untrue, rapore with future employers. Also, alumni donate because they feel that the school will use the money to enrich the community, not just to feel - as you insinuated- elite. Rich people want to know that their money is going towards something to preserve their reputation and would be very unlikely to donate to a failing, unacademic, nonprogressive institution.</p>
<p>As much as people lambaste USNews survey, it is pretty much right on the money. These factors may not DIRECTLy correlate with a university's excellence, however they are excellent indicators of academic performance and student demand for these educations. That's the point of these surveys and that's why students use them very closely to gauge market demand, employer demand, and student demand, however add their own personal preferences into the mix. All else being equal, you'er better off goin to Yale than Duke, better off going to Duke than Northwestern, better off going to Northwestern than UCLA, better off going to UCLA than UNLV, and so on.</p>
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<p>Joel: what I'm saying is that vast sums of wealth go towards analysing other curriculae and updating your own. With more money you have better facilities, better materials, better professors, etc. Yes, a poor school might have a superior curriculum for one year before other schools catchon and hire consultants to assist them in modifying their own curriculum - but after that year is over, that little school has lost its comparative advantage to Ben Franklin. I wasn't knocking your interpretation of the global schools, only your assertion that they are unfairly placed below domestic schools. I believe that they are FAIRLY placed below due to these cost considerations and that although a portion of those international places are good schools, but, as I noted earlier, are not placed in the top 25 because things like <em>ACCEPTANCE % and ENTRANCE NUMBERS (due to population and structural differences)</em> are incompatible, NOT things like endowment. We have almost no barriers to capital flows now Joel; to claim that international institutions wouldn't command salaries in accordance to their rapore is - for the most part - incorrect.</p>
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