<p>Some colleges like Reed have decided not to play the US News & World Report college rankings game - and apparently it has not really hurt their applicants pool. Just curious which colleges have caved-in with an institutional policy/mandate to climb the USN&WR rankings charts. I'll bet the true information may be hard to come by since I suspect it's not very pc for any college pres to admit publically they even pay the slightest attention to those "overblown popularity contests". Are schools truly ambivalent on this matter, or do many have secret or not-so-secret ambitions to climb the USN&WR rankings. Which schools have climbed the USN&WR rankings fastest in the last 10 years, and how much of that can be attributed to gaming the rankings system??</p>
<p>wustl . (there's a thread that shows students from a wide range of scores + gpas receiving plenty of wustl literature)</p>
<p>I have to admit WUSTL was one of the first schools that came to my mind ... but there is more to gaming the USN&WR rankings than continuously bombarding applicants with literature propaganda.</p>
<p>I personally don't see anything necessarily wrong with bombing applicants with literature propaganda. In fact, I would argue that that's a completely legitimate tactic. There are some schools, like HYPSMC, that have huge name brand recognition. WU does not have that yet. So to get to that level, WU has to build the quality of its student body, and to do that, I think it is legitimate to advertise through literature. Just like when a company wants to boost sales, it spends a lot on advertising, so similarly, if a school wants to build interest, it should also spend a lot of advertising. Nothing wrong with that. </p>
<p>As a case in point, I would submit Stanford as an example. It wasn't that long ago that Stanford was basically a no-name school. Today Stanford is obviously one of the elite schools. Part of how Stanford got better was through aggressively attracting the best students in the country, students who would have otherwise gone to the Ivy League, MIT, Caltech or Berkeley. By doing that, Stanford developed a reputation as a school that had top quality students and high levels of selectivity, and that contributed to its current elite status.</p>
<p>USC is another school that used merit money to buy high-stat kids, particularly NMSF's....to move up in the rankings.</p>
<p>I also don't see why using merit money to buy high-stat kids is a bad thing. Hey, at least USC realizes that its student body is not as strong as it could be and so is using its money to try to boost the quality of its student body. There are plenty of other schools who not only have don't have the best student bodies, they're not even bothering to try to improve it. Just like when a company wants to hire more and better workers, it ought to raise pay in order to attract better people. USC has been highly successful in courting donors for money and has shown a willingness to aggressively spend that money to improve its student quality. That's exactly what it should be doing. </p>
<p>I think the real problem is not with USC, it's with those other schools out there who aren't trying to improve their student bodies. That's like a company that complains about not being able to find good employees, but then refuses to boost pay in order to attract good workers.</p>
<p>WUSTL would have to be the absolute worst at this. I go to a public state magnet school, and WUSTL has a habit of waitlisting highly qualified candidates (people who were waitlisted there got into stanford, harvard, princeton, duke, etc. - all RD) and admitting less qualified people from my school. This is because they are scared of being the back up school and want to increase their matriculation numbers. From what I've seen around here, it's not too hard to get into WUSTL ED (ppl with C's do get in) and nearly impossible to get in RD. But I think this may all be just my school.</p>
<p>Students and GCs from my school that have talked to people in WUSTL's admissions office say taht their officers talk endlessly about how "in ten years we want to be on the same par as Harvard/Yale in the USNWR rankings".</p>
<p>I think it's somewhat hard to game the rankings because they tweak it every year. You don't know exactly what they'll weight, so you'd have to guess where to invest your resources. It's not a bad gamble if you're doing things that would generally improve the school anyway, but if you're investing time/money/energy in a measure that doesn't mean that much outside of the rankings....and US News decides to weight it very marginally....ouch, what a waste.</p>
<p>wustl, penn, emory,nyu.</p>
<p>Washu, Indiana, Purdue, Penn.</p>
<p>The reason WUSTL waitlists those people is because they know that those people will not go if they were accepted so why bump up the acceptance rate for people who will not go?</p>
<p>I would have to say that Middlebury's gerrymandering of the SAT scores they report on their common data set compared to the real SAT numbers they have for their actual enrolled class may be the egregious example of gaming USNEWS that I have seen.</p>
<p>On their website class profile, they include the SATs for all enrolled freshmen for whom they have the scores. The 25th - 75th medians are:</p>
<p>1230 - 1400</p>
<p>In their USNEWS reporting, they only include a subset: only the 50% of the enrolled freshmen who asked that the SAT scores sent to the school be considered for their application. The resulting "published" SAT medians are:</p>
<p>1380 - 1500</p>
<p>As you can see, this is not a trivial difference. It is actually quite misleading. This is an issue to be looked at carefully in the USNEWS reporting of any "SAT-optional" school, but this is the most extreme example I've seen.</p>
<p>They are relying on a "Clintonesque" parsing of the meaning of the word "submitted". I believe that the intent of the common data set is to include any scores the school has as being "submitted". Middlebury is relying on a more narrowly tailored definition: even when they have the scores, they are not considered to be "submitted" until the student designates them to be used in the application process.</p>
<p>STANFORD wants to improve, but it does NOT support using US News as a benchmark</p>
<p>or at least that's what they said:
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html</a></p>
<p>IMPROVING in the rankings does not necessarily mean you're playing into the US News methodology or using it as a benchmark for success. unless of course, US News is the rightful indicator of improvement... then basically every school that tries to improve is gaming US News, and i dont think that's true. </p>
<p>playing into US News would include strategies such as concentrating scholarship offers to high SAT scorers instead of focusing on other aspects, or by creating a massive waitlist in order to keep their acceptance rate low.</p>
<p>Most people misunderstand the true impact of the selectivity numbers. WUSTL is typically named as a big offender because of all the brochures it send out. However, the rise in applicants account for very little in the total number. In some cases, a higher selectivity is actually detrimental -check Wellesley versus Swarthmore and Pomona to understand how the expected graduation is supported by a lower selectivity. </p>
<p>The real games are played in what's called the peer assessment. That is where you can find the most abject geographical cronyism and despicable gamemanship.</p>
<p>Kfc4u, the truth in the past, back when it was not an elite school, Stanford used many of the same tactics that schools like WUStL use now. Stanford engaged in heavy promotion and marketing campaigns to draw students away from the traditional East Coast schools. OK, it wasn't through direct mail, but the effect was the same. Stanford also used to charge much less tuition than the East Coast schools did, which had the same effect as an across-the-board "merit scholarship". </p>
<p>Furthermore, I find it ironic in the extreme to read about Stanford's complaints about other schools benefitting in the rankings by easing the grading of their curricula in order to benefit from higher graduation rates. I think anybody who knows Stanford would concede that to this day Stanford continues to practice rather extensive grade inflation which has the effect of boosting graduation rates. Practically nobody ever gets expelled from Stanford for poor academic performance. Those who leave do so because they want to leave, not because they're forced to leave. That stands in stark contrast to Berkeley, Caltech or MIT where a significant portion of the student body is involuntarily expelled for poor performance. </p>
<p>Hence, WuStl is really just doing many of the same things that Stanford did in its rise. If Stanford was allowed to use those tactics in the past, I don't see what's wrong with WuSTl using them now. </p>
<p>That doesn't mean that I think that USNews is perfect. Far from it. My point is, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a school trying to improve by aggressively building the quality of its student body through better marketing and more merit scholarships to attract better students. That's exactly what schools ought to be doing. There are far too many schools out there who just don't seem interested in trying to improve the quality of their student bodies.</p>
<p>We had a top 100 school come talk to its alumni at my work site.</p>
<p>They spent a few minutes talkinga bout the USN&WR rankings. They said that there were a couple of categories that were based solely on size such that they were growing their grad programs specifically to do better in these categories.</p>
<p>beprepn</p>
<p>Every college ranking system has flaws, but do any CCers see a way to do it properly or more fairly? Can anyone imagine an objective Consumer Reports-type ranking, or is the whole process just so inherently impossible. On the one hand, colleges must certainly be justified in decrying the weighting (and even existence) of some of the rankings variables. Yet a number of CCers have alluded to the collusion against full disclosure of information that might actually help applicants and their families.</p>
<p>For instance, on the surface "peer review" seems like a most reasonable variable since the college pres/deans that do the ratings must have more general knowledge of the quality of their peer colleges than the average Joe. Yet how many deans take the process seriously enough to do it carefully, and how much of their ranking is subject to "cronyism". In some rankings, "number of high-impact publications per faculty member" is easy to come by and heavily influences rank order, but IMHO hardly captures the essential gestalt of a quality undergraduate education (and most especially at LACs).</p>
<p>I'll bet xiggi, interesteddad, mini, hoedown, collegehelp, and others may have some interesting opinions!</p>
<p>I agree with you that peer rating--at least as it plays out among doctoral and research-intensive universities--generally doesn't capture the undergraduate experience.</p>
<p>sakky,</p>
<p>i dont have US News rankings from when they started in 1983 (and weren't annual), but the earliest annual one i do have is 1991, and stanford is #2 in that version. i would like to hypothesize that stanford has risen with whatever tactics it used PRIOR to the mass consumption of US News rankings, and thus, it wasn't exactly playing into US News criteria. </p>
<p>two things about stanford. yes, their tuition used to be lower, but stanford's goal at its inception was not to charge any tuition at all! but this was way before US News rankings were invented. of course, as that became more and more impossible, tuition slowly climbed up. </p>
<p>you do have a point with stanford maintaining grade inflation. but stanford has had grade inflation. is it wrong to maintain a policy that was established prior to US News rankings... or in other words, should a school change its policies because of the creation of US News rankings? </p>
<p>consider the difference with WUStL. using massive waitlisting is a new strategy that was devised to purposely play into US news rankings' selectivity. schools never used massive waitlisting in the past. </p>
<p>and i do have a problem with schools trying to improve its student body by concentrating scholarship offers on "merit" that is based primarily on something like SAT scores or GPA. it is ironic that colleges say they want more than numbers from people, yet those with numbers get the merit scholarships because they're the type of people that can be quantitively measured by US News. </p>
<p>i dont have a problem with scholarship offers to well-rounded students, students that have above average SAT/GPA scores but bring much more to the campus. THAT is improving the quality of the student body, or at least i think so. but some think that improving the quality of the student body means attracting high statistics and if so, then hey, nothing wrong with that either.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i dont have US News rankings from when they started in 1983 (and weren't annual), but the earliest annual one i do have is 1991, and stanford is #2 in that version. i would like to hypothesize that stanford has risen with whatever tactics it used PRIOR to the mass consumption of US News rankings, and thus, it wasn't exactly playing into US News criteria.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am referring more to first half or so of Stanford's 114-year existence. That is when Silicon Valley had barely been created as a technology dynamo, when Stanford faculty had yet to win a single Nobel Prize, and Stanford was suffering from tremendous financial problems, and actually flirted with bankruptcy on occasion. Stanford administrators used to despair that they were too geographically close to Berkeley and lamented in how they were ever going to be able to compete for the top students and profs just in Northern California, never mind trying to compete for the best minds in the world. Berkeley at the time seemed to have an endless amount of money, full backing from the state, and a supposedly prime location conveniently accessible to San Francisco by ferry, whereas Stanford was basically located in the middle of a bunch of farmland (remember, Silicon Valley didn't exist back then). </p>
<p>Fast forward to today and we see the results. Stanford doesn't have financial problems anymore. Far from it, in fact, Stanford has one of the largest endowments in the world. Furthermore, I would say that Stanford stands as the most balanced and complete school in the world. If there is any school that could possibly challenge Harvard in the next generation for the crown as the most prestigious school in the world, it's not Yale, it's not MIT, it's not Princeton, it's not Berkeley. It's Stanford. Don't get me wrong, I still think Harvard has a substantial "prestige-lead", but Stanford has become a worthy challenger. </p>
<p>One might say that it's not fair to denigrate Stanford's early years as all schools need time to develop and establish themselves. To that, I would point to Caltech, which was founded in the same year as Stanford, yet by the 1930's was widely considered to be a premier, if not THE premier science school in the country, even more so than Harvard (which was still essentially a gentlemen's finishing school at the time) and possibly even more so than MIT. For example, in the 1930's, Caltech faculty held 3 Nobel Prizes, compared to 0 at MIT and Stanford combined. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that Stanford has risen rapidly in the second-half of its existence. How did they do it? Basically through promotion and marketing, combined with aggressive fund-raising and spending on facilities and students. So sure, these activities occurred before USNews. But so what? The point is that Stanford raised itself in the eyes of the world through tactics that WU is trying to use now. If Stanford could do this in the past, then there should be nothing wrong with WU doing it now. </p>
<p>
[quote]
and i do have a problem with schools trying to improve its student body by concentrating scholarship offers on "merit" that is based primarily on something like SAT scores or GPA. it is ironic that colleges say they want more than numbers from people, yet those with numbers get the merit scholarships because they're the type of people that can be quantitively measured by US News. </p>
<p>i dont have a problem with scholarship offers to well-rounded students, students that have above average SAT/GPA scores but bring much more to the campus. THAT is improving the quality of the student body, or at least i think so. but some think that improving the quality of the student body means attracting high statistics and if so, then hey, nothing wrong with that either
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, come on. We both know that at the end of the day, it's a game. Let's keep in mind that about 100 years ago, admission to top colleges was solely based on numbers. In 1905, you want to go to Harvard or Yale or some other Ivy? You didn't have to worry about 'well-roundedness'. All you had to do was score high enough on a test that the schools handed out. Get a high enough score and you're in. If you don't, then you're out. It's that simple. Whatever the merits or demerits of this approach, at least it was 'fair' in the sense that you know exactly what you need to do to get in. Whether you can get it is a different story, but at least you know what needs to be done.</p>
<p>The whole notion of using 'well-roundedness' as a criteria has a highly racist history behind it. Basically, the Ivy League realized that the old test-method was admitting too many Jews. So they decided to clamp down on Jews by using 'well-rounded' characteristics, which were really code words for 'not Jewish'. Of course the schools didn't explicitly SAY that they were discriminating against Jews, but that's exactly what they were doing. The point is, colleges have always lied about their intentions. </p>
<p>Of course it wasn't just Jews that they discriminated against. Back before affirmative action, many elite colleges also used to strongly discriminate against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Catholics, and basically anybody who wasn't a WASP male.</p>