Why aren't universities' SAT/ACT scores a bigger part of the US News ranking?

There certainly have been reported cases of some university officials trying to manipulate the rankings by downgrading their competitors in the peer rating. My impression is that this isn’t widespread. First off, it’s hard to see how it would be effective. You only get one vote, and it might be thrown out if it’s too obviously off-base. And if everyone did it, the results should pretty much cancel each other out.

But beyond that, I’ve known quite a few university presidents and provosts in my time. They tend to take their jobs and their integrity—and their reputation for integrity—pretty seriously. I can’t think of any I’ve known who would even be tempted to try something that underhanded, and if they were tempted, they’d quickly think better of it for fear of being caught. These are jobs where, if your reputation for integrity crumbles, you’re pretty much a spent force. And who knows, you might want to go work there one day, so there’s no point in burning bridges. It’s a competition alright, but it tends to be a friendly, collegial, and mutually supportive competition, just like the competition among math faculties as to who has the best.

Besides, there are countervailing advantages to having your peer institutions be highly regarded. Minnesota gets a lot of mileage out of putting itself in a peer group with Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc., when those are all highly regarded institutions, as they are. And on the other side Minnesota doesn’t feel terribly threatened by a Nebraska or Missouri that it perceives (rightly, I think) to be a step or two behind. So why not just play it straight?

The interactive tool for identifying a school’s peers linked in post #95 by @Data10 is kind of fun. It lets you see who the “popular kids” are among colleges, those with a lot of friends. Princeton says it has no peers, but 31 schools view Princeton as a peer. Harvard says it has only 3 peers, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, of course; but 25 schools had the audacity to list Harvard as a peer. Yale and Stanford are the only members of a mutual admiration society with Harvard, Princeton being, as previously mentioned, peerless.

Michigan says it has 60 peers, and 42 schools call Michigan a peer, with 27 schools falling into both groups. That latter category includes all the Big Ten schools except Nebraska, which apparently feels it’s not good enough to rub shoulders with Michigan, and Northwestern which apparently feels it’s too good. Northwestern lists 25 schools as its peers, all highly regarded private research universities, while 32 colleges list Northwestern as a peer, including a pretty broad mix of top and second-tiers private research universities, some of the better public flagships, and even one LAC (Wellesley) and a couple of for-profit private schools. But only 11 schools that Northwestern regards as peers return the favor.

This is fun, but I think for most purposes, most schools use a more concise list of peers, because there’s only so much data they can handle.

@ucbalumnus yes, I realize that, and agree. I just meant that’s how I read the OPs question (what they were asking in the opening line of their post). Again, in hindsight, I realize I could have misunderstood them. Don’t want to put words in their mouth

@bclintonk Thank you for your answer. I understand what you’re saying about their integrity. But if that’s true – and I hope it is – then who are the people manipulating the test scores and other pieces of hard data that you and others have spoken about in this thread? Isn’t it the same people (presidents and provosts) submitting or approving all the pieces? So why would their conscience allow them to intentionally manipulate hard data but not the subjective piece? I’m not challenging you, but clearly you work in that world and I’m just trying to better understand.

I also looked at that link, thank you @Data10 for posting. It was very interesting, but from 2012, so I wondered if things have changed significantly since then. I looked at my D’s school and saw that things like acceptance rate and endowment were very different from today. (I don’t know how much her school’s USNWR rank has changed since then since I don’t know what it was in 2012). Also, I noticed that some schools (i.e. Princeton, Duke) listed no peers, but I wasn’t sure if that meant that they didn’t participate?

I also noticed that Columbia listed no peers.

When they listed no peers is because they didn’t respond, or at least whomever it was sent to didn’t respond. The only thing worth looking at that link (it was posted last year in another thread) is where two colleges both respond that they are peers of each other. Many colleges will say they are peers of Harvard but is the reverse true? if not then it really isn’t valid.

For example, Yale:

These colleges picked Yale as a peer:

Bowdoin C
Brandeis U
Brown U
California Inst of Tech
Cornell U
Dartmouth C
Emory U
Harvard U
Johns Hopkins U
Massachusetts Inst of Tech
New York U
Northwestern U
Regent U
Stanford U
Stevens Inst of Tech
U of Chicago
U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
U of Notre Dame
U of Pennsylvania
U of Phoenix, Jersey City
U of Rochester
U of Southern California
U of Virginia
Vanderbilt U
Washington U in St. Louis
Wellesley C

but doesn’t this list make more sense, where they picked each other as peers:

Peer colleges that also chose Yale as a peer:

Brown U
Cornell U
Dartmouth C
Harvard U
Massachusetts Inst of Tech
Stanford U
U of Chicago
U of Pennsylvania

Regarding schools listing their own peers – there obviously is some politicking, outright (and outrageous) denial, and myopia. We can list our own, far less biased and hopefully more accurate, academic undergrad peer groups: we can look at things like program rankings (undergrad rankings whenever possible, as grad rankings are imperfect proxies), breadth of offerings, class sizes, selectivity, even curriculum type if we’re being picky… and for me, type of school: I don’t like combining the apples, oranges, and pears – private universities, public universities, and LACs. They have different priorities and constraints.

Regarding colleges listing their peers, isn’t it often the case that they tend to list aspirations of prestige? I.e. they often include schools of higher prestige, but not those of lower prestige.

This whole peer college discussion reminds me so much of those horrible dollar valentine fund raisers in high school. You get to see how many of the people you sent candy to also sent candy to you. It wasn’t always a nice surprise.

I don’t think the president and provost personally fill out the CDS and IPEDS submissions that include test scores and other data that end up in the US News rankings. There’s usually an office of institutional research or some such thing that compiles these and other data sets. The president and provost may be aware of the underlying admissions policies, however, and they might even affirmatively sign off on them. I think what they’d say in their defense is that they’re not falsifying anything—they’re just providing exactly the information that’s asked, which is ACT and SAT medians for first-time freshmen enrolling in the fall of the year in question. If others among their students fall outside those parameters, well, maybe it’s the fault of a defective question. Though of course, some schools have falsified even the data that’s asked for—but that crosses a different kind of line.

It certainly tends toward the aspirational, but not exclusively. To some extent it depends on the purposes for which they’re compiling a list of their peers. When it’s just for broad public consumption, like the IPEDS data linked in post #95, it probably tends toward the aspirational—but not entirely, even there. Michigan, for example lists 65 schools as its peers in that data set. I’m quite certain they don’t really think there are 65 schools as good or better than them. Heck, they even list Michigan State and Ohio State as peers! :)>-

But when they’re comparing themselves to a group of peer institutions for internal decision-making purposes—e.g., comparing selectivity and yield rates, or undergraduate graduation rates—they’re going to use a smaller, targeted list of schools most similar to them. The administrators don’t want to make themselves look bad before the Regents by producing a list that shows them at the bottom of the barrel by comparing themselves only with other schools that are doing better. And by the same token, they don’t want to paint an unrealistically rosy picture by comparing themelves only to schools that are doing worse, or make themselves look bad by comparing themselves only to schools that the Regents hold in lower regard.

I agree with @prezbucky, if fact, the ranking systems (whichever) ought to delineate between those three, it would be a fairer comparison.

Regent University thinks they are peers with Yale? I had to google to even figure out where/what that one was… had never heard of it.

Like I said, you make like the pretty girl/guy, but they may not like you.

Part of what makes the whole “name your peers” exercise interesting is that there are so many variables upon which a school could choose those peers: location, selectivity, academic rep (and multiple ways to determine that), type of school (pub/priv/LAC), social vibe, research output, even athletic conference: as mentioned above, Michigan seems to have dubbed the entire Big Ten, minus Nebraska. (they need to be in the club a few more years, maybe…).

How Regent deems Yale to be its peer is entirely beyond logic, though, imo. hehe. I’m sure there are similar examples.

…since Nebraska recently got kicked out of the American Association of Research Universities (more or less in favor of Georgia Tech), I’m thinking that UM will never think of them as a peer, maybe not even in football.

That’s why students should never rely on US News to pick out a school. When 25% of your calculated numbers are based on perception, that’s when you start having flawed numbers. Perception is this…“Dude! Harvard is like sooo cool, and like SMART people go there!” What about educational innovation, educational quality, infrastructure, or job placement for specific majors?

If you rely on USNWR to pick out a school then you get what you deserve, USNWR (as do other ranking systems) go into a lot of other info about the colleges and what they have to offer, including some of the questions you present. If your just looking at a number then you aren’t doing due diligence. Having said that, top 20 schools aren’t going to have any issues with job placement, infrastructure or educational quality.

top 20? I’m sorry but I believe that is the same for the top 100 unis and top 50 lacs.

As I’ve posted before only 1 of the 10 ceos of the Fortune 500 top 10 went to an ivy. And that’s not even true with Jeff imalt out at ge (Dartmouth). The rest where mostly public unis and some more obscure. Like GM institute.

The engineering major with good grades at Iowa is going to have non problems. No difference for the majority of schools.

And the looking at number of phds says more than which school is better.

Which one had families with the most resources. PhDs are a lot of time out of the world force even if it is being paid for by a school. Might not cost anything but who’s buying the groceries.

Also not everyone aims to be an academic. As my fil who is h grad and professor said. He went into academics because he knew he had a financial foundation. Ie trusts that would help him throughout life. He had the benefit of doing something he loved over money.

If we are looking at best shcools to become a researcher or professor that’s one thing. But such a statistical minority. What schools prepare you for life and productive citizenship.

@privatebanker I agree with all of your post, but I would expand the LAC’s beyond the top 50. That exclcudes some really fine schools like Muhlenberg, Sarah Lawrence and Reed. Many others as well, I’m sure. This is why I really hate rankings!

“As I’ve posted before only 1 of the 10 ceos of the Fortune 500 top 10 went to an ivy. And that’s not even true with Jeff imalt out at ge (Dartmouth). The rest where mostly public unis and some more obscure. Like GM institute.”

Highly highly misleading. Note that the number of graduates produced by all the State Unis in the U.S. is like a 100X the number of grads the elite schools produce. On a per capita basis, the elite schools produce top CEOs like crazy.

Here’s the run down of the top 10 U.S. companies (by market cap). Tons of elite school grads. And the elite schools become ridiculously dominant if you add in graduate degrees to undergrad students. For this purpose, I count people like Bill Gates who attended Harvard but didn’t hang around to graduate.

Apple’s Tim Cook has a Duke MBA. Amazon is run by a Princeton guy, Microsoft had Harvard and Stanford guys running the show for a long time and now has a UChi MBA as CEO, Facebook has Harvard and Stanford at the top, Google has Stanford at the top, Berkshire has Penn and Columbia, Alibaba’s CEO did mot attend school in the U.S. J&J has USMA and Penn, JP Morgan has Tufts and Harvard, Exxon has Northwestern.