<p>
</p>
<p>You are correct. The Dean of Admissions recently acknowledged in an interview that Brown only loses in cross admits to Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton. This is essentially what the Revealed Preference Study also showed a few years ago. I guess it still holds true.</p>
<p>And if you are a true Brunonian, you don’t care much about rankings anyway. Bring it up as a topic of conversation at Brown and you will get very puzzled looks… :)</p>
<p>Unfortunately its just not a good fit with the rankings due to endowment + lack of graduate schools. Fortunately we’re awesome at graduate placement, do well with career placement, and have a strong reputation amongst the people who matter and make decisions so I never cared at all. I think people spend way too much time thinking about graduate biased rankings and not enough on placement.</p>
<p>jackpot. Brown does not really belong in the LAC rankings. It certainly has a small graduate school but it is has much in common with other major research universities.
It is perhaps more like Princeton which also has a relatively small graduate school.
Brown does make undergraduates feel like they are the center of attention and the focus but
this is not really the whole story. </p>
<p>When the history department or the physics department or the mathematics department is hiring they compete with Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan. They are not
competing with Haverford, Swarthmore, Carleton etc. If a senior faculty member leaves Brown they will most likely move to another very strong research university. They are not moving to liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Brown actually has a very good graduate school with some particularly strong departments.
Overall it is not perhaps at the very very top but it is very good. It will be very difficult to break into the next level. In fact it will take hard work to keep the level that Brown has reached and that will be done department by department.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s not exactly true. If you are talking about entry level hiring at the Assistant Professor level, the job market is very competitive. Accordingly, the same top candidates would typically apply to/interview with the major research universities and the major LACs, especially in the social sciences and humantities.</p>
<p>The answer to the question posed by the OP is… money. Brown is the least wealthy of the Ivys. The US News formula overweights and rewards instutional wealth. That’s why the rankings have absolutely no credibility among academic experts. </p>
<p>See <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064484302-post16.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064484302-post16.html</a></p>
<p>pointoforder</p>
<p>I agree that the hiring at the Assisant Prof level is competitive and that top candidates in the humanities may apply to major LAC’s. However just as in undergrad admissions there is also the decision that candidates make once they receive offers. For this Brown competes mostly with the top research institutions. I strongly believe that a historian who receives an offer at the assistant prof level at both Brown and Swarthmore will go to Brown.
In this sense it is different than at the undergrad level where some would choose the LAC.
On the other hand Brown is still likely to lose to Harvard.
It was in this sense that I meant that Brown is in competition more with major research universities. I do agree for the candidate it is different. Candidates are certainly likely to apply to LAC’s as well as Brown because the market is so difficult.</p>
<p>I do completely agree that the rankings have no credibility with experts and I think most experts think that even the idea of ordering the schools makes little sense. Moreover given the way that universities select students there is an amazing amount of talent spread over many institutions.</p>
<p>17% of the USNWR rank is based on finances (faculty compensation under “faculty resources” (35% of 25%) and expenditure per student (10%)). I don’t know about all of you, but I feel that finances are very important in contributing to the quality of a college–better facilities for students and profs, and then higher salaries (and also those better facilities) to attract higher-quality profs. IMO, 17% seems like a pretty reasonable chunk to base rankings off on. USNWR does not measure endowment directly, only what a school actually spends for paying faculty, and how much a school spends per student on what USNWR considers to be “educational” purposes.</p>
<p>If you want a true “ranking” of colleges, look at average annual acceptance rates and yield rates. That’s data representing the decisions of hundreds of thousands of well-informed, highly intelligent students.</p>
<p>No matter how much time, money, or energy is devoted to constructing a ranking system based on any non-market criteria, it will always be inferior in accuracy to the data to which I have alluded. Allow me to present an example illustrating the perils of an arbitrary value-assigning system:</p>
<p>Say, as an educated chemist, you were given the task of setting prices (i.e. relative values) for all pharmaceuticals on the market. Assume you have a Ph.D. in chemistry and are highly educated in pharmacology, understanding the development processes and costs involved in the production of every single drug on the market. Now, you must assess each drug’s relative value according to several criteria, including its overall market demand, its production costs, as well as any premiums that must be paid due to patent laws. If you think similarly to me, this probably seems like an overwhelming task! How could one possibly sort through all this data in a non-arbitrary manner? Choosing to weigh one factor more heavily than another may be your opinion, but another professional’s opinion may be just the opposite. In fact, picture an infinite sum of professionals creating their own pricing systems for all drugs on the market. Comparing any random two chemist’s rankings, it will be statistically inevitable that a degree of variance will exist between the two, with certain drugs priced higher than others and vice versa. Given this variance, whose pricing scheme should be chosen if all seem to differ by a statistically expected amount and seem to be equally accurate, since they were all formulated by top professionals/experts?</p>
<p>Now let’s get back to college rankings. To put the story in perspective, you are U.S. News and you have been given the task of ranking all of the universities in America. Given that you are a single entity and not an infinite sum of knowledgeable entities, your ranking list will be inevitably affected by an inherent amount of variance from what the presumed infinite sum of college rankings would yield (since certain quality criteria will be weighted differently in different ranking schemes). Given this variance, you may be wondering whether there is any way of achieving an ordinal ranking of universities that is not subject to the unavoidable variance (from the envisioned “mean” of the presumed infinite sum of rankings, representing the true ranking) of a single entity’s opinion.</p>
<p>The answer, of course, lies in finding the mean of an infinite sum of rational agents’ opinions over which a consensus can be achieved through making differences among rankings statistically irrelevant–in taking all of the matriculation decisions of utility-maximizing high school seniors who are the ones actually choosing where best to invest their human capital for growth during their undergraduate years.</p>
<p>And voila! The preference ranking is revealed, illustrating clearly and specifically what schools most students choose to attend when given the choice. As icing on the cake, the study was published by truth-seeking university professors as opposed to a mediocre, profit-seeking news magazine.</p>
<p>School ranking, as a fundamental concept relevant to students’ decisions, is a function of desirability, since desirability corresponds to the mean of an infinite sum of previous matriculants’ decisions, all of whom can be presumed to be utility-maximizing (After all, the top echelon of students did get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc., so would it be such a stretch to assume that they have a pretty good idea of what the educational quality is like at these schools? Further, might it be justifiable to deduce that the collective choices of hundreds of thousands of students like these paint a more accurate picture of comparative educational quality and prestige value at American universities than a few State U grads working for U.S. News and relying on spotty survey data?).</p>
<p>As a final note, to harp on my last big point about desirability being the root of the relevance of the entire concept of ranking: Desirability is directly and quantitatively measured through the preference ranking.</p>
<p>I leave it to the discerning and critically-observant reader to deduce his or her own rational conclusions regarding the efficacy of various popular ranking systems.</p>
<p>In summary: Brown is actually a bad school, and U.S. News is the first to discover this scandalous truth that has been covered up for so long, deceiving tens of thousands of students all these years and ruining their futures, which could have been far more prosperous had they attended the great Washington University in St. Louis.</p>
<p>Awesome. You should probably go to law school after college.</p>
<p>^I second that! Wonderfully well-expressed thought…</p>
<p>But just how “well-informed” are highschool students? Maybe it does not matter, since the schools that America’s best talent is currently rushing to get into right now will only stay prominent because these high-achieving individuals will always be high-achieving regardless of the school, they will go on to be successful, and the school can then hint that it had something to do with it. The school will get more attention, more donations, more funding, which attracts better profs, allows for the creation of better facilities, etc. In this sense, I agree with airbag that the top-students’ choices are all-important and factor heavily into the quality of an institution. As expressed before, a new revealed preferences study would be awesome…</p>
<p>And to anyone who might have “insider” knowledge, can you tell us anything about the percentage of cross-admit battles Brown wins against a certain peer school (the most recent data available)? In terms of absolute numbers, it has been stated that most of the 1500 or so students that reject Brown choose to go to HYPS. But lets say, for example, that there were 20 Columbia-Brown cross admits, and 14 chose Columbia. Yeah, out of the 1500, 14 is not a big number, but that does not mean that Brown does well in that (theoretical) cross-admit battle with Columbia. If Brown really is doing as well in 2010 as the revealed preferences of 2005 suggest, then there is no cause for any concern. BTW, I am not obssessing over whether Brown is “better” or anything…its undoubtedly one of the top schools in the nation. However, this stuff is quite interesting to explore.</p>
<p>The 2005 revealed preference rankings provide a measure of the certainty of the ranking based on the proportion of MCMC draws where a given school outranked another school. For Brown, this number was greater than .9 with respect to every other school except for Columbia, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Wellesley.</p>
<p>I have heard that Brown loses to MIT but the total numbers are very small. I have also heard that Brown loses to Cornell for those admitted to engineering but wins for Arts and Sciences.
Finally I have also heard that Brown loses to Wharton but that Brown wins against
Penn Arts and Sciences. In each of these cases these are clear cut one way or the other.</p>
<p>I chose Brown over Columbia, I’ve definitely met a ton of people at Brown who also chose Brown over Columbia (not that we talk about this all the time). For me it was a super easy choice. I wanted a “normal” college experience with house parties, a nice campus, people staying on campus, and a town built for college students. Incidentally, I’ve visited Columbia twice (my best friend goes there, he’s come up to Brown twice as well) since coming to Brown and every time I’m so happy I made the choice I did. </p>
<p>What also gets me is if you look at where graduates end up after school, objectively it looks like Brown outperforms Columbia. So I’ll definitely take the better college experience and the as good or better placement into grad schools.</p>
<p>Moosemaster, if you consider deeply what is signified by “quality of a school”, you will realize that a school’s quality is assessed via the quality of its alumni and their accomplishments. The single greatest contributing factor to a school’s performance in such a category is the quality of its students, which, on an individual level, generally does not change significantly over the course of an undergraduate education (motivated, intelligent, hard-working high school students tend to become motivated, intelligent, hard-working college students. A is A). Thus, assuming the premise that learning is fundamentally a solitary pursuit and cannot effectively occur through coercion (even the best professors cannot force students to learn), schools attracting the highest-quality students are of the highest quality themselves, since “program quality” and “teaching quality” are tangential to the central concept of becoming educated, which, I have argued, is in its essence a solitary pursuit. That said, high-quality schools tend to have high program quality and teaching quality, since those factors are important constructive additions to an education and make a particular school more desirable for high-achieving students.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the quality of an undergraduate school is still fundamentally determined by the quality of its students and alumni, and this quality tends to be correlated with a strong academic reputation and high teaching quality, as a result of natural market forces.</p>
<p>Let’s just hope that Brown stays among the most heavily demanded in that market :). Let’s also hope that future students do not rely too much on flawed ranking systems to make their decisions–I worry about this because from what I’ve seen, more and more put a lot of weight on those rankings when making matriculation decisions. Bragging rights have never been so popular.</p>
<p>^ This is true, but, by the same logic, I don’t think Brown’s popularity will fall just because of flawed rankings. The only thing that would affect Brown negatively enough would be if their Ivy status was taken away. As long as they are part of the Ivy League, I can’t really see their attraction to motivated and independent students declining too much.</p>
<p>Remember, even the best of us have factored into account the “ivy” status, but at the same time matriculated to Brown because of what it offers. In my opinion, the Ivy status is how we really found out about Brown (through publicity, teachers, etc.), but what they offer is what made us decide Brown.</p>
<p>People start to forget that the “Ivy” label takes shallow use and meaning. Brown’s overly liberal curriculum (especially with the pass-fail system) sort of add to this. Brown may be an Ivy, but non-Ivy schools’ research bases stand over what Brown has. Needless to say, Brown is a great school for undergrad, but again many applicants who look for US News “Rankings” also look for superficial elite labels. Whatever has a name, students will take it, thus sadly glossing over the more important fact of a solid education. You do not need an Ivy label to define yourself.</p>
<p>Just how much of the benefits of a strong research base will actually trickle down to undergrads? (this is not a challenge, this is a serious question)
Do undergrads really need Nobel Prize winning professors in order to master a field and master it well? With the advent of the internet, knowledge travels quite fast…
Do undergrads really need state-of-the-art-research facilities? Could they actually be doing research that is so in-depth as to require such facilities?
Again, these questions are not rhetorical–I know what I think, but I am curious as to what you more experienced people think</p>