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Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

My kid just went through college selection process and I can assure you that the US News rankings are largely irrelevant in terms of decision making. The revealed preference score[1] or global university rankings[2] are much closer to how students, their counselors, and their parents rank the universities. For instance, any ranking that does not have Stanford first among non specialized US universities (i.e. excluding MIT, Caltech, Julliard, etc.) is suspect.

[1] https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php?pag... [2] https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...

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I find revealed preference to be very useful in many situations, but a ranking that has Harvard just below Swarthmore, at #61, does not pass the smell test. I say this as a graduate of Swarthmore — I cannot take seriously a list with Harvard so far down.

I work at a university, and honestly have never heard of this ranking that you referenced in [1]. Also seems super weighted towards military academies. What's their model? Are kids in the states now looking at more global options ?

>What's their model? Are kids in the states now looking at more global options ?

According to their methodology[1] page, it looks like for student who gets multiple offers they do an Elo style ranking. The first problem; and which probably explains the weight to military academies, is that students tend to self select into tiers of colleges, so a group of students who are interested in the Air Force might not even apply to Harvard (even though the USAFA is a competitive school) and upon admission opt to go there (after all if you even were even considering of joining the air force, why would you reject your one shot there to go any other school)?

[1] https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php

So this would favor specialized schools in general?

The revealed preference rankings use co-admittance data (student got into Harvard and Stanford) along with that student's final choice (went to Stanford) to rank the schools. The military academies will have a huge edge because their decisions come out later and most students are highly committed once they continue their application to that point (they've gotten congressional recommendations, passed physical exams, etc.). So basically throw those out.

> For instance, any ranking that does not have Stanford first among non specialized US universities (i.e. excluding MIT, Caltech, Julliard, etc.) is suspect.

LOL wut? Stanford is modestly well known, but obviously Harvard is the one that is unambiguously first.

I'd give Stanford a bit more credit than this, but people I know who were admitted to both all went to Harvard. Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard.

> Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard.

Is that no longer Yale? From the perspective of someone who had a rather poor exposure to universities during my high school years—so, precisely what someone gets from pop-culture and osmosis without anyone in particular acting as a guide—my impression was that Harvard and Yale were unambiguously the Big Two, and everything else fell somewhere after them in terms of recognition and prestige.

Is this a CS perspective? I hear a lot about Stanford's CS program so I assume it's notably good.

I think Stanford is viewed as having eclipsed Yale and is competitive with Harvard. Princeton probably also eclipses Yale.

Insider who worked with a lot of schools: Yale is a much, much better school than Stanford. Stanford beats Yale on hype.

A lot of the elites are hype-over-substance, and it's often hard for a naive audience to screen out which ones.

It makes more sense to me that east-coast schools would show an artificial advantage on "revealed preference" type rankings, because more Americans live closer to the east coast schools. They're more "locally" well-known, you're closer to home (okay, a disadvantage for some), etc. I'd expect them to benefit more from hype than Stanford would.

And they're older and have had longer to work their way into the culture. Many of the eastern ivy league schools are older than the USA. Some are even older than the state they're in (in the east, unlike in the west, states are often a little older than the USA itself, rather than a litlte newer)

Stanford certainly beats Yale in CS quality both in terms of peers and instruction.

I have significant experience with HYP, less-so with Stanford. I don't think I am a naive audience, I know many people from these schools and have attended classes, either due to being a student there or online videos in the case of Stanford & Princeton.

True, but CS isn't everything. Stanford is definitely much more of a tech school than Yale.

I'd never have gone to Yale because it was a poor fit for my interests. That's different from being a poor school. Overall school quality is less important than fit. Given my interests, I would have pick Stanford over Yale (and in turn pick Caltech, CMU, or Georgia Tech over Stanford).

That said, Yale is a phenomenal experience. It's very academic in the classic sense -- deep, philosophical discussions, and thoughtfully exploring topics in a way that's increasingly rare in the fast-paced elites. It gives a lot of what people assume they'll get out of a small liberal arts college (which is different from the reality; most small liberal arts colleges are expensive and horrible).

I have little knowledge or Princeton. I know both Harvard and Stanford in great depth.

Fair point. I would guess there would be some people who would choose Yale over Stanford, and vice-versa. It probably depends mostly on which coast you want to be on, and if you prefer a very old institution or one that is much younger.

Yale also has a beautiful campus and a nice Oxford-style college/residential system. I didn't attend, but was somewhat jealous.

I've seen a few places that Stanford and Harvard are close to 50/50 on cross admits now, and that Stanford has even passed Harvard a few times (which no school has ever done). Likely a lot to do with press around Stanford students becoming rich Silicon Valley founders. My original point is that there has been a lot of changes in how students perceive schools that may not get reflected in the US News ratings.

Interesting! My impressions were formed some time ago, so I'm not surprised they're out of date. Thanks.

Yeah, there’s some “new gold rush money” thinking going on in this thread. Harvard has had 5 US Presidents. Yale has had 3. Stanford has had just one. Not a single Supreme Court justice went to Stanford. 4 went to Yale and 4 went to Harvard.

Stanford tied with Harvard for 6 Senators in the 117th Congress, impressively, but obviously Harvard dominates that metric over a longer time.

Harvard still has more than twice as many billionaire alumni notwithstanding how many billionaires these days are in the tech industry.

Not taking a side on this, but those are all heavily lagging indicators. IE, those are all almost 30 years after college. The current ranking can be highly different from what it was a generation ago.

You are quite wrong about the Stanford supreme court justices: Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer

He's talking about Law School of course - that's where promising students are drafted into the Supreme Court clerk position that's the first step on the cursus honorum to becoming a Supreme Court Justice. Undergrad doesn't matter as much except inasmuch it gets you into the prestigious law schools.

Um, Sandra Day O'Connor went to Stanford for undergrad and law school.

Also, this is a thread that's largely about undergrad, so I'm not sure Rayiner was talking about law school.

There are different rankings for law schools, and Yale has been considered the most prestigious for many years. I think SLS nabbed the top spot various times in the last decade, but Harvard is definitely not the uncontested leader in law schools.

Sorry I meant current Justice. I thought that was clear from the count (4 Harvard, 4 Yale, 1 ND).

You're forgetting Princeton, which is almost always grouped together with Harvard and Yale to form "the Big Three"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(colleges)

I think it's easy to underestimate the impact of rankings. Just from your description, it seems that one of the most important overall decision factors for you seems to have been some sort of vague personal sense of how you'd rank them. That subjective ranking is probably influenced by a lot of factors, including many rankings that you consciously claim to disregard.

My personal opinion is that students are highly influenced by where the best students in the grades above them chose to apply, where they got in, and where they eventually chose to go. The software the students use also ranks how likely they are to get into each college/university based on the past performance of students at their high school with similar grades and test scores.

That might be the one thing I would do over again. Move to a "better" HS for my kid, especially since he missed out on 1.5 years due to Covid anyway. His HS ranks top 15 in our state in college readiness scores but falls out of the top 50 overall since there are also a lot of poor students who are lucky to have parent at home at all and often are the surrogate parent for their single mom or dad. Basically, the top students are about as strong as any school in the area but the reputation gets dragged down by the kids who were never on the college track due to life circumstances and a limited support network.

As a result, if you have your sights set on anything other than the two in-state schools or BYU (strong Mormon influence here) the counselors don't know what to do with you and you are on your own.

It worked out and I have no doubt my kid will have strong opportunities post-college but he missed out on any chance at the truly life-changing schools, which I have no doubt he would have succeeded at had he gotten in.

It’s really weird Cambridge is ahead of Oxford in world rankings.

Cambridge has a reputation for strongly preferring UK students.

Cambridge has traditionally been ahead in science and mathematics (e.g., it's where Newton was a professor). On the other hand, Oxford until the 1800s was pretty much a seminary and theological college. As a non-Brit, I still get the impression that Oxford is where you would find the best philosophers and other humanities experts, while Cambridge is still slightly ahead in STEM

Hmm ... Cambridge had Russell and Wittgenstein, e.g., you have that bass-akwards wrt Philosophy departments.

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