Columbia whistleblower on exposing college rankings | Hacker News Reader

Columbia whistleblower on exposing college rankings

theguardian.com

162 pointspseudolus128 comments

When I was picking colleges a few years ago, I made my own rankings. At the time, I knew more about what I didn't want than what I did want, and none of the tools I found supported searching that way.

The US department of education collects extremely comprehensive data on colleges every year, and makes the data public. I loaded these CSVs into SQLite and made a bunch of queries to filter schools out, then dumped the rest to a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet I weighted each column and sorted the rows. The weights were tunable so I could emphasize different factors in the sorting. The process was successful in that it turned up some surprising results I wouldn't have otherwise considered!

I've wanted to write a post on my website about this process for a while, but haven't gotten around to it. In the meantime, for anyone looking to do something similar, the data is here:

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data

I'm certainly very curious about your surprising results. I hope you write the post (and I somehow find it again when you do!)

> it turned up some surprising results

> I've wanted to write a post ...but haven't gotten around to it

Now you have to write that post ASAP because you can't leave us hanging like this.

FTA "... all university rankings are essentially worthless. They’re based on data that have very little to do with the academic merit of an institution . . . "

While I strongly believe that a motivated university student can maximize their ROI at any institution, it would also be nice if there was an easier way for prospective students to identify schools that would offer the best opportunity for students. But campus visits don't tell you much about actual classroom teaching experiences from the learner perspective.

Any ideas out there?

When I talk to high-achieving parents of kids picking schools, the parents seem to say that choosing a school was mostly a matter of coming up with some arbitrary evaluation function (eg, "wanted a small school with a few hours of home", "interested in a big flagship state university", "wanted an Ivy", etc).

The high-achieving parents aren't wrong to do this because the value a student gets from a school is largely self-directed and based on the people they meet there. It makes more sense to evaluate based on the student than the school.

Is your kid vulnerable to social anxiety and mental pressure? They would be better off being a bigger fish in a smaller state pond than developing suicidal ideation at a big name institution. You can come up with solid criteria based on knowledge of the world and intuition.

None of the criteria you cite are truly that arbitrary if you inspect them a bit more closely.

> the value a student gets from a school is largely self-directed and based on the people they meet there.

For this reason, rankings (unfortunately) have more value that OP suggests. The "best" students will cluster around the "best" institutions. Does the average student differ muchst between #1 and #5? Probably not much. But the difference between 10 and 100 does, by a lot, and the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.

If you're measuring is "how good is my peer group", rankings are often a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not so much at fine granularity, but more so if you measure in terms of "20-50 position overlap equivalence classes". This is particularly true in fields like CS, where there are huge differences in curriculum between the top schools and the not-so-top schools.

I'm not convinced on this - with a large enough student base (e.g. most state schools), I think it's possible to find peers that would have excelled even at top 5 universities. Similarly, at top tier colleges, you can find people who don't really perform to the expected level and coast along.

You stand out by being a top performer, and will attract other top performers as long as you search them out. Also, in those scenarios, professors will give you more attention, because you are a better student and more enthusiastic than most of your peers.

Perhaps if you are a true prodigy, you might need a top-tier program to reach your full potential... at that point your peers are the professors and high-performing graduate students, but for most students, I think there are pros and cons for being in a top 5 vs a top 50 program.

> I'm not convinced on this... I think there are pros and cons for being in a top 5 vs a top 50 program.

Yes. That's why I used the top 50 CS programs as an equivalence class in my post:

>> the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.

The US has 5,000 colleges and universities. Not 500. 5,000.

You are absolutely not going to find more than one top performer every half decade or two at a small non-selective LAC or the branch campus of a university system. If ever. I spoke with on faculty member at a branch campus who said that he's never had a single student who is as good as the average undergrad he taught at <top 5 program>. He's been teaching for 20 years. Those types of institutions comprise the vast majority of US colleges and universities.

I think the "rankings are just noise" attitude is mostly held by people who don't even think about the existence of 90% of US colleges and universities. If you consider Stevens Institute of Technology a "backup" as opposed to a "reach", then I guess the attitude has merit. But if you're one of the 50% of college students who get rejected from Stevens -- or the even larger percentage who don't even apply because they know they can't get in -- then the world looks different.

Said teacher likely has a reason to further the myth that "top tier schools" have "top tier students." Academia is largely nothing but group think and elitism these days.

He's a professor who has spent his entire career at one low-ranked institution. If he has a reason for being down on his own employer, where he's tenured, I'm not sure what it could be...

(Also, he didn't state this as a negative or a positive. Just as a fact. "Different institutions serve different clientelle". You don't have to be a hotel snob to say that the Holiday Inn you manage isn't as nice as the Ritz, or a elitist that the youth swim team you coach has nothing on the US olympic program... some people -- particularly educators -- aren't obsessed with being "the best".)

The key concept here is that there are some truly no-name schools out there. Many of them in fact.

This is entirely compatible with the idea that top tier schools are overselling the quality of their students.

At my high school the "target" schools for the top performers in the class were usually some kind of high ranked school or ivy for this reason. I don't remember any of my classmates (myself included) really factoring in specific details of the institution itself for whether we preferred one over the other, rather we just looked at the top 20 list and applied to the ones we liked. The logic being that if we landed somewhere we could basically be pretty successful in whatever field we ended up choosing. So, often that looked like apply to all ivies + a safety or two.

I was rank 8/432 and applied to: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Pomona, Rice, and UW. Got rejected from everywhere except UW so that's where I ended up going. I think only one other person in the top 10 went to UW with me, and he had plans to be a CS major. Funnily enough over 50% of my graduating class just went to UW because it was: good enough, close to home, and relatively affordable.

I don't think this is completely true. Brand name universities might impress some people, just like brand name clothes does, but that doesn't mean the education is qualitatively better. Nowadays MIT puts its materials online so you can see for yourself what the fuzz is all about. And roughly the same material with the same "difficulty" was used by the professors at my university. Though, they are more "shy" (we in Europe are more modest) so they don't put their content online so I can't prove it. I think this whole "weak and strong universities" is mostly a US only thing.

I only did this for one school, but at the college I went to I was able to sit in on a class or two when I was visiting it before attending. You might need to ask for permission, but I'd imagine most professors/teachers would be happy to have people listen in. And more schools are recording classes and making them available on YouTube, so you can get a sense of the teacher's style.

Another thing one can do is, instead of picking a school, pick professors. Consider what majors the student might study, look at what professors are there, and look at things like what books they've written, have they written any interesting blog posts about their teaching, and that sort of thing.

Both of these approaches take more time than scanning a rankings, but it actually resembles much more closely how other decisions we make in life operate.

> some arbitrary evaluation function...

I think "wanting an Ivy" is a bit arbitrary, but wanting a small vs. a large school, or a school a certain distance from home, can lead to a very different experience over the course of 4 years.

>look at what professors are there, and look at things like what books they've written, have they written any interesting blog posts about their teaching, and that sort of thing.

I wish I did this. I basically applied to Universities ranked highly for my degree at the city I wanted to be in (London) before realizing these rankings are near arbitrary. It was only in my first or second year as I read more papers that I realized I should look into what Professors there publish and was largely unimpressed or didn't care for their subfields but it was too late by then.

> Any ideas out there?

For undergrad, this might be a good place to start: https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ How good are the staff at actually teaching the subjects of interest?

Having had a prior career in college teaching, rate my professor ratings are tied, almost directly, to how friendly you are as a faculty. For institutional "data" that is tied to whether or not a student got what they wanted. Note: Not what they needed.

Yes it asks about quality, but if faculty are friendly and funny, students will score you high. If you are quality but not friendly, students will score you low. It's a popularity contest for college faculty, not exactly a great way to make a decision about your college choice.

If a student doesn't get what they want, even if they get what they need, they will score low. For example: the institution I am currently working with is scored pretty low. They're a science and technology focused institution with a niche related to electrical and mechanical engineering. The first year is general education, then you get into your specific major.

The scores are low, because the schools inside the university are VERY selective. There are a large number of freshmen who do not get into their first choice major their sophomore year. This is because they don't have the necessary achievement to be competitive, not because the school sucks.

But, if you look at the rating on rate my professor, the school looks like it's full of sociopaths bent on destroying children's futures.

I don't have any experience with universities that have such a competitive aspect to entry into specific fields of study for students.

My gut is that is may be very good for the university reputation if the university is already pretty selective on admissions. But pretty bad for even a better than average, but not top %, student who has their heart set on a specific major.

I have taught as an adjunct and was impressed by the average undergraduate at a large state school. As a person who very much doesn't like an entirely "winner takes all" mindset in life, I'm curious about in the extra pressure of getting into your preferred program.

Mind sharing your thoughts on how that extra internal selectivity works out for students? I mean, clearly students complain about the process if it doesn't work for them individually, but what do those students mostly do? "Settle" for another program? Transfer?

> The scores are low, because the schools inside the university are VERY selective. There are a large number of freshmen who do not get into their first choice major their sophomore year. This is because they don't have the necessary achievement to be competitive, not because the school sucks.

I wholly disagree. Sounds like the school sucks to me. If I had a choice between entrance into my chosen major at a different institution, and your school, I would choose my major. As students are often applying for 5+ schools, they may not understand the nuances of each schools admissions process, and the admissions departments may intentionally obscure unpleasant details like this.

If this practice is bad enough to drag down scores across the whole institution on RMP, it sounds like a lot of kids are getting suckered into thinking they got into a great engineering program, but then get shoveled into whatever department needs them to fill their quota.

It's _hard_ for undergraduates to transfer schools after freshman year, at least in USA.

This is why you should generally always try to get admission directly into your major rather than later, or you wind up studying something else at a college you don't necessarily want to be. For example, it's MUCH harder to get directly admitted into the engineering school at most colleges than general admission (undergrad), and then equally hard to switch to engineering from another school in the college after you're already there.

I'm going to pile on here and agree that while the school may not suck academically, this is a pretty shitty academic plan for students who may not have realised they might need to make a choice of taking a major they don't want or leaving to another institution to study what they want. Transfering between institutions is possible, but it comes with a lot of barriers --- transfer admission is usually secondary to direct admission; credits may not transfer well, especially between quarter and semester systems; sequencing differences may make scheduling difficult, etc. It's unusual to get a 4 year degree in 4 years total when transferring, unless there's a specific transfer program between the two institutions; if, after one year spent working towards their chosen degree, your students are told they can't get it there and they would have to spend four years somewhere else to do it, it looks like a wasted year.

Of course, maybe your institution does accept some students directly into their major and counsels the rest that most of them won't get their choice and they still accept your bargain. And it doesn't sound like a terrible place for an undesigned engineering and technology major, who would presumably be wooed into whatever specific major would accept them after the first year.

EDIT to add: from my experience as a student at an engineering school, almost all the students capable of succeeding in one engineering major would have been able to succeed in the others too, with the exception of biomedical engineering --- you needed to have a hell of a lot more drive to succeed in that. There was a popular belief that mechanical engineering was easier, but I don't think it really was; just it was a lot easier to get excited about it and being excited about your major is an important factor.

I would take it as only one factor, since it's more about whether the students like the professor (and how strict he/she is), which is different than whether they're good at teaching.

Just go to the library.

Library was my favorite place at college, probably the most important place too since I tended to skip class and learn the material myself. A good library should be comfy and have ample working space.

It's also mostly free access to the public.

First we need to accept the nobody is ready competing on academic strength and quality of teaching. College is 80-90% about signaling and then the other 10-20 is the basic skills to ensure students don’t damage the brand

are you suggested that you wouldn't be able to spot an ivy league school if you saw one?

seems like it would be useful to have available a "nutrition" label for colleges, which has to be based on facts.

By quality of education no. As a method of pre-filtering candidates sure it’s pretty obviously when someone comes from an extremely privileged background.

Also there isn’t really much difference between Cornell, brown, or pen graduates from Any of the decent state schools. Except they are full of themselves more.

Honestly the graduates from 2nd tier state schools seem to have gotten the best education but they had adverse selection coming in because their more competitive peers went to higher ranked/named schools.

I like this education label idea. I further suggest a couple of columns of numbers based on the outcomes for several socioeconomic groups. Most people can read the side of a cereal box.

There are institutions that compete on the basis of teaching quality. Often private, sometimes public. They emphasize small class sizes, do not stress research productivity in hiring or promotion, etc.

Some of those institutions also signal (e.g., Williams, Harvey-Mudd, etc.) but most of them are relatively unknown and really do just compete on educational quality.

(Some) community colleges are competing on academic strength and quality of teaching. Transfer rate, and graduation rate (and/or graduation time) from the subsequent institutions are easily measured proxy metrics for academic quality (up to you to decide if they're compelling proxy metrics).

Class size is also a proxy metric for quality of teaching. If all your classes are auditorium lectures vs 20 student groups, it makes a difference. Of course, small classes with terrible instructors and awful lesson plans aren't better than competent lectures.

Of course, community colleges fill a lot of roles, and aren't just for transfer students, and they need to compete on those other things too.

A degree from MIT is exactly the same as one from the University of Phoenix?

Successfully graduating from u of phoenix I heard was no easy feat. They didn’t teach much or at all and failed most of their students. To actually graduate from there required a great deal of drive and determination. The program was designed to fall so to succeed against that is a undervalued accomplishment. It was completely worthless for signaling though.

The caliber of student going into MIT is a lot different than UOP but the net ADD from MIT is probably not as big as you expect especially compared to any other accredited institution which UOP was not.

> It was completely worthless for signaling though.

Everyone I know who was going through their program had a structured pay scale where a graduate degree got them more money regardless of the degree. It was effective for signalling you wanted to get more money without learning much.

I never really thought grad students knew much more than under grad they were just willing to grind for longer. There are exceptions in some fields where undergrad programs are really weak but that master’s is simply a signal that You will continue to grind hard

> The caliber of student going into MIT is a lot different than UOP but the net ADD from MIT is probably not as big as you expect

the net add of being surrounded by high caliber students is immeasurable in a positive way. The professors are experts, if the students can handle it, the professors deliver more material, faster. It's a huge add, there is no substitute for it.

Look at clubs and student jobs on campus in relation to lab work/research. For example if you have a compsci school without active students doing things like robotics, that's because the admins and professors don't want to do it.

The best idea I've found is actually visiting the university web pages of the faculty in the department you'll be studying in. Often the more amiable professors will have better web pages with information like mentoring students, possible projects, other outreach activities, etc.

Find old syllabi and assignments online or ask the prof / a subreddit for some. Shittier schools to tend to have easier and more boring assignments and projects (eg "build a calculator", "list facts about X").

I like to use OpenSyllabus to investigate which textbooks, papers, etc. are used to teach courses: https://opensyllabus.org/

Whether rankings matter, I think depends a lot on what your goal (as a student) is for going to college. Off the top of my head:

1- get a good-paying job post-graduation? : you want a school with a good reputation within your target industry (and here's where rankings play a big part)

2- actually get a good education? I'd look at the professors, curriculum, what student-learning opportunities are offered, etc.

3- enjoy the college experience as a young person? That will depend a lot on what appeals to you personally (i.e., big state school vs LAC)

4- study abroad / other opportunities?

5- an affordable option that doesn't put you in debt? This There's usually a trade-off there even if you get accepted into the school of your choice.

6- close to home (usually goes with affordability / i.e., you might be able to keep living at home)

I'd imagine that for most people it's ideally a combination of these, but knowing which is the highest priority for you personally is very important. And rankings don't really play a part in any of those except maybe for #1 -- and even then it's hard to know. Example, my D went to what might be a "tier 2" ranked U (top 50, but not top 20) which most people have never heard of but was well respected among employers in certain industries (engineering in this case), so your target major is a big factor with that. Also, she turned down a top-20 U because it would have put her into debt; often lower ranked U's, i.e., the next tier down, will provide more scholarship money to attract top students (based on SAT/GPA) away from the very top-ranked colleges.

Rankings matter because rankings matter to people. If we lived in a purely meritocratic world I would agree with you that for a lot of degrees it wouldn't matter where you go. But the rankings are confounder for two important aspects: money and network reach. Money means bigger and more advanced labs (comparatively. I've been to big school labs and small school labs. Both are hacked together but there's sure a difference). Networking helps you get more papers published, more prestigious internships (i.e. more on job training), more internships in general (lots of students get denied in tighter job markets where it is easy for top tier uni students despite similar skill levels at Freshman and Sophomore years. But internships beget internships), and the networking gets you into the door when you graduate.

I strongly agree that it doesn't matter much where you go to get your education if your goal is to get educated. But if in addition to that education you want a promising career, rankings do matter.

Having all 1xx courses on youtube would give a glimpse

I've watched some courses from Yale for an area I received instruction in at a state school that's just about entirely unknown once you get about 150 miles away from it. So, a 2nd or 3rd tier state school. One of the former "Normal Schools" that Fussell complains about diluting the meaning of higher education when they hastily converted to general colleges or universities to soak up demand driven by the GI Bill.

As far as I could tell the content was basically identical & the exercises or papers weren't that different, but two things stood out:

1) The students at Yale were way more engaged, and

2) They had more guest lecturers or speakers, and it was always someone really important & impressive.

LinkedIn knows. LinkedIn + Glassdoor really knows.

I created a crude site that ranks universities & departments based on professor review data.

https://www.bananacharts.com/rank.html

Not sure I have an answer to your question but the most ridiculous thing is the dichotomy between undergrad and postgrad educations. Most schools iirc are ranked based on their grad school programs with is totally different than an undergrad education. And what about institutions that don’t offer postgrad programs..? If possible it seems the most appropriate for parents to talk to recent grads of the institution they’re considering.

"... all university rankings are essentially worthless. They’re based on data that have very little to do with the academic merit of an institution . . . "

So much this. The biggest value of a prestigious university is the name, not the education. Prestigious universities crank out top-notch graduates (and the occasional complete incompetent) because they accept only top-tier students (and the occasional complete incompetent).

As a parent, know that if you get your child into a 'good' school you've probably done all you can. The outcome has more to do with your child than the stultifying, enervating, curriculum to which they'll be subjected.

Education from -1 to 24 is horribly broken (at least in the U.S.).

Couldn't help but draw parallels to startups with "fake it till you make it" mentality. If you're Columbia, you might start off gaming a few metrics, hoping that as you rise in the rankings you attract better students, better instructors, more funding, thereby fulfilling the prophecy. Many startups do the same (pretend to have success with the hope that that will attract talent, funding, customers which then does lead to success).

Of course there's never an excuse for misleading people via outright fraud.

>>Of course there's never an excuse for misleading people via outright fraud.

Pretty fine and yet hazy line you're drawing there...

If you are having to fudge numbers, you are doing it wrong. You are playing with the symptoms and ignoring the causes of success. Get the fundamentals right - the a product, a product-market-fit, and then build. If you have to fake it, you are very unlikely to actually make it, at least honestly. (and yes, you can point to fakers who have even had a successful IPO, but I still don't consider the likes of Uber to have made it - $$billions of investment and still searching for a profitable model - a massive waste of capital and talent, and we still don't have our flying cars)

I would argue that the exact rankings are worthless, but the general tiers or positioning, is not. In other words, whether #1 is Stanford or Harvard, or whether Columbia is #5 or #9 makes zero diff and shouldn't factor into anyone's decision. But whether your school is ranked 20 or 150 does make a big difference in terms of job perception once you leave school. It may be unfair, but if you apply for a job post-college with a CSE degree from CMU the hiring manager is going to look at it much differently than the applicant from LSU. But college probably won't matter between applicants from CMU and MIT, for example, regardless of those college's respective exact rankings.

But they do start to create a feedback loop. Even if the underlying data is completely made up, as long as the “best” students are going to an institution, there’s at least some value to future students to be associated with them.

I think 'worthless' is too strong a statement. The rankings are a subjective score, but it does correlate to some measure of merit. A school ranked in the top-20, will probably be a 'better' school than one ranked in the bottom-20 spots.

For undergrad, the reality is that you can get a good(enough) education from almost any accredited university in the country. For degrees fields like CS, or Engineering, it almost doesn't matter. You will get a quality education from most institutions.

1) prof thaddeus is the man 2) here is a good paper on something similar https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005

They aren't worthless, they're a measure of prestige, which is what students are largely paying those huge fees for.

Prestige is informal and unmeasurable. Columbia's prestige will remain high even if the quality of its education declines. But people expect the top-ranked schools to be roughly the same as the top-prestige schools, which is one of the reasons for these kinds of shenanigans.

The rankings are probably more meaningful at the bottom of the list than the top.

If the primary (not sole) purpose of college is to land a premium entry level job that sets you on a significant wealth acquisition trajectory as a laborer then they are not worthless at all and may be the primary thing you care about.

Everyone knows this in these institutions but the kayfabe is that this is not the primary purpose of college, despite it so clearly being the case for the vast majority of students.

> If the primary (not sole) purpose of college is to land a premium entry level job that sets you on a significant wealth acquisition trajectory

College will look like a huge waste of time and money measured against such a short-term goal.

The primary purpose of college is to get an education, which confers life-long benefits (financial and otherwise).

In what way is it a waste? When I graduated HS 15 years ago the statistic was the average college grad made a million dollars more than the average HS grad over their lifetime.

The primary purpose of a college education is to network.

Have you ever seen Good Will Hunting?

That's a purpose but not primary, if that were the case the hyper competitive college admissions process would cease to exist, as there's plenty of reasonable substitutes in terms of education provided, in some ways these less prestigous places even offer better educations than the places with the top published professors.

It's primarily about acquiring economic opportunity, full stop.

The vast, vast majority of college students do not attend hyper-competitive institutions, but receive lifelong benefits nevertheless.

It's odd how as information has become more widespread and accessible than ever before, the cost of obtaining information through conventional means has skyrocketed.

Something is clearly not right.

Information and education are not the same thing.

For anyone looking for schools for CS, https://csrankings.org/ is an excellent site that gives you an overview of departments' research output, filterable by subfield, geographic location etc. A very nice system if you're intending to get involved in research in your undergrad, but especially good if you plan on continuing to a Master's or PhD in CS.

So maybe HN can help someone with a question related to this:

I’m retiring from the military in the spring with a state college STEM BS (3.79 GPA; done on active duty) and a whole lot of experience. I was looking at ranking as a possible way to help decide where and if I would do a graduate degree; I want to further my education but am geographically limited.

What other signals can I use that are relevant to the tech world? I’m still undecided on a STEM Masters vice something more like Liberal Arts or MBA and don’t completely understand the signaling there in tech either, aside from the MBA pushing to management.

I’m open to any advice either here or via my contact info in my profile. Really at a loss on how to proceed and hope someone around here might have good advice!

Graduate degrees are a different animal, but one thing you could do is look into who you might be under at the school, and what kind of work they're doing.

Are you looking to do a thesis? If so, I'd suggest that it is more important to find a professor who is well regarded and working on a problem that you care about.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about. Doing a degree on Active Duty means a lot of late nights and weekends and no real time to explore anything not directly related to the degree.

Further, my son has cancer and autism and with the relative stability of my pension I have thought that I’d like to make the world a better place in some way that my experience can be leveraged.

Unfortunately that combination leaves me with little hope of being admitted to a more classical MA or PhD because I just didn’t do the coursework that is needed to apply and distinguish myself. Perhaps a terminal MA at a state school?

I’m in CA and can move to any school in the state; I can’t really leave the state for a few reasons to do with my sons care.

FWIW, I did a MS with a thesis, I really liked it. Currently I'm working on a PhD, and honestly -- I dunno, with the MS I was working on more of a little refinement to something that my professor had done, it was pretty cool. With the PhD, there's almost too much freedom and the expectations are much higher, haha.

The MS felt more much more practical. Some of that could be related to the specifics of the projects, but... I dunno, there's something to be said for restricting scope.

As a project/program manager I feel that last sentence in my bones.

Well it's not like there is shortage of great schools in California. Basically anything in the UC system is great, there obviously Stanford and USC as well. But certainly Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB are all world class and UCI, UCSC, UCR and UCD are nothing to sneeze at either. Cal State also has some great programs particularly in Engineering at Poly San Luis Obispo

As far as the degree itself it really depends on what you want to do. Work in a business? MBA will be fine, work as an Engineer? Get an MS. Be a Lecturer at a CC? Any Master's will probably work.

Rankings aren't a bad place to start, they just shouldn't be where you finish too. Keep in mind that there really isn't too much difference between the #2 versus the #10 school or the #30 vs the #50. If two schools are in the same general neighborhood in ranking, that's when you should start putting more weight on the intangibles and how the school meets your needs specifically as opposed to just generally having a good reputation.

Thanks for this. I know there is a lot of compression in rankings, so it's kind of like IQ ratings: you can't tell the difference in normal day-to-day stuff until they get fairly large.

It's also like them in that it's a less than rigorous ranking it seems!

Look at where you might want to end up and see if they have any connections to specific schools / programs in schools. Beyond the education and the prestige attached to a school / program, the big benefit of graduate school is making connections. This is not nearly as present in online programs, but it can still be there.

This is another aspect of a school's program I hadn't considered, thanks!

I applied to and got into a bunch of good universities to study for my MS in computer science.

My biggest mistake, BY FAR, was not visiting all those schools, talking with prospective advisors and current students, and using my gut instincts on those conversations to guide my decision.

I picked the school that I felt was the best but wound up poorly matched with an advisor. I had been a very proactive and driven undergrad (returned to undergrad in my late 20s) but reverted to a passive approach in grad school - it was a terrible mistake. By the end of my first year, I was completely demotivated and very unhappy. I turned it around my second year by dropping my advisor and taking some control in the process back. But I also totally punted on a PhD and settled for a MS. But it left me very unsatisfied in the process and in a position of asking "what if" in many ways.

One big part of why I was dissatisfied is that in hindsight, many of the professors I interacted with were simply not very friendly or considerate of students. Maybe they were used to being able to be more dismissive of undergrads coming straight to grad school, but as an adult I expected adult interactions. That experience was partly my fault - there are always people who are prickly to deal with. I should have been a little more self-directed about making sure I was working with better people even if it meant maybe doing thesis or research work in an area that was slightly less interesting to me personally.

Thanks for this. It’s a stretch to hope any real grad degree will accept me, but I’m thinking all they can do is tell me no.

The advice about advisors I keep hearing repeated, so I will have to listen (if I can get in anywhere).

Your chances of admission are probably significantly better than you think.

I did my BS in computer science at a mid-lower-tier state school - it wasn't like I was all-world Stanford/MIT/CMU or anything. I did a bunch of GRE practice tests and have always been a very strong standardized test-taker so I had that going for me.

I also had cultivated strong references at my undergrad institution. My references were professors I had multiple classes under and that I had actually spent time with during office hours. You may have those sources available to you but I would guess that a decent fallback might be former commanding officers?

The school where I got my MS also had stories about active duty Air Force students coming in full-time for a PhD, mowing through the check-lists of to-do work, and finishing their PhD in the three years the AF gave them to do it.

Your military background may be a strong point in your favor. Also, I vaguely remember that military retirees often had some tuition assistance programs. Grad schools LOVE students with external funding sources. Look into this.

Lastly, it sounds like you have a good story to tell. Tell that story in your application letter!

I’ve been hesitant to lean on my story, as it were, as it seems too close to the plot of a Lifetime movie.

I’ll have to get over that and leverage it I suppose.

I have almost no contact with professors outside of class due to the nature of my degree taking a long time and it being online.

I do have at least one CO who is a cheerleader for me and is the one who has told me to push higher. He is open to writing any and all letters I need. Most of the others I’ve lost contact with, and due to my situation my most recent ones hardly know me.

You aren't leaning on your story so much as you are demonstrating successful experience navigating a world that isn't laid out in a way that made it easy.

Retiring from the military? I expect you know deeply how to navigate a bureaucratic system with sometimes frustratingly weird rules. (translation - can work through grad school institutional requirements without hand holding)

Possibly at least partially funded by outside sources? (translation - wait, I don't have to pay the full cost of the student? Has healthcare already? FREE FREE FREE labor to advisor)

Earned undergrad degree while working full time and caring for a special-needs child? (translation - nothing here is going to knock this person off course)

Truthfully speaking, almost everyone has a good story to tell. People are generally interesting to me and I think to others - especially the type of other people you would probably prefer to work with.

Maybe I am being overly optimistic about it but maybe remember that grad school is not a magical place where only super-geniuses tread the halls (internal opinions on that may differ </slight sarcasm>).

You gave me my first honest laugh of the day, thanks! It's a chemo week, so those are in short supply.

As for the actual content of your comment... I can see all of those. Never having walked those halls it's very much blind to me and statements like yours help demystify what I'm looking at.

Every statement you made there is true: I have stable income, I have paid for health care, I have the GI Bill if needed, I know bureaucratic systems, I'm excellent at project management, and I don't give up or derail easily.

Maybe I have a shot. I'll have to sit down and work out exactly what I want to pursue; I don't have long left in the season for applications.

+100 to visiting all the schools after you apply. I believe it signaled serious intent to the departments where I applied and gave me a chance to explain my non-traditional background in person.

Ended up attending a school in a location that I wouldn't have ranked first on paper but ended up loving. And vice versa for a school in a location that didn't bother me on paper, but when I visited, I realized I couldn't spend years there.

I hadn’t considered doing this. It’s a huge investment, but I suppose just by making that investment it’s a signal to that department.

Thanks!

In the US, if you can get accepted to a PhD, you get full scholarship, especially in STEM, but also in other fields. You can drop out in a year or two and get your masters. (I got my master's this way at Harvard, though I also finished the PhD. Nothing was required but the first year of course work and a language test.

Far less expensive and possibly less work than going directly to masters.

But if you do want to pay for a professional masters', then unlike undergrad, the specific program may be more important than the reputation of the university as a whole.

As others have said, grad school is a very different animal from undergrad. People choose undergraduate schools for all kinds of reasons, but a graduate degree should be 100% focused on what’s best for your career.

I think you’re looking at things from the wrong direction, and flipping it around will help a great deal. It seems like you’re going from the idea that you want to further your education, to thinking about potential degrees, and only then what you might do with them. This is how you wind up in a masters program that turns out to go nowhere or be a bad fit. Instead, turn it around! Set a goal for yourself and plan backwards from there.

What degree do you need? Do you need one at all? What kind of advisors and faculty should you be looking for? All questions that you can only answer sensibly with a goal in mind.

In my case my career is done and it’s time to find a new one. I have a decent amount of fixed income, and have been considering using my second career for something more fulfilling I suppose, hence the possibility of a degree that makes no financial sense but might make me happy or allow me to contribute to society in some way.

My advice is that you get a civilian job /before/ you start your MS. There's a few reasons why:

1. Your employer may sponsor you and pay for some/all of the cost, or otherwise support you financially while attending.

2. #1 may be contingent on which school you attend.

3. Your coworkers who are mentors to you (at whatever level that may be) likely have connections and can steer you towards the right school to further your career.

Ultimately, to a large degree, your career should decide if, when, and where you attend graduate studies if you aren't going to go into academia. A lot of people do Georgia Tech in the FAANG world and it's pretty great, but some companies have an internal (and often unspoken) preference for particular schools if you're trying to rise in the ranks.

This is a path I’m pursuing as kind of a default, with graduate applications to a full time program being what I’m asking about here in particular.

Georgia Tech or CMU are two I’ve been recommended if I go this route, so it’s nice to hear that wasn’t necessarily bad guidance!

What is your ultimate goal? To be employed in tech? If so, what type of positions? What is your MOS (or equivalent)?

Like many people leaving the military I'm not 100% sure what I want to do, simple because I haven't been exposed to the breadth of what I have the options to do. I'm institutionalized, for lack of a better word. Tech is what I'm most familiar with, so that's what I default to. The more I think about it the less I care about making all the money and the more I want to do something that fulfills me and lets me make society a better place.

I am an Aviation Electronics Technician, previously a Nuclear Reactor Operator. Also have experience with Lean Six-Sigma (Black Belt), physical and IT security, was an instructor, and lots of QA experience.

It's been an interesting ride, and I took every opportunity afforded me.

My advice is to look at the programs that Amazon offers to veterans: https://hiring.amazon.com/our-team/military#/

Previously in US News and World Report malfeasance: "Students Find Glaring Discrepancy in US News Rankings". Specifically about how they rate Reed College, my alma mater and a school that has famously opted out of participating in the ranking system for years. It looks like the report artificially punished Reed for that giving them a lower rating than their statistical model would have. It's very similar to what Columbia is reporting.

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2019/usnews-disc...

The UK is big on league tables. Hospitals, schools, universities, police, ambulance and fire services and so on.

The paper below explores some of the statistical questions that ranking organisations on outcome measures of some kind raises.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...

I'm working my way through Dr Thaddeus's paper now to see if it fits with or dis-confirms the framework of Goldstein and Spiegelhalter.

> “It’s clear that the growth of university bureaucracies and administration has been a major driver of the cost of higher education growing much, much faster than inflation. We now have about 4,500 administrators on the main campus, about three times the number of faculty, and that’s a new development over the past 20 years,” he said.

This has been going on for decades at many universities. As he notes, administrative organizations are primarily expanding for their own sake, at the expense of students.

Many parents seem have forgotten that kids are supposed to get top education instead of getting into "top" schools. As a results, we see kids take 15+ APs in high school, even though they leetcode into a FAANG after graduation (yes, I'm talking about your kids, parents in the bay area). Or worse, the kids burn out in high school. We see kids build novel clubs to "be a world leader" in high school and only abandon the idea once getting admitted. We see parents focus so much on rankings without thinking twice what exact a highly ranked university would offer to their kids. On the other hand, we see universities game the ranking systems. We see universities inflate their GPA scores. We see universities try every shady way to lower their admission rate.

I'm still hopeful, though. Eventually good education wins. Life is a marathon, not a 100m dash. Getting into college or not is merely the beginning of one's adult life. In larger scheme of things, which college one goes to or how many APs one takes hardly matters.

I think Columbia is a bit of an anomaly.

As someone who knew a lot of people who went to grad school and considered it myself, Columbia grad programs were known as a notorious money-pit/cash grabs unlike any other school in its range. I was always confused how they got away with it.

The only other school in NYC that competed with it in this regard was the New School, which is ranked all the way at 127.

Come now, taught Master’s are always cash cows. They exist to allow the university to cash in on the prestige of its undergraduate or professional programmes. Just as true at Oxford or the LSE as at Columbia or Chicago.

Precisely. There is big difference between undergrad and masters at Columbia. For CS MS was a cashcow - extract money from international students. It's actually a great deal for both parties.

The most shocking thing to me here is that "US News & World Report" still exists. Do they offer anything other than the phony college rankings? I'm being serious. I was interested in "US News & World Report" back in the early-90s when I was shopping law schools, and haven't thought about them since. Not once.

Anecdata, I’ve some students from Columbia in my circles. While they aren’t the brightest of the bunch they certainly are some of the wealthy ones. One student actually admitted that she chose Columbia just for the prestige, even when she has to pay $200k.

Maybe that’s the goal? Then the system is working as intended.

Nowadays college is less about high quality education and more social signaling of prestige among peers. From that perspective, your student who is paying $200k is making a rational decision in her mind.

When she graduates, she may get a prestigious high paying job (investment banking or management consulting) and that will validate her decision. If instead she gets an "ok" job and most of her peers are form lower-ranked colleges, she will feel like she is top of the social / prestige hierarchy, thus validating her decision, bc social prestige has its own unquantifiable value.

Really depends on the field. If you are a law firm, then they want as many ivy league graduates as possible because that is attractive to prospective clients (regardless of the individual merits of people working at said law firm) but if you are google, it makes no economic sense to pick person A from Harvard when person B from community college is much better. I look at my own company (in a "hard" field like google), we got our fair share of top college grad's at all levels but there isn't a large correlation between position and where someone went to school. Our interview process for engineering is 100% technical and people who pass can join regardless of things like education background. As for social heiarchy, people at my company demonstrate their worth by delivering things (that is how the status at my company is determined, what did you do?), you'd get laughed out of the room if you wanted respect because you went to some prestigious school.

Agreed - certain prestige-driven fields highly desire high-ranked academic pedigree, but not all fields. I'm just saying people are willing to borrow the amount equal to like half the median home price for that prestige.

Professor Thaddeus was the best math professor I had at Columbia, glad to see him popping off like this :)

They're not worthless, but they're certainly not objective.

My son missed an Ivy because of an admissions deadline SNAFU. It was his top choice in schools, and he was pretty upset about it.

Two family members employed at the school told us it was the best thing that could have happened to him. They didn't allow their children to apply there, because they see what is happening at the school.

This mirrors the trajectory of a local university, once a pretty prestigious school (circa 1980s/90s), now near last in enrollment and falling fast. If you were older and didn't have school age children (or weren't school age yourself), you would never know.

Schools' prestige has a lot of momentum behind it, and it could take 20 years before a once prominent school tanking becomes common knowledge.

If you're studying a technical field, an Ivy is probably not a great decision, but if you're going for a liberal art or if you are looking for a prestige signal, they are unparalleled.

Highly depends on the field. Among the top mathematicians who attended undergrad in the US, a large proportion went to Harvard.

> If you're studying a technical field, an Ivy is probably not a great decision

Sadly that's not really the case in the biological sciences, especially when you're looking for a tenure track job. If you look at people who enter tenure track jobs at even state schools, they invariably have pedigrees from Ivy schools, including postdocs.

The main value add of undergrad is networking and prestige, not education. That's why Ivys are still an unparalleled value proposition, even if their education is similar to the rest of the top 50 schools.

Exactly! It’s not about the academics (not to say the academics are bad at most Ivy’s), it’s about meeting and interacting with your peer set.

"The main value add of undergrad is networking and prestige, not education."

I think this might be true in software engineering and maybe law, but it's certainly not true in the medical field, engineering, etc.

It’s true for US medical students, since the MD is gated to four year degrees that are mostly orthogonal other than the few required science courses.

There is also utility in having the faculty in every single department of a school be above average in quality. It makes exploration and collaboration much more rewarding.

There are non-Ivies like that, too, but by and large, the Ivies are all pretty good at every subject.

(I don't want to take away from the networking/peer-capability point, which really matters, but rather add another reason to consider the fancy schools.)

Ivies have pretty tiny STEM departments for the most part.

Massive state schools like UMich, UWisc, UW, GATech have a much larger faculty and tend to be better for exploration.

Would love to hear any details you can share (without potentially identifying bits) about the issues.

Nothing scandalous:

    - Severe GPA inflation
    - Not being able to compete with nearby state schools for all but two programs, while being much more expensive
    - Elitism that comes with being an Ivy
    - Students are in many ways competing against each other (in certain programs)

> nearby state schools

Are Ivies near any of the generally top tier state schools ? My intuition was that the best state schools were near Chicago and in California. I do feel like state schools do outcompete nearby 'prestige' private schools in those two regions.

UPenn -> Maryland

Cornell -> Buffalo

Harvard, Dartmouth -> UMass

Yale, Brown -> UConn

Columbia -> SUNY Stony brook

Princeton -> Rutgers

________

I know UMass, Rutgers and UMaryland have strong CS & Engineering programs. Dunno much about the other schools or other programs though.

Like many "metrics", college rankings appeal to people because all you have to consider is a single number. One result is that it eliminates the anxiety associated with having to make a choice. You have a single axis and you just aim for the top without having to go through some process of research and prudential evaluation or worrying that you will regret your decision later (you might end up hating your school, but you can rationalize your bad experience by appealing to your school's rank to soothe the pain). Rankings also appeal to people who are excessively concerned with prestige, and these rankings, interestingly enough, generate and reinforce that prestige. The more people believe the ranking, the more it reinforces the perceived prestige. Above all, rankings appeal to human pride because they give us a tool by which to say "I am better than you" in an unambiguous manner, regardless of whether it is true.

When people apply to graduate school, the situation is a bit different. You typically apply based on the people in the department you're interested in or the faculty member you want as an advisor. People aren't so concerned about rankings here as they are when applying to undergraduate programs.

I am not denying quality is variable across schools. It is. Student bodies can also vary, and rankings can concentrate people of a certain mindset (for better or for worse) in one place. But rankings are not as meaningful as the numbers would seem to indicate. At the very least, the precision is far too high and too reductive (what's the difference between a school of rank 4 and 5? of 4 and 10?). The methodologies used also don't necessarily indicate what you think they do. There's a game these schools play, as this article touches on, to increase and maintain rank.

My general feeling is that college education, and education in general, isn't that great, generally speaking, and the costs are preposterously high. There's too much of Dewey's influence. Classically, universities were not meant to be job training centers and glorified trade schools (we can debate how good they even are as job training centers). The reigning paradigm is being challenged, however, especially with rising tuition and conspicuous ideological presence on campus.

If you cannot define something, you cannot measure it.

Since there is no one universal definition of a good university, how can there be a measure?

So anyone offering a measurement (Columbia is 9.4, Harvard is 9.25 etc) is by definition lying.

The core issue here is that people really want a simple universal scale. The fact that doesn't exist doesn't stop them wanting it. And instead of accepting that it makes them MORE ready to grab whatever rating sounds good based on some repetitional BS around the person offering it.

> We now have about 4,500 administrators on the main campus, about three times the number of faculty, and that’s a new development over the past 20 years

> [he] described an expanding and self-replicating bureaucracy that is growing ever more expensive to maintain

This seems to me a key piece of the problem. Rises in tuition have massively out-paced inflation while salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago. The answer to the question "where is all this money going?" doesn't have a mono-causal explanation, but an ever-expanding self-perpetuating bureaucracy is a significant factor. And it's not just academia; I've heard similar concerns from physician-acquaintances about healthcare. The astonishing growth of middle and executive managers at Johns Hopkins has been an ongoing topic of discussion with department-chair friend of mine for years.

I think we've barely begun to reckon with the costs the MBA-ification of major institutions has had on the overall welfare of the US public.

If only US News would rank by Admin/faculty ratio. They could single-handedly fix this nonsense.

The central problem with yearly university rankings is that they have no raison d’être. US News is financially motivated to keep all of the stakeholders glued to its “50 most beautiful people of the year” list, but institutional quality and reputation don’t actually fluctuate that much.

> “It means that our educational programmes have to be run to some degree as money-making ventures. That is the secret that can’t be openly acknowledged,” he said.

Was this really a secret?

Also, this truth can’t be told without also discussing student loans, which schools have departments designed to help students enroll in.

As they say, hedge funds with a degree-granting school attached.

Get an engineering or science degree - wherever - it beats prestige in terms of earning power.

Can Columbia students sue the school for being defrauded on what they were buying?

I think this would be difficult, since it would require students to claim (or admit) to buying prestige rather than paying for an education.

In other words: Columbia can (and probably still does) provide an excellent education, even if their ratings are rightfully lower.

Defund Universities: pull Government-backed student loans. Let people pay out of their own pocket if they find it valuable.

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