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Comment by whatyesaid | Hacker News Reader

You can have double blind papers and double blind research funding I guess to help that a little?

Not sure what else you can do. Table rankings are actually only applicable for undergrads in practical terms. At research level, You have world leading experts at random universities often, and then people who worked in top universities who advanced the field by none after decades.

I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

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> I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

I know of one, the University of Chicago. And it did so by gaming the ranking metrics. It dropped its long and idiosyncratic application and adopted the Common App. The admissions rate tanked from above 40% less than twenty years ago to about 5% now simply because more students applied. Did the quality of the education change? I doubt it.

P.S. Chicago recently dropped out of the top 10 this past year for the first time since adopting the Common App, due to a change in the ranking formula. Which says more about the inside baseball of rankings than it does about the education on offer.

As someone who would have been of age to apply to Chicago 20 years ago, lived in Chicago, and went to a Chicago college prep high school, it surprises me to hear the suggestion that Chicago had an acceptance rate comparable to that of Madison today. That sounds pretty high! It was perceived as an Ivy-grade reach school back then, and that's at a school that sent lots of people to Ivies.

> In 2006 Harvard accepted 9.3 percent of its undergrad applicants. Meanwhile the College accepted 38 percent, compared to 71 percent in 1996.

https://magazine.uchicago.edu/0612/issue/president.shtml

Isn’t the rankings mostly supposed to be about research quality? Or do metrics such as undergrad admission rates also play a part? Maybe there are multiple rankings out there?

As someone who attended before and after the change: there was certainly no immediate effect. The consensus at the time (at least amongst my little circle of friends) was that adopting the Common App was an obviously short-sighted metrics play.

It's definitely been superficially good for my social life, but I remain very sorry that the Uncommon App is no longer around. It played a nontrivial role in my decision to apply in the first place.

Desk rejects also happen regularly from Editors (who are not blind to the author names and affiliations). Editors can also make final decisions to accept or reject when reviewers don't agree.

Even in a blind peer review, the subject of study introduces another layer of bias in the process. Let's say two economics papers are submitted that discusses how people spend their last part of their pay check. One studies a pool of people across United States and other studies of people across Nigeria. Which one do you think is going to get positive review from editors and reviewers? The Nigeria paper might not even go to review. The editor is going to say something on the lines of "the focus of the study is too narrow for the journal" but won't say the same when it is across US. This is in addition to the trust issues with any research conducted outside western countries.

For researchers from the "low ranked" universities, the game is rigged against them and there is nothing they can do to swing it to their favour.

This would all be turned on its head if any of these papers had actual value and use, because the value would be found and dug up.

But the only value is to get more grants and funding, so they're just complicated beauty competitions.

The peer review process isn't actually blind in practice. The number of experts working in a given problem space is small enough that they know most of their peers, and usually can identify at a glance who the author of a paper is, from the topic, writing style, and experimental design, which they can recognize from previous publications and correspondence.

This is true to an extent, but also overblown. There have been a few experiments testing this and people wildly overestimate their ability to unblind paper authors correctly.

> I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though

An example of rankings being climbed:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...

(Not to dis Northeastern. They have some great professors, and do some great teaching and research. And the faculty of a university don't necessarily agree with the businesspeople.)

But if you think that kind of college rankings climbing is a concern, the climbing demand that college has evolved for students is worse, and has implications for tech industry, as I asserted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086755

I’m not sure that you can. What I’ve read is that in a lot of fields, the community is small enough that you have a reasonable idea whose work you are reviewing even if the author’s name is redacted.

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