What college rankings really tell us
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Similarly, Stanford was considered a relatively mediocre school until one year when they rejected every single valedictorian across the country as a marketing stunt, and suddenly jumped in the rankings after guidance counselors started encouraging the kids with the highest grades to apply there.
Similarly, the admissions departments get an update twice a day telling them their projected US News rank based on the grades and SAT scores of the kids who they are admitting. Thus your chances of getting in can vary wildly based on whether your application is read in the morning or afternoon. If the projected rank drops too low then they stop even reading the essays and just admit solely based on grades and SATs until the rankings are back up.
I don't know when it achieved such stature, but it also had been one of the Big 3 Computer Science graduate schools for quite some time. (I.e., MIT, Stanford, and CMU.)
I recall that my undergraduate advisor thought that I probably wouldn't be able to get into MIT, Stanford, or CMU for grad school, but that I'd have no problem getting into Berkeley. He said staying in would be the problem. They had a reputation at the time for accepting a lot of students and then weeding them out.
[1] http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/college_rankings...
I wish I could find the citation for this, but I recall reading about how when it first started the person who created the ranking formula showed USNWR the list of top 10 schools and the Ivy League schools didn't do as well as expected. If HYP weren't at the top there was a flaw with the methodology, so they had to go back and get a new methodology that would conform with conventional wisdom.
Also back in '99 Caltech took the top spot. Again this was viewed with some disdain from the East Coast elite. They changed their methodology and added/emphasized a metric they call "value add", which is the difference between actual and expected graduation rates. Because CalTech is difficult to graduate from, they were seriously penalized.
IOW, rankings are often simply a way to perpetuate the status quo, but make it look objective.
On the graduation rate: why shouldn't a school be penalized for a low graduation rate? The point of those rankings (beyond selling magazines, of course) is to give prospective students an idea of how each school will help them in life. If I have a choice of going to school A from which I'm 90% likely to graduate and an otherwise equally ranked school B which is 50% likely to kick me out without a diploma, which am I going to choose?
And the bit about CalTech seems a little like sour grapes. I was at one of those "East Coast elite" schools in the 90's and don't remember anyone thinking anything but good things about CalTech (Pasadena, on the other hand...). Basically within its fairly narrow realm of focus CT is absolutely one of the "elite" schools everyone looks to.
Its easy to look at this from the other side though.
I think a lot of people look at these rankings as the value of a degree earned from that institution. That is, they are looking at it from the side of the alums as opposed to the prospects. Suppose two schools have the same admissions criteria and everything else, but the graduation rate of one is much higher. I would think the school with the lower graduation rate would be viewed as more rigorous and therefore "better".
The "otherwise equally ranked school" part shows where a single-dimension ranking system falls on its face. Does it mean they accept the same quality of applicant? If so, graduating from the school with the lower graduation rate might be a much more impressive accomplishment. Or does it mean that the quality of education graduates receive is considered to be basically the same? Does that then mean the second one is just easier to get into?
How would all colleges having high graduation rates avoid pigeon-holing people even further into the box that their high-school performance marked them for? If everybody can graduate, the potential signaling is reduced from "got into and graduated from school x" to just "got in to school x."
For example, if there is 100% graduation, I consider that very suspect and probably a bad sign. It's natural that some people don't finish college. WRT Caltech, they are desirable BECAUSE they offer such a challenging environment.
This is why my alma mater, University of British Columbia (in Canada), opted out of our version of a university ranking, Maclean's. The link is old, but you can read a bit about it here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2006/08/14/maclea...
Currently, I am not sure whether or not UBC has opted back in, however.
Most importantly, I think it's important to understand that if HYP (and others in the Ivy League) weren't in the ranking nobody would take the ranking seriously.
So you have to have a smattering at least of what people are expecting to see or you don't have a list worth considering and reading.
If you are going to have a list of anything, in order to elevate lesser known members of the list, you have to have credible proof of known entities that everyone can relate to.
For example take the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest acts of all time. Particularly the top 10:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists...
The top four positions are taken by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones.
Can you imagine in this list if those four didn't appear until position 71 85 93 99?
Nobody would believe the rest of the list.
Some days I get a little upset that I don't attend a prestigious university, and I'm not really sure why. There's always grad school, though. Anyway, just a personal experience.
I grew up in Queens. My grandmother would pack us a lunch when my dad I visited my cousins in "Upstate" in Westchester county (probably a 30 minute drive on the weekend in those days). The Albany/Troy area to a New Yorker is somewhere between Mongolia and Boston.
The ironic thing is that millions of people in the NY metro area spend 1-2 hours commuting less than 20 miles every day!
If you're committed to learning and improving yourself, you don't need the ivy league's approval.
"One common statistic used to evaluate colleges, for example, is called “graduation rate performance,” which compares a school’s actual graduation rate with its predicted graduation rate given the socioeconomic status and the test scores of its incoming freshman class.... Tulane, given the qualifications of the students that it admits, ought to have a graduation rate of eighty-seven per cent; its actual 2009 graduation rate was seventy-three per cent. That shortfall suggests that something is amiss at Tulane."
Anyone else think that those numbers for the 2009 graduating class has anything to do with the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit during the first few weeks of '09's freshman year, forcing students at Tulane (which is located in New Orleans) to take leaves of absences or transfers?
Just goes to show, in addition to inherent biases, rankings also don't capture extenuating circumstances that can have drastic short term effects that go unnoticed.
He said that almost everything that you can do to boost your ratings are gimmick events like rejecting more applicants, or increasing spending on getting applicants.
One particularly greusome idea was to hire national survey companies to hang outside of popular teen events and get students to fill out a preliminary application that they would then reject to get boost their rejection percent and appear more "competitive".
They keep rejecting these kinds of meaningless shows of status.
But the lure of prestige keeps this meeting on the agenda anyways.
http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-tobacco-industry-sh...
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univs)I graduated in 2009. In that same year we got a new president. He pledged to move the school up in the rankings from 22 in a welcome speech. The crowd gave a standing ovation.
What a shame.
The important question is whether his father would have preferred he attend a higher-ranked school with an inferior CS program, or whether he just wanted his son at a "better" school with a similarly spectacular CS program.
But to draw a parallel to your comment, both Sherbrooke and Harvard attended. Sherbrooke being relatively unknown outside of computer science circles. Well that year, Sherbrooke absolutely dominated every competition placing 4th or better in every event, and 1st overall. Harvard however placed last nearly every event (except AI where they were in the middle of the pack).
Looking at the overall reputations of both of these universities, Harvard is by far the more well known and respected. Just like the article was saying, overall rankings aren't very useful, and that if you're serious about getting a good education, you'll have to dig deeper.
Just playing devil's advocate here. Rankings are a crapshoot, and I don't love the Ivies at all.
With the crapshoot that is college admissions nowadays, it's completely unreasonable to expect your kid to go to such a small list of schools. Especially when there are a few thousand other 2400 SAT, valedictorian Asian Americans with identical goals...
She would then move down the line to the next woman and repeat the whole thing verbatim, down to the pause, slow meaningful nod, and "...with honors."
Most women she spoke to tried to look unimpressed, which I thought was a bit rude. Some even sniffed and turned away. It was amazing.
I was the lone white guy in a room full of Chinese women (and some kids) and apparently the only one who was happy for her and willing to look at her pictures. No luck. When she got to me, she sniffed at me and skipped past me to the next Chinese woman.
I wasn't sure whether that was because my opinion was irrelevant to her sense of social status or, more simply, that she knew the Chinese women but didn't know me.
I asked my hair stylist who, like most of the staff, has been a friend of mine for years. She told me that she had seen the woman a couple of times but that she didn't think anybody in the shop knew her by name. I (the only one in the room with a EE background and apparently the only one happy for her) was just not somebody whose opinion mattered to her.
So it seems that your Berkeley EECS is plenty good enough to ruffle the feathers of other Chinese moms and to impress me--if that helps any. ;-)
I do think you've picked up on something with the whole social status angle, but I can't say I have a good understanding of it. Chinese moms are deeply invested in their children's education, and no doubt they judge themselves (and each other) by how much their children have achieved.
The sad thing is that some of those women may actually have been unimpressed by a Berkeley grad. You no doubt are aware of the tutoring centers that dot the Valley, catering to Asian students and their demanding parental units. Besides AP and SAT prep, some of these places also offer "college counseling" that runs many thousands of dollars over several years.
My sister, who is quite a bit younger than me, is on the verge of applying to college. Last time I was at home, my parents had collected a pile of brochures from these tutoring places, which advertise successful applications to Stanford, UofC, UPenn, and the Ivy League. The UCs are an afterthought. It's all about the exclusive brand names, if you will.
I'm just thankful I never had to deal with any of this madness.
Sadly, the prestige factor doesn't end when one enters college. My sister and I are Asian American and our parents emigrated from the Philippines. My sister's majoring in Urban Studies at Stanford. Despite this, my father insists on telling family, friends, co-workers, etc. that she's studying law.
Quite a shame indeed.
As Gladwell pointed out in the Car & Driver example, the "scores" assigned in these rating systems are arbitrary linear combinations of factors chosen by "experts." You the car buyer will personally care more or less about certain factors than they do, but they've already chosen the coefficients for you, so too bad. Same for the college ratings assigned by the USNWR.
I think we're asking the wrong questions with college rankings. Prospective students should be asking, what education will maximize the expected value to me personally in the future? It's not a heterogenous and inexplicable "score" they're looking for, it's the probability that the match between student and college will be a productive one. Given data about individual students, colleges, and historical outcomes, surely a better predictive model is possible.
I once met a recruiter for the University of Toronto (Canada) who focuses exclusively on visiting US high schools. She told me how U of T was behind other "top" Canadian schools in advertising to potential students in the US. She mentioned how McGill University (in Montreal) started going after US students aggressively beginning in the 70s, and as a result, has a far better reputation there today. Even The Simpsons once joked that McGill is "the harvard of Canada", even though most Canadians would probably say otherwise.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...
Sort by total endowment per student. Cross-reference this list with the USNWR rankings. The overlaps are striking.
Every region has people who are self-important and people who are not.
Consider what a college experience offers more readily over what you can accomplish with a high-speed internet connection.
- a community of people around the same age with no liabilities or responsibilities
- guaranteed access to an expert on the subject who can answer direct questions
- verification of knowledge
Anything else?
Why do we need thousands of college professors giving lectures on linear algebra each semester? We have the bandwidth to distribute a complete video lecture series from MIT to all college-going people in the US.
The collegiate model is predicated on the inaccessibility and uneven distribution of information. That's why the top colleges have the biggest libraries. That's how information was primarily stored and accessed and catalogued.
The developed world is a completely different place now.
It's much harder to measure the quality of candidate in other fields without the context of what school they went to and how well they did there. (Unless, of course, you have time for a full-on interview. I think parent is referring to the screening process though)
You have a 100 job applications for one open position. Most of the kids went to mediocre to good colleges. Two or three of the kids went to Harvard/Stanford/other selective college. Who do you offer an interview to?
Keep in mind, you're busy running a business. You don't have time to thoroughly analyze each application. You figure, if they're good enough for Harvard/Stanford/other selective college, they're good enough for me. So you start by interviewing the Harvard kids.
This isn't irrational. Harvard/Stanford/etc. spend a ton of money screening hundreds of thousands of the nations' brightest kids. If you make it into one of those schools, there's a very, very good chance you're at least competent. Elite schools (as defined by things like USNWR) will always serve this function, so kids who want to follow this traditional path to success will always flock to them, or to anything that manages to offer the same signaling/screening effect.
I think that's really an extension of the 'skill verification' bullet point. One can easily imagine a program run by a trusted institution whereby a person pays a fee and they are evaluated over the course of a week or so. If they pass, they are given a stamp of approval, if not they either try to improve their skills or go to a lower-prestige institution and repeat the process.
Harvard offers much more. They already spent thousands of man hours combing through tens of thousands of applications from very smart kids all over the country. Even if everyone they accepted graduated (i.e. regardless of who gets a degree), they've already performed a talent search you could never hope to replicate.