Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings

An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."

Comments

link to original paper

[Boghog]

Selecting universities: personal preference and rankings

No link to paper?

[siwelwerd]

I guess it's too much to ask for the article to give a link to the actual paper... http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.1026

Re:Reputation

[Colonel Korn]

George W. Bush graduated from Yale.

Until women were allowed into Yale, rich kids could get in without any uncertainty, as long as they weren't dismally stupid. When women were added to the pool (and when other policies designed to attract upper class white students were dropped in 1970), suddenly the acceptance rate had to drop massively, and the choice was made to base all admissions (or nearly all) on academics.

W would probably have been rejected if he were to apply now. His daughter might be raised as a counter-example, but she was a good student in high school. It certainly still helps to be rich and well known, but it's no longer a carte blanche. Graduating's a lot harder now than it was then, too, but that's a different story.