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Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings

Posted by timothy on from the deep-springs-college dept.

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."

4 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Reputation by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A college degree is an education, and that should be of paramount concern. It's also nice to be in a place you'd enjoy living, etc.

    But then there's reputation. You might get the same education at CMU and MIT, but if you're looking for jobs, all other things being equal, someone's gonna pick the MIT grad because it'd a bigger name. I realize it's variable across fields and with individuals, but names mean something to a lot of people, particularly when they're not really qualified to judge on merits.

    1. Re:Reputation by the_weasel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And he became president. That's a pretty clear success for him. :-)

      --
      - sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
    2. Re:Reputation by johnlcallaway · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bzzzzt!!! Not always right.

      A college degree is a piece of paper. But I'll concede that the education should be the paramount concern. I agree with a concept I read in Money magazine a few years ago when they analyzed how much a difference in salary people got depending on what school they went to and how much they spent. The gist of what they recommended was to get the basics from a community college that can transfer credits, then enroll in the more expensive places. Math is math, science is science, IT is IT up to a point. That way you don't spend two years figuring out that you suck at IT and spending a crap load of money doing it.

      Not everyone puts a lot of value in a school's reputation. I'd rather work for a place that hires people based on their abilities instead of on a sheepskin. I worked with a VP of development that had a PhD in neuro-networks from MIT. Smart guy ... lousy to work with. Ego the size of Massachusetts, and the personality of a penny.

      I don't even pay attention to whether someone has a degree or not when hiring admins or development staff. In fact, 'professional students' will probably fall down lower on my list than someone who has been attending local colleges taking specific courses. All I care about is how smart and curious they are, and lots of smart, curious people don't go to school. Anybody can learn to code, but the smart and curious people are really good at it. Some of the best IT people I have worked with in the last 25 years had very little college education.

      You want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a consultant and have your own business?? Pay for the degree, many people put stock in it.

      Aren't that smart?? Pay for the degree, it fools some people.

      Otherwise, save your money. Learn what you need, go to a tech school or get a 4 year at a state school if it's that important to you.

      If you are smart, curious, and have a strong work ethic, you will do fine.

      --
      I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
  2. Rankings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've actually played with ranking data quite extensively, and usually for reasonable weighthings of the parameters the movement in position is in the order of plus/minus 5 places. Sure, Penn State would be number one if all one cared about is retention rates, but really nobody does. Instead we can define a range of reasonable weights for retention rates (say between 7% and 35% of the total weight) and test all possible combinations in that space, suddenly Penn State place goes up and down a fairly small amount.

    A bigger concern is what is the value of selecting a school based on the ranking as a whole, without paying attention to the your likely area of major. Say, Yale is a great school but in CS is a non-entity. If you are positive CS is your thing, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton are far better choices.