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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."
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.
Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards.
Was that standard "name which sound most like a Prison". Its good to get some measure of how good a team is but there are of course other approaches, one would be to have a league system with a set play-off format (rather than 100 "bowl" games) with a number if tiers, bottom few teams drop down a tier, winners of the various tiers below move up.
The whole point of the US News figures is that they are arbitrary, this isn't about really working out who is best over the course of the season its about having something to talk about around the water cooler, it would be miles more boring if you know that winning a game by 4 points when someone else loses by 2 means that your ranking goes up. You'd have commentators talking all the time about the "real time change" in the figures, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
Keep the arbitrary figures lets just have a proper league system instead rather than a flat "randomly play teams" format.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Percentage female. If you are going into engineering (face it, you are) try to get in to a liberal-arts dorm.
Several of the metrics that U.S. News uses do seem to be arbitrarily weighted, leading to some bizarre contortions on the part of the various schools to enhance their ratings. Most of the data is self-reported by the universities, which clearly provides a powerful motivation to spin or "enhance" the numbers to one's advantage. I have no doubt that several colleges fudge the numbers to raise their rankings, leading to a lot of frustration at other schools that are playing by the rules but feel that they're being cheated in the rankings.
And some of the metrics make little sense. For example, engineering schools can raise their rankings by several places just by having one or more faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering. Yet NAE membership is essentially meaningless in terms of research and teaching, and hardly more prestigious than having faculty members who are Fellows in other established engineering societies. Yet U.S. News ignores the number of Fellows in IEEE, ASCE, ASME, etc., and focuses on NAE membership. So why the emphasis on NAE? Probably because the NAE told U.S. News that they were the most important engineering society, and U.S. News never questioned it, when in fact the NAE has almost negligible impact on higher education.
Selecting universities: personal preference and rankings
Having been to Stanford as a visiting scholar recently, I have to say I am very glad I never went there (tuition and housing orders of magnitude out of my reach or not.)
Things I take for granted on a university campus, such as being able to walk into a library, or to use public wi-fi while sipping coffee somewhere on the grounds... These things are actually difficult or impossible for a visitor to do -- even a visitor with credentials who is there on academic business! I was *amazed* at the difficulty of getting into the Green Library for instance, and my week was pretty much destroyed by the fact that if you want to use on-campus wi-fi, "you can't", simple as that.
At every turn, everything that could have been convenient for a visitor was hostile. I ended up rushing through my research and spending all my time at a coffee shop in Palo Alto (where the wi-fi was free, and nobody minds if you hang out and work.)
Thanks Stanford, you're awesome.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
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.
That's actually a pretty sad indication of how much a college name matters over what you do. I had a friend who did his undergrad at MIT, and when applying for jobs, he was insta-accepted to various tech jobs. No interview. No background checks. Just an open door. Given that, he refused those jobs because that easy entry gave him some indication as to who the companies hired and on what criteria. On the other extreme, were a couple of people who had to work twice as hard because they had to sell the college they attended. It's a little sad, but it's the reality.
I'm a law student. I also attend one of the most maligned law schools in the country. Not entirely by choice.
Oh sure, I wanted to go to the University of Michigan. I wanted to go to Georgetown. I applied to a number of elite law schools, and was surprisingly accepted by most of those that I applied to. The problem was money. Law school, as you can imagine, is pretty expensive. It's typically a 3-year program that runs anywhere from $25-50k/year for tuition alone. Build in the cost of books, rent, food, etc. and you're looking at another $15-20k/year. Federal student loans aren't that generous, and the terms on the private loans make them rather detestable. While my grades were good enough to get me into those high-end schools, hey weren't good enough to make be stand out enough to get much in the way of scholarships. And since I was paying for school by myself, I had to take a look at my safety schools. So I started researching the various ranking systems and what criteria they used.
One of the major ranking indexes I looked at, for example, heavily weighted entrance requirements as well as the attrition rate. The result was that the schools who only accepted people with the best GPAs and LSAT scores ranked high. That was expected. But the attrition rate? By its rankings, if two schools accepted students with the exact same criteria, the one with fewer failures/drop-outs after the first year ranked higher. That struck me as being really odd. A more rigorous program is desirable, and will likely result in more failures. Meanwhile, the school I go to will take in very average students the first year, and has a huge failure rate; anywhere from 20-50%, depending on who you ask. The first year professors are brutal, and the whole year is designed not only to teach you, but to weed out the people who don't really want or deserve to be there. Consequently, they get hammered in almost every ranking except for "most competitive students," where it's in the top 10 in the country.
Then I started noticing some other oddball problems. That same ranking service said that the average undergraduate GPA and LSAT score were below the school's minimum requirements. At several schools, I noticed that, if they offered part-time programs, it looked like an incredibly low portion of the students were enrolled full time. Then I realized how they were figuring that out: it wasn't by graduation, it was by sampling year-to-year enrollment.
Example: Say a normal student graduates in 3 years. A part-time student graduates in 6. Over 6 years, the school graduates 60 full-time students (let's say they're spread out evenly at 6 per year) and 10 part-time students. The thing is, because of their sampling, those part-time students wind up being counted for twice as long. So at any given time in that 6-year period, you have 18 full-time students, and 10 part-time students. The sample is going to show that more than 1/3 of the student body is part-time, even though the school is graduating six times as many full-time students. It's rather misleading.
I noticed a number of other glaring issues, too. For example, prestigious schools have loads of information published, while the less prestigious schools usually have little more than a few out-of-date statistics. Self-reinforcing, no?
In the end, it felt like the ranking systems were a complete waste. They rank everything but the quality of the education. And while I don't mean to play to the cliche, because I know it's not universally true, but I actually flew around the country and visited a couple of those "elite" schools that I was accepted into. They don't let you forget how "elite" they are. At all. The snobbery was utterly overwhelming. One of them told me that their students were "the Maseratis of law school." /gag
I wound up going to the school that offered me the biggest scholarship.