felson
10-20-2004, 09:51 AM
A current AP story (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=19&u=/ap/college_rankings) describes a recent economics paper (http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf) that presents a new algorithm for ranking US colleges and universities. The algorithm uses data from incoming college freshmen. When a student chooses to attend Georgetown over Amherst or Brown, it is treated as a victory for Georgetown over the other schools. Then the authors use tournament-ranking algorithm similar to algorithm used to rank chess grandmasters.
The results look very much like the U.S. News rankings: the top five schools are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The paper presents the top 100 schools, although the authors say that rankings below the top ten are less accurate due to the small number (3,000) of students polled.
The authors say that their method is superior to the U.S. News metric of (number of incoming freshmen)/(number of admitted students), because the U.S. News metric can be tampered with by college admissions departments. This is done by admitting less-qualified students who will likely be rejected by other top schools. These students will therefore be likely to accept the offer of admission.
The authors claim that this is actually occurring at some top schools. Page 6 of their paper features a humorous graph of (probability of admission) plotted versus (SAT score), shown for three schools. (It is debatable whether SAT score is a good indicator of ability, but let us set that aside for now.)
At MIT, the higher your score, the more likely you are to be admitted.
At Harvard, students at the 92nd percentile are just as likely to be admitted as students at the 98th percentile.
And at Princeton, students at the 92nd percentile are twice as likely to be admitted as students at the 98th percentile!
The authors conclude that Princeton indulges in "strategic admissions," and they indicate that Princeton is far from alone in this.
By the way, in the paper, Princeton ranked sixth.
The results look very much like the U.S. News rankings: the top five schools are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The paper presents the top 100 schools, although the authors say that rankings below the top ten are less accurate due to the small number (3,000) of students polled.
The authors say that their method is superior to the U.S. News metric of (number of incoming freshmen)/(number of admitted students), because the U.S. News metric can be tampered with by college admissions departments. This is done by admitting less-qualified students who will likely be rejected by other top schools. These students will therefore be likely to accept the offer of admission.
The authors claim that this is actually occurring at some top schools. Page 6 of their paper features a humorous graph of (probability of admission) plotted versus (SAT score), shown for three schools. (It is debatable whether SAT score is a good indicator of ability, but let us set that aside for now.)
At MIT, the higher your score, the more likely you are to be admitted.
At Harvard, students at the 92nd percentile are just as likely to be admitted as students at the 98th percentile.
And at Princeton, students at the 92nd percentile are twice as likely to be admitted as students at the 98th percentile!
The authors conclude that Princeton indulges in "strategic admissions," and they indicate that Princeton is far from alone in this.
By the way, in the paper, Princeton ranked sixth.