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Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Oct 08, 2008 04:00 PM
from the deep-springs-college dept.
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."
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Submission: Mathematicians take on US News college rankings by Anonymous Coward
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Reputation (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.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
and Harvard Business School (Score:2, Informative)
And even if he weren't a member of one of the more powerful families in the US, he probably would have done pretty well for himself having those names under his belt.
Whether or not he actually learned anything of value, though, is a matter we must pass over in silence.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you know exactly which schools they were because, well, it kind of makes a big difference. If they visited private schools (which is most likely), your tax dollars aren't being wasted. And I'm sure that those "Richie Rich" kids probably are paying through the nose in tuition, housing, fees (etc) which is what is covering the costs the lavish (and ludicrous) treatment.
You are not going to find a publicly funded (paid by your tax dollars) school that is that outlandish and extravagant.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
And he became president. That's a pretty clear success for him. :-)
Parent
That's actually pretty sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Reputation (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
As you note, reputation is just one factor and it really depends on what each student wants to *get* out of their college career. Some students are interested in the education itself. Some are interested in the diploma as a hoop to jump through. Others want to push their careers forward through the reputation of the degree (which may be different from the reputation of the school overall) and through networking. So for some people, reputation is almost irrelevant while for others, it's paramount.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, general reputation matters. Cambridge and Oxford in the UK have enormous street cred with employers and it doesn't matter if they're the best in a given field. They'll always be highly regarded. Specific reputation also matters. A university known to have brilliant students and produce top-notch wizards (Hogwarts?) in that specific field will also count highly with an employer. (It'll be the name HR becomes extremely familiar with, if HR is bothering to track such things - and top employers are more li
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
Something very weird happens here in Mexico.
According to several international studies*, The National Automonous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National Polytechnics Institute (IPN), the two largest public universities in the country, are the best institutions of higher learning in the country.
Yet it is very common to see "UNAM, IPN, graduates need not apply" in job listings. Why?
Because employers seem to believe that the networking and prestige of the exclusive private schools are worth more than being a graduate of the two institutions that generate 90% of the scientific research in the country!
Sources:
http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2007/overall_rankings/top_400_universities/ [topuniversities.com]
http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_TopAmer(EN).htm [arwu.org]
Parent
Re:Reputation (Score:5, 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I've seen in the UK, many company directors seem to have a preference for graduates from the university that they went to, rather than by any other selection method. But with so many qualified people chasing the same well-paying jobs, you can't really blame them. Otherwise they start using techniques like handwriting analysis, psychometric questionnaires and pop quizzes to divine who is the "safe bet".
The rankings have always been meaningless (Score:3, Interesting)
At best, they provide a filter for individuals of a certain level of ability of competence, e.g. the average graduate from a school #1 is going to be more capable than the average graduate from school #100.
Re: (Score:2)
That's OK. The ranks of college graduates (a la GREs) are also pretty meaningless, so at least there is symmetry.
Re: (Score:2)
Now how do you determine whether the person in front of you is "average" for their school?
I agree that it's not completely meaningless. If all I know about two people is that one graduated from Harvard and the other from some random community college, I'm going to assume that the Harvard candidate has something more working in his favor. I won't necessarily know what he has in his favor-- whether it's that he's smart, he knows how to cheat, or he has a rich daddy who pulls strings. But it's a pretty goo
This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, I really feel sorry for whatever company you work for. Its been my experience that within a field, people care more what schools are good in that field than what schools are good overall.
In engineering, for example, you'd expect a student from Purdue or Texas or MIT or UC-Berkley to be looked at in a much better light for their high engineering standards.
Re: (Score:2)
This is not my experience graduating from a state school (Cal Poly: SLO) with a degree in Computer Engineering. The grad to job placement for that degree (and many of the other engineering degrees) is phenomenal, because the program is known as being good.
If you're applying as a business student, perhaps that's true. However, I think school prestige in engineering applies more towards grad school than to job placement.
depends heavily on the field (Score:3, Insightful)
In technical areas (e.g. engineering), reputation within the field matters a lot more than generic reputation. People at Boeing know what the good aerospace engineering places are, and hire accordingly. If you graduated from an Ivy with an unknown engineering program, you're more likely to get responses like, "huh, I didn't even know Yale had an engineering program". Meanwhile, if you graduated from a generally lesser-known school with a top-rated engineering program (e.g. Rose-Hulman or Harvey Mudd) you're
Penn State and working out who is good or not (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
MosesJones: 1
Troll victims: 0
Classic trolling style, make one glaring error and then write a seemingly serious post based on the error. Fairly well done, MJ, I give it an 8/10.
So the best college then (Score:2, Insightful)
... is the one that comes out on top after taking an average of all the different ranking methods.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if all the criteria are equal in importance to you. If they're not, you end up with weighted averages... leading us right back where we started.
Re: (Score:2)
You want to average independently weighted outputs to arrive at some meaningful answer? Shame on you. And anyway, if you took outputs of all possible (linear) weight combinations and averaged them, then you would just negate the weightings altogether.
How do you account for... (Score:3, Interesting)
...my person favorite method of ranking? I call it the "cognitive dissonance" method of ranking.
The best school is the one that I'm attending.
The coolest part is, when I change schools to do my Ph.D. in the fall, it will be some other university's turn to be the best!
When will this be publically available? (Score:3, Insightful)
US News could take this, print their magazine, then offer this "service" on their site, run by ad revenue to really give the student a run for their money when applying for a college.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Offer the service on the site as you suggested. After some time period assign weights based on what the people using the site used. Tada! Maybe then you get a list worth printing?
Re: (Score:2)
Let's see...my undergrad alma mater consistently ranks in the top ten party schools. My graduate alma mater consistently ranks among the top ten football teams, and oh yeah, engineering programs. What was my most important factor in selecting them? Convenience to where I lived and worked at the time. Try to put that into an online service.
Blindingly obvious stuff makes headlines... again (Score:3, Insightful)
If all the different criteria all gave the same result, then there would be no need to make a weighted average; you could just look at any single one. If they give different results, then of course the result will depend on how you weigh them. In fact, if a college ranks number one on any of the criteria, clearly a weighting exists to rank that college number one overall (just rate that one factor 100%...)
You don't need "a pair of mathematicians" to show that. A pair of high-school freshmen could do it.
Re: (Score:2)
More obvious insight which should get me some money somehow: even if a college is ranked #1, you MIGHT get a better educational experience somewhere else!
Where's my article and money?
Re:Blindingly obvious stuff makes headlines... aga (Score:3, Insightful)
Our university didn't feature in the top 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
...so we made up our own top 10! We even made it sound more authoritative with better hand waving mathematics. Take that US News!
Only one statistic that matters. (Score:5, Funny)
Percentage female. If you are going into engineering (face it, you are) try to get in to a liberal-arts dorm.
Just as SAT is useless after you're in college (Score:4, Insightful)
Once you get your first job, where you graduated from (name recognition) is less important than the intelligence of the student and what you're really done. Don't get me wrong, you should probably consider one of the "top 20" in your field, but you're just as likely to get a good (or better) answer from people in your future industry than from a magazine. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but unless you happen to be in one of the few snobby professions it doesn't matter. Finding a good "fit" for college is almost as important as the curriculum itself.
Now, if you're going on to do something great (and almost all of you can put your hands down - you either weren't born with the brain or the parents; I'm included in that class, too, fwiw) you should consider finding the top graduate program in your field. Not one of the top, THE top, as judged by your peers. Then school will matter, because when you get near the top, snobbery is almost everything. Your parents, your intellegence, your charisma, and your degree for the "three of four" ticket to stardom. You can need at least three and get to the top. Actually, I think you can only have three - if you get all four your competition will be jealous and cut you down like a dog.
Playing the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
US News has a strong incentive to jiggle the arbitrary weights each year. That way the rankings change and everyone needs to buy a new copy of the magazine. They're out there 'making' news.
I've heard that the single biggest predictor of a college's ranking in the US News rankings is the endowment size. In other words, if you knew the size of the endowments of all colleges and ranked them in money order, you'll get a high fraction of the ranking consistent with US News.
Re:Playing the numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
What I want to know is why U.S. News considers itself qualified to rate colleges in the first place.
Parent
Less than useless.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason that they are pretty irrelevant (Score:2)
Reinventing the wheel? (Score:2, Informative)
link to original paper (Score:5, Informative)
Stanford is pretty but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
This is standard reception for academic guests at many universities and it is a serious problem insofar as electronic access is important to scholarly work (which in most cases it is).
I visited NYU in the Spring and was stunned that it was impossible to get electronic access (wired or otherwise) through the university. My own university (OU) also has no mechanism to allow visitors to access its computing network.
I spent most of last summer in San Francisco and there I rediscovered the Public Library. The SF
Re:Stanford is pretty but... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not positive on this, but I think that part of the reason for this is laws that basically require it. AFAIK, either the college network is classified as an "internal network" (I'm not sure what the real legalese is; I'm paraphrasing), in which case it needs to store privacy-invasive and impractically-large logs of user activity, or it is classified as an ISP, in which case it avoids these issues (and associated liability) but is required to know who is on each IP, which basically necessitates restricted access and obnoxious login pages.
I say this because I did my undergrad at a school that used to keep its wifi completely open and unencrypted (Want security? Go through a VPN.) which was in fact quite wonderful. (This worked, I suppose, because it was in an idyllic little New England town, where the locals weren't a problem.) But after I left, I continued to get a few emails from various services on campus, and one was to the effect of my previous paragraph (i.e., that they were changing wifi access to meet new federal regs that they really didn't want to bother with but had to). So if I were to go back now, I get the impression that I'd be faced with login screens and such.
Parent
And next..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huggins and Pachter are now applying their methods to voting in elections with more than two candidates.
Elections have more than two candidates?
damn I gotta get out of the US for a while
No link to paper? (Score:5, Informative)
Rankings (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.
Anecdotal (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Over 6 years, the school graduates 60 full-time students (let's say they're spread out evenly at 6 per year)
Your law school is teaching you some strange maths...