Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161
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."
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.
Reinventing the wheel? (Score:2, Informative)
link to original paper (Score:5, Informative)
No link to paper? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Reputation (Score:4, Informative)