141–150 of 348 posts
Kind of sad that US News decided to unrank just Columbia rather than suspending the whole thing. If one college games your ranking to the point that a professor from the university is like "hey you guys this seems pretty sus", it's probably true that all the other universities have the same problem and just don't have anyone willing to talk about it. As it stands it seems like just Columbia did something wrong, when…
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Why is small class size a good thing? Anecdotally, you get better class material and TA staff in larger lectures. Why aren't Universities able to innovate here?
My uncle was a math teacher in Brazil - mostly test-prep course schools for university exams, later he opened some of his own private schools. He used to say two things: that he has estimated to have taught at least 100 thousand people in his life (seems just crazy boasting, but feasible when you are working in 5-8 different schools per semester and each class has 100-250 people) and that a teacher is always teaching…
Per the article this came in response to questions raised by a Columbia faculty member critiquing the university's data. I thought that report[1] was actually more interesting than the original article. As per the quote at the top of the report: > Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score... It would be shocking t…
I have a friend who works at Duke University’s marketing analytics and performance metrics team. It’s filled with MBAs who’s job is to massage the numbers and metrics that are asked by US News every year and provide them to US News.
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The gap between the schools' rhetoric and reality is pretty funny; I was just writing about it the other day: https://seliger.com/2022/07/06/nonprofit-boards-of-directors... : You can see a lot of hypocrisy that’s uncritically accepted by a lot of organizations, including nonprofits. Exclusionary higher education is a particular notable example, given the soaring rhetoric of “inclusion” spouted by some people involve…
It's truly mind-boggling. The Ivies were always bastions for maintaining the position of WASP elites. They still serve that function. Maybe there is a bit more wiggle room about skin color, but they still function to socialize the next generation of people to run WASP institutions like "JP Morgan Chase."
The beginning of the conclusion of the original study [1] is worth repeating: No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.” Students are poorly served by rankings.…
Just because you can't get an exact measurement does not mean that a metric does not exist or is not useful.
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I'd give Stanford a bit more credit than this, but people I know who were admitted to both all went to Harvard. Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard.
> Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard. Is that no longer Yale? From the perspective of someone who had a rather poor exposure to universities during my high school years—so, precisely what someone gets from pop-culture and osmosis without anyone in particular acting as a guide—my impression was that Harvard and Yale were unambiguously the Big Two, and everything e…
Per the article this came in response to questions raised by a Columbia faculty member critiquing the university's data. I thought that report[1] was actually more interesting than the original article. As per the quote at the top of the report: > Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score... It would be shocking t…
My kid just went through college selection process and I can assure you that the US News rankings are largely irrelevant in terms of decision making. The revealed preference score[1] or global university rankings[2] are much closer to how students, their counselors, and their parents rank the universities. For instance, any ranking that does not have Stanford first among non specialized US universities (i.e. excludin…
Cambridge has a reputation for strongly preferring UK students.
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> Stanford is surely the most prestigious general-purpose university west of, well, Harvard. Is that no longer Yale? From the perspective of someone who had a rather poor exposure to universities during my high school years—so, precisely what someone gets from pop-culture and osmosis without anyone in particular acting as a guide—my impression was that Harvard and Yale were unambiguously the Big Two, and everything e…
I've seen a few places that Stanford and Harvard are close to 50/50 on cross admits now, and that Stanford has even passed Harvard a few times (which no school has ever done). Likely a lot to do with press around Stanford students becoming rich Silicon Valley founders. My original point is that there has been a lot of changes in how students perceive schools that may not get reflected in the US News ratings.
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Your suspicion is correct. I've taught at several US universities, and it's an open secret that the administrative takes steps to manipulate numbers in order to secure better rankings. Typical example: a small, prestigious liberal arts college always has smaller class sizes in the fall semester than in the spring semester. Why? Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only tak…
> Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring. What a bizarre and totally unnecessary restriction.