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U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

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Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#191

Post by jdnordy »

Just when you think it's time to count hire education out because of bloated administrative spending, overwhelming student debt, and poor technical training for real world jobs, a light shines in the darkness.

I guess there's still hope if higher education can learn from Professors of the likes of Michael Thaddeus. He and others like him make pursing a degree valuable. The administration can go...

Note: read the original document: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#192

Post by xdavidliu »

humanistbot wrote: post #164
burlesona wrote: post #3

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…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

this is also paraphrased in the paper by the Columbia professor.

> Almost any numerical standard, no matter how closely related to academic merit, becomes a malignant force as soon as universities know that it is the standard. A proxy for merit, rather than merit itself, becomes the goal.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#193

Post by bredren »

hackyhacky wrote: post #7
burlesona wrote: post #3

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…

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…

I TA'd in the attendance office at my high school back in the day.

The city's tracking of student attendance only lasted a portion of the year or a portion of each quarter.

During those times, much more effort went into calling the homes of missing students and finding out why they were not showing up to class.

I remember asking about why all the calls were happening or not happening and it was sort of quietly explained by the staffer: measurement of attendance affected how the school was being evaluated by the district. Presumably, budget was hooked to it in some way.

I didn't make any waves about it because "working" in this office was super powerful and the staffer always brought in cookies for us. Amazing gig.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#194

Post by evouga »

lazyjeff wrote: post #108
sam-2727 wrote: post #94

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.…

I've been looking at the bias in rankings for a little while. I think one way to identify and raise awareness of the biases, is just put rankings together side-by-side. I did this for computer science programs, and there's some interesting differences that I noticed: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-co...

The focus on best paper awards is odd as the major conferences of some CS subfields dole out awards as if they were party favors, and those of other subfields don't have best paper awards at all.

For instance SIGCHI 2021 had 28 best papers out of 747 accepted papers (or 3.7%) whereas CVPR 2021 had one best paper out of 1660 accepted papers (0.06%).

I have no opinion about whether it's "better" to be stingy or generous with best paper awards. But obviously any kind of ranking that doesn't account for differences between conferences and subfields is going to be quite suspect.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#195

Post by Fomite »

hackyhacky wrote: post #7
burlesona wrote: post #3

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…

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…

Similarly, at a large land grant university, we talk a lot about improving our rankings, but acknowledge that one of the major metrics (% of students not accepted) is something that's contrary to our mission.

It was an open secret when I was in Boston that Harvard actively encourages people to "give it a shot" when they know full well they're not getting in to boost that metric.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#196

Post by rayiner »

corrral wrote: post #126
gnicholas wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, there’s some “new gold rush money” thinking going on in this thread. Harvard has had 5 US Presidents. Yale has had 3. Stanford has had just one. Not a single Supreme Court justice went to Stanford. 4 went to Yale and 4 went to Harvard.

Stanford tied with Harvard for 6 Senators in the 117th Congress, impressively, but obviously Harvard dominates that metric over a longer time.

Harvard still has more than twice as many billionaire alumni notwithstanding how many billionaires these days are in the tech industry.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#197

Post by lettergram »

burlesona wrote: post #3

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 FOIA requested a lot of universities and man do they fight to keep their stuff secret.

https://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/

Often I’d find the person in charge on linkedin and email them directly (work email obviously). And dig around until I found the particular person.

UIUC put up a particular fight when I FOIA requested information about their post-graduate surveys. They’re definitely manipulating there. I was in the process of filing a lawsuit when covid hit and gave up because I wasn’t sure if I’d need the funds (plus court shutdown at the time).

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#198

Post by Fomite »

peanuty1 wrote: post #34
dataphyte wrote: post #2

US colleges foresee a future where they are under attack for being absurdly selective, what some are now calling being "highly rejective". I think they want to avoid being targeted by the fairness wonks anymore than they already are. Also, US News and World Report rankings have major problems, for instance, the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality, but doesn't account for price, giving schoo…

> the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality. wtf

Having eaten some absolutely miserable dorm food in my time, I get it.

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#199

Post by adolph »

greymalik wrote: post #116
hackyhacky wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Goodhardt’s law in action.

Goodhart's Law

The key problem of using a measure as a metric is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s law. The law is based on a 1975 paper on economic regulation, and is typically paraphrased as “When a measure becomes a metric, it ceases to be a good measure.” When managing a system, this problem is critical, but is deeper than it at first seems, as I’ll argue.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/09/goodharts-law-and-why-...

Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

#200

Post by alanfranz »

rglullis wrote: post #93
lumost wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And yet this seems a self fulfilling observation .

How can somebody raise from the bottom 20% if they get subpar education?

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