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

Post by rayiner » Tue, Jul 12, 2022, 1:03 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #203

rayiner wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

There's nothing inherently white, anglo-saxon or protestant about the oligarchy that these institutions preserve; they will very happily pass on to a new generation of westernised, college-educated liberals of all races and genders but no more variation in thought than the one they replaced. The cultural focus on such ephemera gives them a very useful fig leaf for excluding the demographic that it actually matters to…

Post by DenisM » Tue, Jul 12, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

hobo_in_library wrote: post #229

Fomite wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Acceptance rates is a really poor choice of input for college ranking It's basically saying "other people seem to think this college is good, so we'll nudge them up a few points" In other words, it's attempting to measure public perception about the college instead of the actual results it produces. How the public _thinks_ a certain college is shouldn't factor into how good you _tell_ the public that that college per…

Post by alexpotato » Tue, Jul 12, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

Post by gumby » Tue, Jul 12, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #195

hackyhacky wrote: post #7

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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…

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.

Post by SneakyTornado29 » Tue, Jul 12, 2022, 1:31 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #196

corrral wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…