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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

#321

Post by shreyshnaccount »

DenisM wrote: post #253
hobo_in_library wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's basically saying "other people seem to think this college is good, so we'll nudge them up a few points" So does page rank or citation index - popularity begets visibility, begets popularity.

I usually love this kind of feedback loops in systems but this one is kinda sad

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

#322

Post by shreyshnaccount »

geraldwhen wrote: post #254
mwint wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the forms should be made too complex to be filled with a calculator, to encourage doing things the right way…

Wouldn’t work. Entire state budgets are accounted for by spreadsheets without formulas, emailed between people in an office with no revision control. A few years ago when 50 million went missing, I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the budgeting process, and it was worse than you could possibly imagine. There was an attempt to go the software route, but a nepotism deal left the budgeting department with a worse system than…

lowest bidder took the 50mil. on a serious note tho, this is craziness. technical education and knowing how to code should be mandatory for these kinds of jobs.

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

#323

Post by spindle »

Fomite wrote: post #195
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…

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.

I didn't know that about Harvard. That's so sad. I've seen how devastated the rejects can be.

My anecdote is that I was once recruited by one of the best departments in the world in my field, at a very junior level ... and then, before I started, my contract was rewritten to be at a higher level, because they'd found out that that would allow them to count my grants in their metrics. Not only is this obviously dodgy, but I think it's actually illegal in Australia (since better-qualified candidates weren't given the opportunity to apply for the post at the higher level), but they did it anyway.

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

#324

Post by simonh »

Spivak wrote: post #293
simonh wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that applicants by definition don’t have personal experience of how good the school is, it’s all perception. With page rank and citations the expectation is those linking to or citing something have read it and have reason to value it.

Same with students applying. They’re betting that students aren’t applying completely randomly to schools and that the research they do beforehand isn’t entirely noise and has some signal that will show up in the average. I mean it’s a pretty darn conservative proposition to say “we think that averaged over the entire population of applicants that the schools that students spend their time applying to will trend, how…

I'm in the UK, but my eldest is starting Uni this September and rankings played a huge role in her selection of colleges. Yes of course she looked at their prospectuses and visited a few of them, but the shortlist of the ones to look at and visit itself was based on rankings.

It's like the XKCD about Wikipedia entries being cited in articles, which get cited in papers, which then get cited in the same Wikipedia article.

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

#326

Post by geraldwhen »

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #322
geraldwhen wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t work. Entire state budgets are accounted for by spreadsheets without formulas, emailed between people in an office with no revision control. A few years ago when 50 million went missing, I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the budgeting process, and it was worse than you could possibly imagine. There was an attempt to go the software route, but a nepotism deal left the budgeting department with a worse system than…

lowest bidder took the 50mil. on a serious note tho, this is craziness. technical education and knowing how to code should be mandatory for these kinds of jobs.

Most of the budgeting department is highschool graduates with a few higher ups with accounting degrees.

The pay is abysmal either way. You would make more money at an entry level software job anywhere.

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

#328

Post by CogitoCogito »

unosama wrote: post #123
CogitoCogito wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You add a simple and reasonable (until it gets abused) assumption to your model which allows a lesser data collection burden on thousands of universities. I wouldn't call it a restriction.

I don't agree that there's a good argument for ignoring the class sizes for half the year to decrease data collection burden. The data they're ignoring is of utmost importance to the statistic (well to the statistic as basically everyone will understand it since no one reads "average class size" and thinks "average class size of only half the classes").

In any case, the quality of the argument doesn't really matter. If the number is being gamed so trivially and yet US News continues to ignore spring classes, then the restriction has gone from bizarre and unnecessary to actively malicious. US News is basically colluding with the universities to engage in fraud.

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

#329

Post by raygelogic »

saalweachter wrote: post #33
kens wrote: post #26

There's a very interesting article "How to Game the College Rankings" about how Northeastern University's president focused on improving the university's ranking. In 1996, it was a "third-tier, blue-collar, commuter-based university" rated #162. The new university president had a singleminded goal: to improve the ranking. He got the university into the top 100 in 2006 and into the top 50 by 2013. https://www.bostonma…

Now the interesting question: did Northwestern^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heastern get meaningfully better for students between 1996 and 2013? Did they graduate in higher numbers? Did they have better career outcomes? Did more get into better(?) grad schools? What is their median income? Are they happier, did they enjoy college more?

I've worked with a number of northeastern university grads, and they are consistently well prepared. NEU has co-op program, a standard part of their undergrad, where they get like a year of experience before graduating (5-year undergrad is the norm). who knows if the school is what creates the difference, but grads are really well prepared in general.

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

#330

Post by cschmidt »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #96
verst wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I went to a liberal arts college and had small class sizes (most around 9-15 in size, with the largest being 30) - I could see my professors 1:1 pretty much anytime I wanted, but there was also a preceptor (TA) for each class who didn't teach, but was available to answer questions related to assignments, projects etc. I went to the house of many of my professors for food or drinks too. Generally also wa…

>The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. What's ironic about this though is how many universities won't accept their own undergrads into their grad programs... IE: they know that their undergrad programs are sub-standard but they don't seem to take action to improve them because the money and the focus is on the grad programs.

When I applied for grad school (long ago) they just said it was better to experience another department. The undergrad classes we similar enough to the grad classes that it was good to see a different approach. So if you had a family reason (spouse's job etc) that meant you needed to stay in the area, then they'd let you apply. Otherwise, they wouldn't write recommendation letters to our department.
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