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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

#341

Post by naniwaduni »

cma wrote: post #287
naniwaduni wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression has long been that the endowment per capita metric provides about as good a ranking as any of the third-party rankings within a category. Where it disagrees with US News, it usually matches my intuitions; and where it disagrees with my intuitions, I usually learn that the college in question has a better reputation than my impression. It doesn't do a great job comparing across categories, but then, neit…

Some top colleges don't have alumni/legacy preference so that endowment measure maybe gets skewed away from them. MIT and I think Caltech.

They still do great on this metric, though! MIT comes out looking a bit short of Harvard, on par with Stanford. These schools ride a bit higher than the top tier of LACs (Williams/Amherst/Pomona/Swarthmore), which isn't necessarily the fairest comparison, but Caltech fits right in with those.

Maybe they'd be richer if their admissions was more open about taking quasi-bribes, but I suspect you're dramatically underestimating the orders of magnitude of difference that appear on this metric. You find clear tier gaps.

Don't get me wrong, this is a silly proxy metric about three degrees out from anything you'd actually want to know. But it gets surprisingly good results for how simple it is to tabulate.

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

#342

Post by naniwaduni »

saagarjha wrote: post #44

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…

Suspending the whole thing would be suspending pretty much US News's entire remaining raison d'être at this point.

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

#343

Post by frognumber »

whimsicalism wrote: post #317
frognumber wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insider who worked with a lot of schools: Yale is a much, much better school than Stanford. Stanford beats Yale on hype. A lot of the elites are hype-over-substance, and it's often hard for a naive audience to screen out which ones.

Stanford certainly beats Yale in CS quality both in terms of peers and instruction. I have significant experience with HYP, less-so with Stanford. I don't think I am a naive audience, I know many people from these schools and have attended classes, either due to being a student there or online videos in the case of Stanford & Princeton.

True, but CS isn't everything. Stanford is definitely much more of a tech school than Yale.

I'd never have gone to Yale because it was a poor fit for my interests. That's different from being a poor school. Overall school quality is less important than fit. Given my interests, I would have pick Stanford over Yale (and in turn pick Caltech, CMU, or Georgia Tech over Stanford).

That said, Yale is a phenomenal experience. It's very academic in the classic sense -- deep, philosophical discussions, and thoughtfully exploring topics in a way that's increasingly rare in the fast-paced elites. It gives a lot of what people assume they'll get out of a small liberal arts college (which is different from the reality; most small liberal arts colleges are expensive and horrible).

I have little knowledge or Princeton. I know both Harvard and Stanford in great depth.

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

#344

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

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.

“Hire a coder” appears to be good advice for many organizations, but there’s not enough coders for everyone to do it, so most will do without.

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

#345

Post by AceyMan »

telotortium wrote: post #306
pyuser583 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really weird Cambridge is ahead of Oxford in world rankings. Cambridge has a reputation for strongly preferring UK students.

Cambridge has traditionally been ahead in science and mathematics (e.g., it's where Newton was a professor). On the other hand, Oxford until the 1800s was pretty much a seminary and theological college. As a non-Brit, I still get the impression that Oxford is where you would find the best philosophers and other humanities experts, while Cambridge is still slightly ahead in STEM

Hmm ... Cambridge had Russell and Wittgenstein, e.g., you have that bass-akwards wrt Philosophy departments.

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

#346

Post by Fomite »

gundmc wrote: post #304
draz wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They expect students of a certain caliber. If the applicant exceeds their expectations, the university assumes the student is using this application as a “safety school.”

This is sometimes referred to as "Tufts Syndrome" or "Yield Protection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection

cries in Jumbo alum

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

#347

Post by bdowling »

kragen wrote: post #267
bdowling wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that quote is that if you don't learn to get good grades (e.g., because you are actually learning and not studying for the test), then the resulting bad grades can be extremely damaging to your future.

How is that a problem with the quote? It sounds like a problem with the system, a problem the essay correctly identified.

The essay could be summed up using the following quote from Ghostbusters (1984).

"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've WORKED in the private sector. They expect results."

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

#348

Post by kragen »

bdowling wrote: post #347
kragen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a problem with the quote? It sounds like a problem with the system, a problem the essay correctly identified.

The essay could be summed up using the following quote from Ghostbusters (1984). "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've WORKED in the private sector. They expect results ."

That quote is related to the essay in that both the quote and the essay discuss incentive structures in academia and industry, but that is where the similarity ends; they say completely different things about those incentive structures.
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