I have an interest in researching CS programs within a specific geographical area in the states but am having trouble finding good data on student outcomes and associated metrics. If this ranking data is bs or gamed, then what’s the best available resource for helping to determine what programs are good, bad or otherwise?
U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
241–250 of 348 posts
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#242Lol colleges are more expensive country club than place of higher education. We really shouldn't be surprised with the corruption anymore after we found out how easy it was to get on the rowing team of most of these places.
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Most colleges have the ability to graduate close 100% of their students. If a school only admits students who have at least two years at another college with high grades, their graduation numbers will skyrocket. A highly selective college, like Harvard, could even refuse to grant credit for those two years. There are less nefarious ways of selecting a class of likely graduators: leadership in extracurriculars is high…
bit OT but I'm curious what a college that ONLY selects extracurricular leaders would look like. This is coming from a software job where career advancement depends on being the lead in projects. IME people are mostly chill and happy to do the "grunt" work, but what if EVERYBODY wanted to be "team lead"?
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#244Earlier 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…
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 explai…
Ah yes, the ol’ warm-body count.
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re the #1 best rankings company.
According to US News and World Report
They sort of put themselves on the map for college rankings since 1983 but I would hardly say it’s a fair ranking system. For example, they love to tie multiple schools together: 2x 2nd place, 2x 6th place, 4x 9th places, 3x 14th places, 2x 17th places, and so forth.
Here’s a classic case where if you do something long enough, people will trust you.
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 generou…
Fair point, it's something I'm aware of and it's a bit intentional to counterbalance the "normalization bias" already done in other rankings, if that's what you meant by "account for differences".
To put another way, to count in a way such that a CVPR best paper is worth 28-fold a CHI best paper is also quite suspect. There's a rabbit hole you can go down to find the best conference to submit to where the submission-to-best-papers is low, to optimize for this.
PS: note that there's an upper bound to best paper awards, which is "< 1% of submitted papers".
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#247Per 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…
Funny how this reminded me of a PG essay[1] The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
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.
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#248Earlier 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…
Imagine college A that 100 apply for and all 100 get in vs. college B where 10,000 people applied and only 100 got in. If both colleges are choosing students based off of some measurable criteria, let's say the SAT score. Would you expect to have higher average scores at college A or college B? Obviously college B would have students with better SAT scores simply because they are so much more selective. Assuming that…
Even so, you don’t need to guess the reasons for acceptance on aggregate data - you can check if the SAT scores were higher. At least that would tell you for certain.
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which allows a lesser data collection burden on thousands of universities. How's it supposed to do that? Universities all already collect the data on enrollment for every class they offer.
Spoken like a software engineer! Now imagine every form is being filled out manually by an administrator with a calculator.
Maybe the forms should be made too complex to be filled with a calculator, to encourage doing things the right way…
Re: U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings
#250Per 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'm really curious what the personal cost to that faculty member is. Surely this report was not well liked by the administration.