Rankings manipulation

It’s recently come out that Columbia had been fudging certain metrics in order to game the US News & World Report college rankings. Can’t say I’m surprised that an Ivy would do this... my only question is who cares? [www.theguardian.com]

Who cares? Only every parent, and some kids, who are rank-conscious. They fear that Rutgers or UMass (and certainly Michigan or Berkeley) give the same education, and want the prestige of being a top 10 or top 25 school and preferably and Ivy or Stanford Duke MIT.

BTW the top universities for 2022-2023 per US News:

National universities
1. Princeton
2. MIT
3. Harvard (tie)
3. Stanford (tie)
3. Yale (tie)
6. Chicago
7. Hopkins (tie)
7. Penn (tie)
9. Cal Tech
10. Duke (tie)
10. Northwestern (tie)
12. Dartmouth <-- ranked higher than Cornell? really?
13. Brown (tie) <--see above
13. Vanderbilt (tie)
15. Rice
16. Washington U <-- the one in St. Louis
17. Cornell
18. Columbia
19. Notre Dame
20. Cal Berkeley
21. UCLA
22. Carnegie Mellon
23. Emory
24. Georgetown
25. NYU (tie)
25. Michigan (tie)
25. USC (tie)
25. Virginia (tie)*
* A coincidence, surely. And yet, when it's done, three additional schools can point to being in the top 25.
5 1/2 of the top schools including Cornell (the 1/2) are public
[www.usnews.com]

The top national liberal arts colleges:

1. Williams
2. Amherst
3. Pomona
4. Swarthmore
5. Wellesley
...
15. Hamilton
18. Colgate
68. St. Lawrence
72. Hobart

Nearby schools

National universities
36. University of Rochester
51. Rensselaer
62. Syracuse
77. Stony Brook
83. SUNY Binghamton
89. SUNY Buffalo
105. RIT
127. Clarkson
182. SUNY Albany

Regional Universities North (#1 is Providence)
16. Geneseo
85. Cortland
156-201. Ithaca


Regional colleges North (#1 is Coast Guard Academy)
8. Elmira
11. Cazenmovia

I was on the faculty in AgEc/ARME/AEM the first year that we entered AACSB -- the organization that accredits business schools. AACSB uses metrics similar to US News but a significant factor in their ranking system is the rank assigned by the deans of the member business schools. Cornell debuted at NUMBER FIVE! The deans of most of the other 400+ member schools really had no idea of what kind of business education AEM provided, what kind of internships and jobs our students obtained compared to other schools, etc., but apparently because we were part of an Ivy League institution the assumption was AEM had to be great. It was hard for me to take any ranking process seriously after that.

BTW, while AEM, now Dyson, has not been in the top 5 for all of the last 20 years, it is consistently in the top 10 so while I don't take rankings seriously, I have to concede that at least some units at Cornell benefit from the rankings.

The way schools artificially goose their selectivity is both hilarious and criminal.

The instant a ranking methodology is published it is abused. There is a shit ton of money on the line. Everybody is cheating. Maybe that means it's a wash.

University rankings are meaningless anyway. It's the department, and even the specialization within the department, and those vary wildly at the same college let alone university. The rankings are mostly just a way for privilege to reproduce itself in the next generation. And god bless it -- I paid good money for this credential; might as well put my granddaughter on easy street (I mean... until the guillotines).

Dartmouth and Brown are probably so highly ranked because of small class sizes.

dag14
I was on the faculty in AgEc/ARME/AEM the first year that we entered AACSB -- the organization that accredits business schools...

Good insight, thank you.

AACSB sounds like what I worked on the first day of ninth-grade typing class.

Cornell is #1 in schools with an undergraduate enrollment > 10,000.

Still doesn't mean a whole lot.

RichH
Cornell is #1 in schools with an undergraduate enrollment > 10,000. Still doesn't mean a whole lot.

Cornell is the Great American University in offering a first-rate education but not to a handful: 15,500 undergraduate students out of ~62,000 Ivy undergrads. One of the eight Ivy schools educates one-quarter of the Ivy students.

billhoward

RichH
Cornell is #1 in schools with an undergraduate enrollment > 10,000. Still doesn't mean a whole lot.

Cornell is the Great American University in offering a first-rate education but not to a handful: 15,500 undergraduate students out of ~62,000 Ivy undergrads. One of the eight Ivy schools educates one-quarter of the Ivy students.

I thought Penn had 10000 undergrads

nshapiro

billhoward

RichH
Cornell is #1 in schools with an undergraduate enrollment > 10,000. Still doesn't mean a whole lot.

Cornell is the Great American University in offering a first-rate education but not to a handful: 15,500 undergraduate students out of ~62,000 Ivy undergrads. One of the eight Ivy schools educates one-quarter of the Ivy students.

I thought Penn had 10000 undergrads

9962 according to The Magazine doing the rankings.

Anbd even if Penn had >10,000, maybe some other ratings weightings shifts. You know, everyone gets a ribbon.

It can work both ways. Northwestern didn't accept me because they knew many Illinois residents used it as a safety school. Why pay approximately 10k in 1977 tuition dollars when a very similar vocational school underwritten by the State of Illinois offered a similar education at $1500 (or less IIRC) per year.

My computer processed application to U of I was delayed when a keyboard error of some sort sent it to The University of Missouri. I was therfore wondering if I would be admitted in the fall of '77 and called Northwestern to find out why they had not even answered my application for admission. The person I talked to asked me if I wasn't likely to attend U of I. When I responded yes the response from NW was that I could call them again if I wanted action on my app. They had no intention of accepting me if I planned to go to U of I.

In the spring of 2005 my daughter for some reason decided against going to BC. However she also decided she wanted to turn them down and proceeded with her application even though she had no intention of attending. I remember one guy rubbing me the wrong way during our visit to the school. I don't think my daughter had the same reason for wanting a bit of payback.

“a keyboard error of some sort . . . I was therfore . . .”

Your daughter’s decision about BC reminded me of a Cornell friend who wrote to another Ivy that had accepted him. He said something like “Thank you for admitting me, but I regret to inform you that I will not be attending . . . I wish you the best in your future endeavors.”
.

It must frost BC that BU has moved ahead of the Eagles on some college rankings.

marty

In the spring of 2005 my daughter for some reason decided against going to BC. However she also decided she wanted to turn them down and proceeded with her application even though she had no intention of attending. I remember one guy rubbing me the wrong way during our visit to the school. I don't think my daughter had the same reason for wanting a bit of payback.

I applied to Sucks and Yale just so I could turn them down. They beat me to it.

Didn't matter, tho. Once I visited Cornell, there was nowhere else I wanted to attend.

Jeff Hopkins '82
Once I visited Cornell, there was nowhere else I wanted to attend.

Same here. Fuckers caught me on a beautiful day.

Trotsky

Jeff Hopkins '82
Once I visited Cornell, there was nowhere else I wanted to attend.

Same here. Fuckers caught me on a beautiful day.

Same. Literally changed my application to early admission that day iirc

abmarks

Trotsky

Jeff Hopkins '82
Once I visited Cornell, there was nowhere else I wanted to attend.

Same here. Fuckers caught me on a beautiful day.

Same. Literally changed my application to early admission that day iirc

My first visit to campus in October 1980 resulted in a freak snowstorm that left us stranded overnight in Binghamton.

scoop85
My first visit to campus in October 1980 resulted in a freak snowstorm that left us stranded overnight in Binghamton.

I saw Binghamton and Albany in freak snowstorms. For some reason it damped my enthusiasm for Albany (maybe seeing half the library occupants slumped over their books), less so for Binghamton.

Apropos of rankings manipulation, which leads to the affluent trying to park their kids in nicest schools, I came across an NYT article from five years ago on how some schools are more elite than the Ivies when it comes to admitting really rich kids relative to the non-affluent. [www.nytimes.com]

This disparity table compares the number of students at the school in the top 1% of HHI versus the percentage in the bottom 60%.

10 Schools with Greatest Rich vs. Not So Rich Student Population 
Rank    School                  Top 1%  Bottom 60%
1.	Washington U (St Louis)	21.7	 6.1
2.	Colorado College	24.2	10.5
3.	Washington and 	        19.1	 8.4
4.	Colby College	        20.4	11.1
5.	Trinity College (Conn.)	26.2	14.3
6.	Bucknell University	20.4	12.2
7.	Colgate University	22.6	13.6
8.	Kenyon College	        19.8	12.2
9.	Middlebury College	22.8	14.2
10.	Tufts University	18.6	11.8
Top 1%     = $630K
Bottom 60% = <$65K

In the case of Wash U (15,000 students), about 3,300 students come from families with income over $600,000 versus 900 with income of $65,000 and below. BTW, Washington U's endowment is 1.5X Cornell's.