Dear OC community,

This thread is about school rankings and how flawed they are. I'm asking the OC population how they define what a good school is. Every college you visit in the country will say whatever program you feed them is "one of the best in the country". You'll also have friends and family that are adamant that Ivy league schools are among the best, and there are no schools(maybe outside of Stanford, Michigan, or Northwestern) that even come close.

From what I've read is that rankings are derived from graduation rates, average salaries, graduates opinion of the school, etc. All of these things automatically build in a self-fulfilling bias. Let's take Harvard. Harvard gets the smartest STUDENTS in the world to come to their school because of the perception that they are a good school, and some even think it is the best school in the country. These students, because they are already smart people, are likely to 1) graduate, 2) have higher salaries, 3) be indoctrinated into giving the school high regard. These three things tell you nothing about the true quality of the school because they are all based on a biased sample size.

What you really need to look at, IMO, is money. Why money? Money provides a way to increase the value added experience of college. Money can hire better professors, better technology, better facilities, etc. These are more important than any of the current metrics being used to evaluate schools.

Let me elaborate. For example, let's take Student A and Student B. They both have identical everything, grades, SAT/ACT scores, all the extra curricular, etc(although Student B is black so he can get into Harvard). We'll send Student A to say, Iowa University. There have been studies done(and I will provide links if requested) that have done this experiment and found that these two people are likely to make the same amount of money when they graduate. Now what can you conclude from that? That the only difference is that the person who went to Harvard is now more in debt than the person who went to Iowa.

The point of this thread, is rankings are bullshit. I'm not saying Harvard isn't the top Uni in the country(it is based on my metrics), this is simply some food for thought. Value added is more important, or should be more important than "prestige" of a Uni. If money isn't the best proxy to define value added, I'd like to see some studies done where you take two average students from high school, send them to different schools and see which one ends up making more in salary. That is the best way to define true value added especially if you can get a large enough sample size. The current system we have is BS. The current system we have is BS. The current system we have is BS.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

sleeper

tl;dr

tl;dr

tl;fu

tl;gfy

Is it Ohio State? Then it's a good school.

As you point out, it all depends on what you want to measure. "Value-added" is tough to quantify, as is "Value of relationships made during time." If you're looking at return on investment, 2-year schools do best, but I'm not sure if it follows that they're the best schools.

Plenty of academic literature points out that the prestige of a school largely serves as a signaling function for employers. E.g., my employer wants to hire smart people who are willing to work hard, and we don't want to spend tons of money finding those people. So we hire from a small subset of schools that we know have rigorous admissions criteria, which means we're basically outsourcing our HR decisions to someone else. It seems to work out alright.

I figured most people on here wouldn't read/understand the underlying message.

tl;dr version: The current ranking system for Universities is flawed. Mainly because its based on an 'easy' system rather than a true value added approach to ranking schools.

fan_from_texas;1055581 wrote:As you point out, it all depends on what you want to measure. "Value-added" is tough to quantify, as is "Value of relationships made during time." If you're looking at return on investment, 2-year schools do best, but I'm not sure if it follows that they're the best schools.

Actually I don't think its that tough, but you're right about the money issue. I don't think the big time universities would like to see literature that says they aren't as great as they think they are. Simple, do a study designed to take ACT/SAT scores going to a variety of schools and compare those average students salary in the aggregate. I choose salary because that is the best proxy there is for success. If at the end of your study, you conclude that Iowa grad with the same academic characteristics is making more money than another student and let's say another non-SEC school, then you can definitely say that Iowa is a better school(because it offer a higher value added).

There really is no "ranking" system...at least not in the US.

People claim the US News and World Report, but every college and university in the country knows it's not actually a "ranking" but a marketing ploy. It's political. It's based on who gives money and sponsors within their publications. It's common knowledge in the higher education scene about this. The administrators will continue to do it too because the general public thinks it is a "ranking."

The ranking process is pretty easy. If you're Notre Dame, you're the best. If you aren't Notre Dame, you're not the best and you might at well go to Devry or OSU, instead of Harvard or MIT.

sleeper;1055588 wrote:Actually I don't think its that tough, but you're right about the money issue. I don't think the big time universities would like to see literature that says they aren't as great as they think they are. Simple, do a study designed to take ACT/SAT scores going to a variety of schools and compare those average students salary in the aggregate. I choose salary because that is the best proxy there is for success. If at the end of your study, you conclude that Iowa grad with the same academic characteristics is making more money than another student and let's say another non-SEC school, then you can definitely say that Iowa is a better school(because it offer a higher value added).

That doesn't address the issue fully. Some schools (here's to you, Berkeley) are going to have a greater percentage of students who want to be organic farmers or social workers or whatever else, while others (here's to you, Wharton) will have a higher percentage who want to be investment bankers. Even if you account for ACT/SAT scores, how do you control for widespread differences in professions of choice? Even if both students received the same value-added education, the fact that they pursue careers with lower salaries would unfairly bias the rankings. Would you also adjust for regional COL/salary differentials? If not, schools placing in NYC will look much better than schools placing in midwestern markets, even if the actual standard of living given by that salary is lower.

We've got dolphins.

I went to the top ranked school in the country and I turned out alright.

fan_from_texas;1055609 wrote:That doesn't address the issue fully. Some schools (here's to you, Berkeley) are going to have a greater percentage of students who want to be organic farmers or social workers or whatever else, while others (here's to you, Wharton) will have a higher percentage who want to be investment bankers. Even if you account for ACT/SAT scores, how do you control for widespread differences in professions of choice? Even if both students received the same value-added education, the fact that they pursue careers with lower salaries would unfairly bias the rankings. Would you also adjust for regional COL/salary differentials? If not, schools placing in NYC will look much better than schools placing in midwestern markets, even if the actual standard of living given by that salary is lower.

These can all be justified with a large enough sample size. The assumption would be the choice of profession is randomly distributed.

Wharton is strictly a business school, I was more thinking to do this for the overall university and not the individual colleges within the university. I suppose you could also apply the same study to each individual college, whereas we compare say Wharton with Fisher.

I think the biggest flaw in the study is the perceived bias where you are willing to pay more money for someone with a Harvard degree because they went to Harvard rather than evaluating each student individually and paying them based on that. The irony is this very study would help weed out these biases.

fan_from_texas;1055609 wrote:That doesn't address the issue fully. Some schools (here's to you, Berkeley) are going to have a greater percentage of students who want to be organic farmers or social workers or whatever else, while others (here's to you, Wharton) will have a higher percentage who want to be investment bankers. Even if you account for ACT/SAT scores, how do you control for widespread differences in professions of choice? Even if both students received the same value-added education, the fact that they pursue careers with lower salaries would unfairly bias the rankings. Would you also adjust for regional COL/salary differentials? If not, schools placing in NYC will look much better than schools placing in midwestern markets, even if the actual standard of living given by that salary is lower.

sleeper;1055617 wrote:These can all be justified with a large enough sample size. The assumption would be the choice of profession is randomly distributed.

I think your assumption would not fix the issue that FFT pointed out.

FatHobbit;1055620 wrote:I think your assumption would not fix the issue that FFT pointed out.

Ok, then use a COL index to equalize all salaries.

Problem solved.

sleeper;1055617 wrote:These can all be justified with a large enough sample size. The assumption would be the choice of profession is randomly distributed.

I suspect that a large sample size would not fix this problem. Do you really think the percentage of people going to Penn/Harvard who want to become investment bankers is equal to that going to Oberlin/Berkeley? Even assuming equal aptitude and ability, I suspect that on the undergrad level, value differentiations among professions of choice at various schools makes this very difficult to determine. I say this with some confidence because similar analyses have already been done for law schools (where it's easier to do because you're dealing with a much smaller class size). Dramatically different percentages of students from Yale pursue public interest projects than do Harvard/Stanford, who tend to head off to firms. Yet it seems pretty clear that Yalies could end up in MFH if they wanted to--do we penalize the school by saying it doesn't add value when the students choose lower-paying but lifestyle-friendly.

Do you really think that you could figure out where every graduating student went, the salary they made, and then adjust for COL? It's great in theory, but it's impossible to do in practice.

Current rankings are undeniably flawed. I don't think we can realistically do anything to fix them.

dlazz;1055616 wrote:I went to the top ranked school in the country and I turned out alright.

I think you mean county, not country.

fan_from_texas;1055658 wrote:
Current rankings are undeniably flawed. I don't think we can realistically do anything to fix them.

If there is a way, it'll be a B1G grad who figures it out and you can take that to the bank.

sleeper;1055680 wrote:If there is a way, it'll be a B1G grad who figures it out and you can take that to the bank.

Reps.

B1G SECURE!

Do they have good food, hot BITCHES, and are they in a badass city.

DeyDurkie5;1055715 wrote:Do they have good food, hot BITCHES, and are they in a badass city.

Undergrad: Yes, no, no
Grad school: Yes, no, yes

Damn.

tl;dgaf

Tobias Fünke;1055667 wrote:I think you mean county, not country.

That would make it best school in the county by default.

Use your head.