Ivy-equivalents (ranking based on alumni outcomes) take 2

College Search & Lists
1

A couple years ago, I decided to do an outcomes-based ranking to determine tiers of schools (again, mostly for bragging rights; for different career paths, like Wall Street vs. engineering vs. art vs. design, etc., I’d actually recommend different combinations of school options that don’t neatly fit in to these tiers).

At the time, I used 4 metrics:

  1. Percentage entering elite professional schools (for MBA/JD/MD).
  2. Production of “American Leaders”, who are mostly leaders in business, government, and the arts.
  3. Percentage winning prestigious national student awards.
  4. Percentage getting PhDs.

Now that I’ve found this old thread (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/294885-whos-who-among-american-students.html), I’ve decided to add in a “Percentage who appear in Who’s Who” component.

Since I value professional success more than academic success (since most graduates will join the workforce rather than academia, I again value those higher). Though I assign different points to different tiers.
So for “American Leaders”, the top 25 get 3 points, the next 25 2 points, and 51-75 1 point each.
For Elite Professional Schools, Prestigious National Awards, and Who’s Who, the top 25 get 2 points each and 26-50 1 point each
For PhDs (since a PhD may not actually be all that useful), only the top 25 get 1 point.

So here’s the list (and keep in mind that schools within 2-3 points of each other are essentially the same level):

Ivies & equivalents (14 RU’s and 9 LAC’s):
10: HYPSM + WAS LACs
9: Brown, Chicago, Rice, Pomona, Haverford
8: Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern
7: UPenn, Bowdoin, Carleton, Oberlin, Smith, Wellesley

Near-Ivies (9 RU’s, 2 service academies, and 10 LAC’s):
6: Georgetown, Barnard, Wesleyan
5: Caltech, UMich, ND, UVa, Bryn Mawr, CMC, Grinnell, Middlebury, Reed, Vassar
4: Cal, Rochester, Tufts, Wisconsin-Madison, West Point, Naval Academy, Macalester, W&L

Other good schools (11 RU’s, most of them giant, 3 LAU’s, and 14 LAC’s):
3: NYU, UCLA, UIUC, UNC, Brandeis, W&M, Davidson, Harvey Mudd, New College of Florida
2: Colorado, CWRU, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, USC, UT-Austin, Vanderbilt, Lehigh, Bates, Bennington, Colby, Colgate, Hamilton, Holy Cross, Mt. Holyoke, Occidental, Pitzer, Scripps, Trinity

2

I thought the Who’s Who books were just vanity scams where you pay for an expensive book because your name is in it.

3

@katkatmouse, a lot of them are.

Marquis Who’s Who is suppose to be the gold standard in the US and supposedly, you can’t buy your way in to that one.

4

The methodology is suspect at best. Really, whos’ who? Hardly the “gold standard”.

5

I have thought, for some time, that LACs deserve more notoriety than they receive and should be more widely known and respected than they are.

So I’m not surprised to see many LACs in this ranking.

I’m also stoked to see UW-Madison well placed.

6

The results aren’t too far off the CC Prestigiosity rankings.

(Which is the gold standard of rankings)

7

@blah2008, eh, what methodology isn’t dodgy?

Test scores? Schools can game that (by, for instance, offering only those with high test scores admission in the fall while still admitting kids with low scores via transfer or having them start in the spring).

Admit rate? Can be gamed a ton of ways as well.

The reason why I like the outcomes-based metrics is because they can’t be gamed and they express “true” quality in a way. After all, students will become alums.

And yes, any one metric could be noisy, but that’s why I use 5 of them.

8

Looks good to me since both my kids’ schools are on your list. :smiley:

9

show your metrics and sources. If I wanted to waste time and make a similar arbitrary ranking, I would look at non-institutionally sponsored National Merit Scholars (normalized by freshman class size) for one. Northwestern, Michigan (high rankers on your list) would rank quite poorly. I could also come up with 5 criterion and show a completely disparate view.

10

@blah2008, the other 4 sources are from here:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1682986-ivy-equivalents-p1.html

Except that I used the 2015 Forbes component ranking numbers that I saved to my computer last year.

And ranking by non-sponsored NMS is silly when some colleges sponsor and some don’t, so those who do would automatically drop to zero in that ranking. Not to mention that what alums a school turns out is what matters, not how many NMS it got.
Which is why these aren’t arbitrary criteria and all measure how many notable alums are produced by a school.

11

4 edit: LACs deserve more respect... not notoriety. Cripes.

12

Purple, what on earth are you talking about? “And ranking by non-sponsored NMS is silly when some colleges sponsor and some don’t, so those who do would automatically drop to zero in that ranking. Not to mention that what alums a school turns out is what matters, not how many NMS it got.”

They clearly delineate between those sponsored and not. Including those who actually earned a National Merit Scholarship not sponsored by the college yet still enrolled at a place that does sponsor.

http://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/images/gid2/editor_documents/annual_report.pdf

Seeing the proportion of NMS scholars is more useful than those who are in “Who’s Who”. I’ve never heard of this as a credible source, and I’ve earned all the usual suspect honor society/awards (Tau Beta Pi, NSFGRFP, NDSEG) . And neither have my friends that have won items like Phi Beta Kappa, Goldwater, Fulbright, Marshall, Gates, and Siebel scholarships

13

@blah2008, I’m not sure how old you are, but nobody who has worked for a while cares about NMS other than for scholarship purposes for their kid (and I was one back in the day). They do care about real-world accomplishments, which Who’s Who tries to measure.

In any case, “prestigious award winners” (like the Rhodes, Marshall, Goldwater, etc.) is also one of the criteria that I use, if you bothered to notice.

14

In my thirties working in consulting at McKinsey, so I’m working and not wasting time conjuring up arbitrary rankings.

NMS is not outcome based, but neither is Who’s who as a credible measure either.

15

In fact, I and most others had the same reaction as many in that thread you linked in your OP for Who’s Who: immediate reaction = “is this a scam?”

16

I’m also questioning how old you might be.

Anyone with basic comprehension of businesses and non-profits and honors societies should be able to differentiate between what is credible and not.

Here’s a hint:

www.tbp.org (Tau Beta Pi)

https://www.pbk.org/ (Phi Beta Kappa)

www.rhodesscholar.org/ (Rhodes Scholar)

https://www.betagammasigma.org (Business honor society)

us.fulbrightonline.org (fulbright scholar)

Now take a look at who’s who:

http://whoswhoamongstudents.com/faq

Notice the “.com” that most people with common sense would be able to decipher the true intent of the business as.

17

^I disagree. Northwestern would rank quite well even within that matrix.

In 2014, it got 216 NMS winners. Out of the 216, 167 were college sponsored. Even if you assume none of those 167 got any from NMSC, the number for Northwestern is still a respectable 49. But college sponsored and NMSC sponsored ones are not mutually exclusive; given that Northwestern’s SAT ranges are higher than some of the Ivies (mid-50% is 1400-1560), it’s reasonable to assume some of Northwestern sponsored winners were also NMSC sponsored winners.

http://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/images/gid2/editor_documents/annual_report.pdf
http://enrollment.northwestern.edu/pdf/common-data/2015-16.pdf

18

@blah2008, I’m questioning how anyone who purports to work for McK isn’t capable of catching that “Marquis Who’s Who” is nowhere near the same thing as “Who’s Who Among Students”.

Guess they don’t pay you guys to be detail-oriented.

19

Ugh. OK, I copied in the wrong link in the original post. The link to the guy who did the work of ranking by Marquis Who’s Who is here:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/292515-schools-ranked-by-the-number-of-alumni-in-whos-who-p1.html

20

The ironic thing is that JHU actually gets full points on the Who’s Who criteria, though now I see why @blah2008 got his panties all in a knot; looks like I have to fix my spreadsheet as JHU should have 5 points.