collegehelp

Prestige is based on real quality factors that exist over a long period of time. Prestige is a good indicator of quality. Prestige is like the US News Peer Assessment rating which is correlated almost entirely with measures of quality.

Don't discount the meaning of prestige. It indicates quality.

Milkmagn

^but doesn't indicate fit

why bother going to a school thats more "prestigious" but you end up hating the four years you spend there?

collegehelp

Don't you think quality is the most important factor in determining "fit"?

dke

No, Collegehelp, "fit" has to do with the culture of a place and how it works with the kid. You can take two colleges and be miserable at one because of the school's culture. That aspect is very important. I look at my son's classmates and know that they would die at a place like Amherst, and will be very happy at U. of Central Florida. It goes with their culture.

hawkette

collegehelp,
For starters, Peer Assessment scoring is NOT a measurement of quality. It is an opinion survey of people we don't know, using metrics we don't know, and about colleges that even some of the respondents admit they don't know.

Let's put your PA comparison to the test. In terms of prestige, consider a college like Dartmouth and a college like Cornell. Cornell has a higher PA score (4.6 to 4.3). Does Cornell have higher prestige? Should a student always pick Cornell even if he/she finds the culture of Dartmouth to be more appealing? Or make the same comparison, but change the schools to Cornell and Yale (4.6 to 4.9). Do you reach the same conclusions? Should all students automatically select Yale because it has more prestige than Cornell?

Quality is not the same as reputation. A college can have a better reputation and be of the same or lower quality (and especially as applied to a single individual's circumstances). I think that there are many colleges that offer an educational quality similar to what you'd find at Cornell, but I don't think that many of these colleges have the Ivy imprimateur to which Cornell owes a large part of its fame and its attraction. Take away the Ivy branding and you have...Tufts or the University of Rochester or Carnegie Mellon. These are all excellent colleges, but none have the brand power of the Ivy League and thus they have lower reputations and less prestige than a Cornell.

Yet, despite that prestige advantage, could Tufts/U Rochester/CMU/etc be a better potential choice for some students, depending on what he/she was looking for in a college experience? IMO, absolutely. But in your view, Cornell would always be the superior choice and I would strongly disagree with that conclusion.

norcalguy

Too much emphasis on prestige and too much emphasis on selectivity and quality of student body (as if 75 points on the SAT will make much difference) on CC. More people should be concerned with the actual quality of programs. People need to stop citing placement rates for professional schools, especially based on flawed studies, when they don't understand what professional school admissions entails.

collegehelp

Hawkette, although Peer Assessment ratings are not a direct measure of quality, Peer Assessment is ASSOCIATED with actual quality factors like student selectivity, faculty productivity, and so on. Peer Assessment is like "prestige" because it is a more or less gut feeling about a school.

Things like prestige, reputation, Peer Assessment are useful and meaningful characteristics of a school that should be considered by prospective students among other important factors like cost, location, "lifestyle", campus atmosphere.

I don't think any student should automatically select a school based on PA score or prestige. The point I am trying to make is that prestige and PA score should not be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant as some posters seem to imply. Some posters seem to make prestige sound like a negative thing. What I am trying to say is that prestige and PA ratings mean something and they are worth considering.

But, I agree that it is important to do your research, look below the surface, take factors other than prestige into account, and determine what a school's prestige is based on.

hawkette

Sorry, collegehelp, but I cannot agree about any of your comments on PA and frankly blame measures like it for promoting the unhealthy overweighting of prestige factors.

What you have written is what YOU think PA means-others can and do have different interpretations of what it means. If clear guidelines were provided for what this measure means and greater transparency were provided on who was saying what, then perhaps I could accept its results as helpful, but as it is currently constructed, I think that PA is a sinister number and does more harm to USNWR's ranking system than any other aspect of their ranking.

Where you and I possibly can agree is that when wide differences in quality are seen (and this is reflected in quantifiable data), then there is a quality difference and then the student should take this into consideration. For example I would not equate the quality at Cornell with the University of Arizona and there are many objective data points to substantiate that view. But I would equate Cornell’s quality with Tufts where again there are many objective data points to support that view. And yet both U Arizona and Tufts have PA scores of 3.6 while Cornell has a PA score of 4.6.

I don't intend this to be a Cornell thread, but I am using that college as an example due to your close affiliation with the school.

hawkette

Norcalguy,
As one who frequently cites standardized test data, I actually agree with your comment about the overemphasis on this number. It is a single data point in the consideration by college admissions counselors of a student’s application. However, it is the cleanest single number that we have to evaluate and compare students. Furthermore, I think it is clear that there is a high correlation between Rigor/GPA and Test Scores and thus Test Scores becomes the best available proxy for measuring student strength. I should also add that, according to the National Association of College Admission Counselors, the standardized test score is considered nearly as important as rigor and GPA.

As for the importance of selectivity, I would argue that this factor needs even greater emphasis by aspiring college students. More than the professors at a college, one’s peers at a college will most determine the nature of one’s undergraduate experience. Having talented peers is a great advantage, both in the classroom and beyond. Moreover, these relationships have lifelong impact and provide a network that can be tapped time and again, both personally and professionally.

kyledavid80

Selectivity and prestige are highly correlated--so how you could argue for one but not the other doesn't make sense.

hawkette

IMO, selectivity and prestige are connected, but far from universally.

Consider the LAC universe of colleges. Certainly these are selective places, but often are not that high on the prestige meter, particularly as compared to better known national universities. Schools like Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Claremont McKenna, W&L and others undoubtedly carry less prestige than their selectivity would indicate.

Or consider the universe of national universities themselves. Certainly a college like Tufts (SAT avg of 1410 with 83% Top 10 students) is as selective as a college like Cornell (SAT avg of 1385 and 84% Top 10%). But I doubt many would consider it as prestigious generally. And certainly not among academics who assign Tufts a 3.6 PA score vs Cornell with its 4.6. In a case where a student prefers the campus culture of Tufts, it sometimes happens that the prestige factor pushes Cornell in the conversation. Should it? I would argue no, not if the student prefers Tufts and it meets his/her requirements. Such situations are the perfect breeding ground for sub-optimal college selection.

afan

Seems like an appropriate time for collegehelp to post the analysis of correlation of PA with quality factors. As I recall, there was a high correlation, implying that the people who voted in the PA survey were, on average, well informed about the colleges they rated.

I remember wondering, but not asking, whether the precision of the estimates went down as colleges became less well known, and the group of people who knew much about them became smaller.

Aceera2001

I would like to suggest that, as an alternate method to checking up average GPA and SAT scores in order to gauge a school's academic rigor, is to look up which AP scores a school takes as credit. You'll find that the more rigorous schools only take 4's and 5's (sometimes only 5's) and the most rigorous only allow a student to bypass an entry-level class without giving credit for it.

If anyone doesn't fully understand this post, just say so.

kyledavid80

^^ not always true. Schools like Berkeley are known for their rigor, yet it's very generous with its AP policies (as a way of helping students to graduate on time). Stanford, for example, is very stingy with its AP policies (and doesn't even give credit for most of them--even APs like English lit, USH, etc.), but it isn't quite one of the most academically rigorous schools (minus the hard sciences).

collegehelp

The link to my thread "How to calculate a university's Peer Assessment score" follows.

Basically, I showed that the Peer Assessment score was almost completely predictable by hard data. The subjective Peer Assessment scores can be replicated with quantitative data. R-squared = .94 where perfect=1.

The enigmatic formula is as follows:

estimated peer assessment = -1.19636
+(.03042* classes over 50)
+(.07052*NRC mean for physics english psych SQUARED)
-(.00122*financial rank)
+(.0000005199697*percent fulltime faculty cubed)
-(.00002286*classes over 50 cubed)
+(.00254*sat 75th percentile)
+(.0000007890567*actual graduation rate cubed)
-(.16392*NRC physics rating)
+(.000000553739*acceptance rate cubed)

How to calculate a universitie's "Peer Assessment" score