<p>Media buzz is tricky, but the measurement factor isn’t especially challenging when it comes to filtering out false positives. I used Newsbank, which gives much better coverage and functionality than something like Google pass and did a few stages of refinement to make things work right. So, in the case of Princeton, my search accepted anything that matched the literal “Princeton University” as well as any document that included the words Princeton and university or professor within 40 words of each other. In all likelihood, I erred slightly on the side of having too few rather than too many results, but spot checks reveal essentially no false positives.</p>
<p>As for how media mentions relate to prestige, it’s much more straightforward for universities than restaurants. McDonald’s gets a lot more mentions than haute cuisine because it’s such a large restaurant and important business, which is not interchangeable in the case of food. For universities, however, importance ties closely to prestige. Most news coverage of universities takes one of several forms: “Researchers at MIT discovered…”, “In a new book, Joe Smith of Harvard…”, “In a speech at Yale…”, or “John Doe, CEO of Mega Company X, received his MBA from Stanford…” etc. To be sure, there are occasional events or scandals which result in a lot of of news coverage of particular universities (e.g., the Tech shootings), so this is why it would be a rather poor idea to produce a ranking solely based on news coverage.</p>
<p>Within the sample ranked above, however, I glanced through the top news hit for each university and the coverage was generally positive and not connected to single events. The level of media coverage also closely parallels intuitive quality judgments. Ranking exclusively on media coverage, we would get:
- MIT
- Harvard
- Columbia
- Stanford
- Yale
- Berkeley
- Johns Hopkins
- Chicago
- NYU
- Texas</p>
<p>The only one on that list that’s at all unexpected is Texas and NYU does a bit better than I would tend to expect, but that alone would be a reasonable top 10 prestige list. The fact of the matter is that public opinion is largely shaped by the media and most media coverage of universities is positive. Thus, colleges that are in the media the most have the most prestige.</p>