A different sort of ranking

interesteddad
Sat, 21 May 2005 16:38:29 +0000

The fact that the WSJ feeder school ranking is from two years ago is not the problem. The fact that they only looked at a total of 15 professional schools in the entire world and did not look at any grad schools in the arts, humanities, or sciences is a problem. The fact that only one school west of Chicago or south of Baltimore (a Calif Med School) was on the list is a problem.

An even bigger problem is that they only bother to look at a single year of data. There is enough year to year fluctuation that you really have to look at a five or ten year period to have any meaningful data. The raw numbers admitted from any one undergrad college in a single year to such a small sample of grad schools is very small. For example, if you change Pomona’s numbers by just two or three fall enrollees (perhaps because a few of the Stanford or Berkeley bound grads opted for UChicago instead), their ranking would shift dramatically.

By looking at a single year and by limiting the selection of grad schools to the northeast US (from Chicago to Boston), you reduce the value of the data.