<p>sakky, i think you put too much weight into the preference of students.</p>
<p>i’m sure you’re familiar with stanford’s “revealed preference” survey of colleges. If not, here it is.</p>
<p><a href=“http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105[/url]”>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105</a></p>
<p>Anyway, this survey basicly answers the question “given admittence into school x and school y, which would you go to?”</p>
<p>Now according to you, just winning cross admit battles is one way to distinguish how good the school is. looking at this survery though, we see that schools like georgia tech will beat johns hopkins in cross admit battles, or schools like Furman will beat out Vanderbilt in cross admit battles. As you can see, you have schools that generally have worse reputations than other schools winning cross admits. I don’t really think that “winning cross admit battles” determines how good a school is.</p>
<p>I don’t think business week is right - but I think its better than USnews. Business weeks methodology is at least more involved than simply the average of “what do you think of this school on a scale of 1-5.”</p>