Data10 please go look at my link to the Harvard Law Faculty and look both where they went to law school and college. No one has ever claimed many successful people don’t come from other schools. However it’s silly to pretend that all other things being equal it’s not a substantial advantage to attend H/S/Y if you can get admitted and with a yield of over 80% it would seem most people agree. It’s very hard to predict the future for a 17-18 year old kid so it’s an easy decision to go to H/S rather than to hope for the best at Podunk U. and it has nothing to do with being caught up in prestige or hype.
Again, you are trying to generalize from a specific type of employment which is very school-prestige-conscious (law, though mainly with respect to one’s law school) to the overall employment market.
The undergrad colleges for the first 10 are below. I didn’t look beyond that. It’s odd that Tel-Aviv University (a public college in Israel) occurs so often, but I’m not sure how their colleges proves your point?
Alford – Amherst
Anker - Brandeis
Ardalan – Yale
Bar-Gill -Tel-Aviv University
Bartholet - Radcliffe
Bavitz - Tufts
Bebchuk - University of Haifa, Tel-Aviv University
Benkler – Tel-Aviv University
Blum – Tel-Aviv University
Bordone – Dartmouth
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97% of seniors do not apply to HYS. HY are not among the top 25 colleges that get the most applications in the United States. Many students have different opinions.
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Respectfully, what does any of this have to do with gaming the USNWR rankings?
Good point, Sue22.
But for the record, through my academic work I’ve known several law school deans and they all confirm what Data 10 says: law school admissions these days is purely a numbers game based on GPA and LSAT scores, and that’s true all the way to the topmost selective schools. The nameplate on the undergraduate degree counts for approximately zero, They hate it, they feel trapped, but it’s the tyranny of US News. If they broke the mold they’d slip in the almighty rankings and their presidents, provosts, alumni, and students would be after them with pitchforks.
But let me amend that just slightly. Below the very top levels of law school admissions selectivity, law schools have figured out a little trick to game the US News rankings. They can only get a certain number of students who are above their target medians in both GPA and LSAT. So they’ll flip-flop GPAs and LSAT scores, taking some applicants with LSAT scores above their target but GPAs below their target, and others with GPAs above their target and LSATs below their target. As long as they keep these two groups in balance, it maintains both medians. They do this very consciously with US News rankings in mind. And in that context, if you’re going to take someone with a sub-target LSAT but above-target GPA, you might choose someone from an academically stronger school over someone from a weaker school, even though for US News purposes they’ll have the same effect. That’s because you’re more confident the student who did well at the stronger school will succeed in law school. And in general there are more students with high GPAs than there are with high LSAT scores, so you have more of a choice. But that group of stronger schools that give applicants an edge is certainly not confined to HYPS. It includes a lengthy list of quality public and private research universities as well as the better LACs.
I’d call this a form of gaming the US News rankings, and it’s so rampant that it’s taken over law school admissions.
There isn’t much room to doubt that some metrics supporting the USNWR rankings can be gamed.
Gaming must introduce a margin of error, especially in addition to any slop inherent in the choice of criteria and weights. How big is the margin of error? Does it completely poison the CDS well?
The S:F ratio is one metric that not only can be gamed, but that I’m pretty sure is in fact being reported incorrectly by certain colleges. The top 20 or so private schools typically report S:F ratios below 10:1. The numerator gets into single digits by excluding grad students from the “S”. However, … even if you include grad students, the top private schools still have some of the best S:F ratios. Furthermore, S:F only counts for 1% of the USNWR ranking. Still, one might conclude that such a practice poisons the well for the rest of the CDS data.
So I think it’s important to compare multiple rankings as well as measurements that the major rankings don’t all use. Those comparisons do seem to show fairly strong agreement on the set of T50/75/100 schools. Some research appears to show a measurable difference in certain kinds of outcomes between alumni from those schools and alumni from “unranked” schools (or the Joni Hersch “Tier 4” schools). So, as far as I’m concerned, the major rankings are precise, accurate, and reliable enough to expose a basket about that big of pretty good schools. Which may be good enough to be helpful in the early stages of building a reach-match-safety list.
That is very different from asserting a reliable bright line at any specific point among those T50/75/100 schools. Within that range (or even a somewhat wider range), Dale & Krueger couldn’t find a significant difference in career earnings. Law and Med admissions are largely numbers-driven; the over-representation of elite colleges at elite law/med schools seems to be attributable to the fact that elite colleges are cherry-picking the best students and the best test-takers (as well as students who care a lot about school prestige). If the IB sector or top tier law firms still have an irrational exuberance for a very few colleges, I doubt any amount of gaming will get a college into that club (unless maybe it’s already very close.)
If one picks a single measure, whatever it is, one can rank the colleges objectively based on that measure. However, if there are numerous measures, there’s no objective way to rank the colleges. These publications know that most consumers are just too lazy to aggregate these measures themselves to come up their own preferences. Simplicity sells (magazines, or whatever), even though a single numerical number makes no sense in this case. The commercial success of USNWR college rankings has had profound impact (definitely not all desirable) on how we choose colleges. How could we then not expect there would be consequences on how most colleges are administered? Some just go to more extremes to game the system than others.
TK2- I think your post is spot on.
I will say- having worked for a few companies during my career with an “irrational exuberance” for certain colleges, that at its core- it is a reality based exuberance.
The likelihood that you are going to hire a math major from Swarthmore who can’t write an error free, one page executive summary (on any topic) is extremely low. I don’t mean analytically error free (although that, too). I mean grammatical, topic sentence, evidence and conclusion. Similarly- when you hire that Princeton engineering major for a non-engineering job (but one which requires a lot of data analysis, research, quant type skills) the probability that the kid can’t develop an independent thesis or hypothesis about a problem and then develop it via facts, summarize it using plain English, etc. is also very low.
So pretend you’re creating the recruiting calendar for a global industrial corporation and you have a management training program/rotational type hiring program to fill with new BA’s. You can boil the ocean and go to 100 colleges to fill your class, or you can go to your “irrational exuberance” set of tried and true colleges. Nobody can predict with 100% certainty that every 22 year old hire is going to complete the program and get staffed in a fast track management job in an operating division (exact role TBD). But hiring from the Swarthmore/Princeton type colleges which have some level of academic rigor in both humanities and the quant-type courses is a pretty nifty shortcut. You are less likely to be wrong and VERY likely to be right.
I’ve hired actuaries from the top actuarial programs who can’t write. I’ve hired engineers from some very rigorous engineering programs who can’t stand up in front of 30 managers/colleagues/exec’s and present a topic and then handle the Q&A. I’ve hired entry level writers and editors from top ranked Journalism programs who can’t interpret a bar graph or understand what a regression analysis shows (not DO the analysis- just interpret the pretty basic findings to create an executive summary).
Many jobs today do not have a lock-step “first you do this and then you get promoted to do the same thing but faster” type progression. So if you need a certain level of intellectual and skill-based versatility in your junior hires, there is a list of colleges which reduce a lot of the errors (plus administering skill based tests which many companies do- math tests which are harder than the SAT or GRE; editing and analytical reasoning tests which are developed internally).
Can you find kids to pass these tests at University of Montana or High Point? of course. Is it easier to send a team to Pomona or Swarthmore or Yale where the density of these kids in the student body is higher? You tell me. And the fact that this list approximates (not 100%- every recruiter has a list of “overrated colleges” and “underrated colleges”) the USNWR… well, ok then.
This HAS to be true. The math is simple.
HLS has an extremely large class, although its shrunk it recently (so HLS can game by accepting more transfers?). There are not that many 173’s (and up) to go around to the top schools. HLS cannot afford be picky for those kids if it wants to maintain its LSAT median. OTOH, YLS and SLS are much smaller and are picky about a bunch of stuff that is not-numbers related. But as I posted earlier, YLS has kids from schools with a 65% admit rate and <1200 SAT mean. (Maybe not Podunk State, but not very selective.)
“Again, you are trying to generalize from a specific type of employment which is very school-prestige-conscious (law, though mainly with respect to one’s law school) to the overall employment market.”
UCB is right that law employment is a bit different because the main filter on that is what law school you attended and how you did there. So the impact/signal effect of your undergrad college is significantly muted. Undergrad college just isn’t the primary filter. A kid on the Harvard Law Review will get an interview at any law firm in the country even if his undergad degree is from Univ of Phoenix.
So tracking how your law career will go based on where you did undergrad is more like tracking how your post-college employment will go based on where you went to high school.
Exeter grads are over-represented at Harvard College for sure. But there’s also plenty of Harvard undergrads who go to Suburban Public HS too. HC grads are over-represented at HLS, but there’s plenty of kids at HLS from meh colleges too.
My meh college consistently gets 2 or 3 kids into HLS every year. Because those kids (even though they attended Meh College) have the same intellectual chops as the HC kids. There’s simply more of those type kids at HC than at Meh College.
hpysm may have a higher percentage of these academic stars getting into elite grad programs but not in real terms. it is just not true in terms of the raw numbers.
Not even the most vocal Hpysm cheerleader would think that all 1600 grads from Harvard each year are academically more gifted than, say, the top ten percent of Berkeley and UCLA grads each year. The numbers are roughly equivalent.
And then add in the top ten percent at every school in the top 50 and it’s a massive number of brilliant students entering grad school completions and job searches.
I think it is safe to make the case that the average hpysm student has elevated opportunities versus the average student at school x.
The outliers at the school x s make the broad generalization inaccurate and quite frankly a pointless debate.
However, the above-average student at school x - let’s say that top 10% – may have better opportunities than a HYP student with equivalent capabilities, simply because of being in an environment where they can stand out. Sometimes it’s easier to be a star if one is not surrounded by superstars.
Let me ask you this. When you search best undergraduate college for say busines, the #1 school is UPenn. Is that ranking completely meaningless and unfounded? How about top colleges for government/polical science we get Georgetown and Harvard. Same question?
Or is the undergrad education you get from say SUNY Binghamton going to be comparable to these colleges?
Not sure why it’s too hard to wrap your head around the fact that some colleges, especially low acceptance rate ones, provide a better educational opportunities than many, many other colleges.
Sure, Nixon became POTUS having attended Whittier College but he is an outlier and presidents are a very small sample size. I’m more interested in the overall quality of the undergraduate education and programs for the average student pursuing their career in certain fields.
Of course Nixon was much helped by attending Duke Law School rather than Whittier Law School.
Standardized test scores have significantly democratized all of this. Kids from Whittier HS and Exeter both can get into Harvard undergrad with great test scores…
Law school admissions are even more quantitative and democratized. At Harvard Law School, a 175 LSAT from Whittier College beats a 170 LSAT from Harvard College every day of the week and twice on Sunday. HLS admissions is a very level playing field. It just so happens that HC has a higher percentage of enrolled students being strong test takers than WC.
The 1941 NY Yankees had many great players and won the World Series. But the Boston Red Sox clearly had the best player. Ted Williams .406 batting average and 1.207 OPS > >>> Joe DiMaggio 56 game hitting streak and 1.083 OPS.
Edit:
1941 Ted Williams OPS was 1.2875. 7th best of all time (behind only Babe Ruth and a juiced Barry Bonds). Joe D’s 1.083 OPS was 119th best of all time.
Nixon, in all his interviews about his life, never failed to mention he was accepted by Harvard with full tuition scholarship but couldn’t afford the train ticket because his family was so dirt poor. If Harvard had the financial aid practice of today back then he would have been a classmate of Jack Kennedy, who BTW had attended most of HYPS among presidents. Kennedy was enrolled at Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. Wow, how did he know the USNWR ranking then? There must be a CC site in his days too.
Depends on what the student wants to do in “business”. UPenn’s undergrad reputation is drawn from the graduate reputation of Wharton, but if the student wants to run their own business — or get enough of an education in undergrad that they can come home and help run the family business … then that student is probably better off with an option that conserves finances, so they have more to invest in business & startup costs. Even the time spent on undergrad can represent a huge opportunity cost – a conclusion that both Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerberg seemed to have reached early on in their Harvard years.
Political science? Same deal – you want a future career in academia? Go to Harvard. Be a policy maker? You need a grad degree. Go elite for the PhD, law, or MPP-- but as funding for those degrees is hard to come by, best to conserve resources as an undergrad. You want a career in politics? Best way to do that is to get involved politically at the local level. Political science programs generally do not have courses that teach the skills needed for political organizing or campaigning… so either the student learns them somewhere else, or reconsiders their major.
I wouldn’t place too much weight on U.S. presidents’ undergraduate degrees as evidence of the excellence of HYPS.
- Harry Truman never went to college.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower graduated from West Point, an excellent public institution but no Harvard.
- John F Kennedy graduated cum laude from Harvard after starting earlier at Princeton until illness forced him to withdraw. He had been in the bottom half of his class at Choate, a traditional feeder school to the Ivies at a time that was hugely important, and he was also the scion of a wealthy and politically influential Boston family, which surely didn't hurt.
- Lyndon Johnson graduated from Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University).
- Richard Nixon, as we know, graduated from Whittier College in his hometown of Whittier, California.
- Gerald Ford graduated from Michigan where he was an All-American football player, playing center, linebacker, and long snapper.
- Jimmy Carter started his undergraduate education at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus, not far from his home in Plains, but transferred first to Georgia Tech and ultimately to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated 60th in a class of 820.
- Ronald Reagan graduated from Eureka College, a small Christian college in Eureka, Illinois, not far from his childhood home in Dixon, Illinois.
- George H.W. Bush graduated from Yale. It surely didn't hurt his chances of admission that he was a double legacy. His great grandfather, the Rev. James Smith Bush (Yale College 1844) was a prominent 19th century Episcopalian minister and author of books on religion. His father, Prescott Bush (Yale College 1917), later a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, was a wealthy Wall Street investment banker, a member of the CBS board of directors, and a member of the Yale Corporation, the university's governing body. On top of his legacy connections, Bush was also a graduate of Andover, another major feeder to the Ivies, at a time when those connections were still critically important. At Yale, George H.W. followed in his father's footsteps as a fraternity member, Yale cheerleader, and member of Skull and Bones, the infamous Yale secret society. Somehow he also found time to captain the Yale baseball team
- Bill Clinton graduated from Georgetown.
- George W. Bush graduated from Yale where he was admitted as a triple legacy, after graduating from Andover when that still mattered a great deal. At the time his father was a wealthy Texas oilman and soon to become a member of Congress. At Yale, George W. became the third generation of Bushes to join Skull and Bones, serve on the Yale cheerleading squad, and participate in Greek life, but he also found time to play varsity rugby. By his own account he was an average student, earning average grades of 77 (out of 100) on the scale Yale used at the time.
- Barack Obama began college at Occidental but transferred to Columbia, where he graduated.
Seems to me there are two kinds of stories here. There’s a large group of up-by-the-bootstraps types (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Clinton, Reagan, Obama), some of whom did later get advanced degrees from Harvard and Yale but certainly didn’t start out there. And then there’s a smaller group who were launched straight into Harvard and Yale with the help of wealthy and powerful families (Kennedy and both Bushes), legacy connections (both Bushes), and old-boy New England boarding school networks (Kennedy and both Bushes).
Obviously, Harvard and Yale are great schools. No one disputes that. But if anyone needs evidence of their excellence as undergraduate institutions, you won’t find it in the undergraduate educations of U.S. presidents.
Hmmmm…
Clinton…Georgetown undergrad
Obama…Columbia undergrad
Carter…US Naval Academy
So in the last half century you only have Reagan who didn’t go to a top undergrad college.
The president list is a small sample size, many of which were elected many decades ago and attended college far before that, as early as the 1930s for Reagan. Someone brought up members of Congress earlier. The new members of the 115th Congress attended the following colleges for undergrad. There is a wide range of selectivities, ranging from directional state to Harvard, but by far the most common path seems to be state college in the state where they get elected.
Adolphus
American University
Appalachian State
Boston College
BYU
Chicago
Colgate
Colorado
CS-Fullerton
Embry Riddle
Fairleigh Dickinson
Florida A&M
Florida State (3)
Franklin & Marshall
Georgetown
Gustavus
Harvard (2)
Harvard Extension
Kansas State
Indiana State
LaSalle (2)
Lewis
Michigan State
Northern Illinois
Northern Iowa
Northwestern
Penn
Princeton
Queens College
Rutgers
SUNY Brockport
Texas Tech
UCD
UCLA
UCSB
U-Memphis
U-Minnesota
U-Nevada
U-NH
U-Georgia
U-Hawaii
U-Puerto Rico
U-Richmond
Wake Forest
Washington & Lee
Western Kentucky
William & Mary