I turned down Harvard, Princeton and Stanford for Berkeley's Physics programme

eudean
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:14:11 +0000

Uh, am I the only one who sees the paradox in this paragraph? You talk about how rankings are silly, but then you talk about a guy who went to a no-name school and then went to Stanford for graduate school. But who says that Stanford is a good graduate school in the first place? Answer - the rankings. So really, this paragraph, which purports to state that rankings are unimportant has, in reality, implicitly confirmed the importance of rankings.



Indeed, you are right. I’ve completed screwed up. Oh no.

Actually, the point of my saying the rankings are stupid is because you guys argue about whether Stanford is as good as MIT or Berkeley in engineering based on rankings. Rankings are useful to tell apart Seattle U from Stanford. When you nitpick whether Stanford or Berkeley or MIT should be higher on a list (when they’re listed in the top 3), THAT’S when rankings are silly. That’s what you guys are doing. I may exaggerate the unimportance of rankings, but you guys certainly exaggerate their importance.

I think the rankings would be just as valuable if they simply listed by tiers. Who is top tier, who is second tier, who is third tier, and so on. If we lumped the top 15 engineering schools into a tier, people wouldn’t have rankings to use to complain about such and such school being better than another when they’re, in fact, comparable.