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

sakky
Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:02:01 +0000

That’s what you guys are doing. I may exaggerate the unimportance of rankings, but you guys certainly exaggerate their importance.



While I can’t speak for others, I would ask how is it that I exaggerate the importance of rankings? Where in this entire thread have I ever specifically said that rankings were so important? I have used rankings to debunk others who have stated that Berkeley is supposedly ranked higher than this-and-that school, under the general principle that if you are going to use rankings, you have to be consistent with what they say. You can’t just pick and choose the rankings you like and then dismiss the ones that you don’t like. But that’s a far cry from saying that I myself think that the current rankings are highly important.



You’re right, there would be a lack of specificity. But really, the ratings are based on these arbitrary metrics anyway, weighted at arbitrary values. If MIT alumni contribute $100,000 more per year to MIT than Cal alumni do to Berkeley, does that really mean they are better than Cal? Arguable. The granularity of the rankings should be broadened, in my opinion, because such specifics don’t really mean that much in terms of college quality. We can both agree that they are good colleges, on the same level. To say that one is definitely one rank higher or lower than the other is deceitful, since people associate rankings with general quality, while they really just measure some things that somebody thought would be worth measuring.



I personally suspect that the most meaningful ‘ranking’ of all is the one that demonstrates revealed preferences - basically, where do students prefer to go - and especially, an analysis of cross-admit data. The fact is, whether we like it or not, MIT and Berkeley are NOT comparable at the undergraduate level for one simple reason - MIT has almost double the yield of Berkeley, and MIT wins more of the cross-admits. Simply put, the majority of people who get admitted to both Berkeley and MIT for undergrad will go to MIT. That indicates that these schools are not really on the same level. If they were, then the revealed preferences for these 2 schools would be equivalent.

I don’t think people are completely irrational. There has to be a reason for why people prefer MIT over Berkeley for undergrad. MIT must offer something to its undergrads that Berkeley does not, whether that’s better research opportunities, better prestige, a more integrated undergraduate experience, or whatever it is. If Berkeley could equal what MIT has, then Berkeley would become more preferred.