<p>T26E4: I have no connection to CPAI. I happened to see it on Wikipedia site and found it quite interesting. The fact that it produced a list that matched up so well with universally recognized top schools, while using only two objective factors, was fascinating to me. Sad to admit, my alma mater is not on the list. But I calculated my school’s CPAI, and was pleased to see it was above 1.5!</p>
<p>Weaker metric, when it produces such a credible list??? </p>
<p>And I haven’t seen Yale, MIT, Columbia, Penn, Caltech, Brown, Dartmouth – all top performers on CPAI – dominating football or basketball recently!!!</p>
<p>T26E4: you’re right; I am new to this forum, and my “singular focus” was simply the result of being attacked simply for expressing my honest opinion, and then defending against what I think are unfair criticisms. I welcome disagreement and spirited debate, but some have called the measure I defend “dumb” while others question whether I have some vested interest. I haven’t attacked anyone personally. </p>
<p>I was semi-facetous about the FB and BB thing. I’m saying those factors actually give colleges boosts in CPAI-valued metrics for reasons that have NOTHING to do with “quality” of the university. </p>
<p>College X wins the NCAA Mens Hoops championship, the next year their apps increase and the admit rate declines. College X’s CPAI rating improves. What does that say about the underlying metric analyses if a missed free throw, a player’s twisted ankle, or a miracle 3-pointer makes a school’s placement rise or fall on an index that supposedly measures “quality?”</p>
<p>When I say that if any index hangs its foundation on admit rate and yield, then by definition, it’s statistically on shaky ground. LIke I said, my belief is that admit rate and yield are related to popularity (think of it as the Emma Watson bump) and institutional focus/ability on marketing (i.e. UChicago’s recent growth in aggressive marketing severely altering their apps and yield).</p>
<p>And yield gets manipulated by colleges with early decision and consideration of “level of applicant’s interest” (or so-called “Tufts syndrome”).</p>
<p>You are wrong that there are only two factors. When using a ratio, this is by itself two factors. Yield equals attending students / accepted students. Acceptance rate equals accepted students / applied. There are three factors in this equation. CPAI = yield/acceptance rate = (attending students * applied) / (accepted students)^2.</p>
<p>I said that there were three factors, but the third factor – class size – is effectively a constant for each college (although it varies from one college to the next). If you tell me a college’s yield, class size, and number of applications, I will tell you its acceptance rate. </p>
<p>Yield and number of applications are certainly important measures of popularity, but they (especially the second) are pretty sensitive to marketing. I wouldn’t dispute that “CPAI” is one way to quantify how popular a college is, but so what? It’s not so precise in measuring that, and I am skeptical that it’s worth measuring with any precision anyway.</p>
<p>LOL. Yield and acceptance rate are artificial measures of success used to show how popular a school is. </p>
<p>Schools could completely manipulate this by simply making a target. “XYZ U will just take 2.2% of the applicants into a given major/program.” Then offer them get merit or need based aid and presto! You get high yield and low acceptance rates. It must be a great school! Poppycock.</p>
<p>Similar idiodic measures of success: money spent at the university; professor salary; articles published by faculty…etc. Some of the worst professors are the most ‘reknowned’ in their fields. They understand their subject matter, but cannot teach. (Think of Sheldon Cooper as a prof!) It does not matter so much how many Rhodes scholars are on the faculty or how many Nobel prizes they have won. Sure, it may be interesting and exciting, but if the kids cannot learn from those geniuses, then what’s the point?</p>
<p>Measure the success of the graduates of the programs. What percent of admits actually graduate from that school in 4 years…5 years? What percent of those applying to grad school from that undergrad program actually get in? Do graduates of programs at the school get jobs in their field directly out of college? What percent of students pursuing Rhodes scholarships and other such honors actually get them?</p>
<p>Of course, these measures are mostly dependent upon the qualities of the entering students. Better entering students typically means better graduation rates and other student success measures.</p>
<p>So if the school can get more high end applicants to apply and later attend after being admitted (perhaps through better marketing to get more high end students to apply, or offering an “honors college” and large merit scholarships to high end applicants), that could raise these student success measures, even if the school otherwise does nothing different.</p>
<p>CollegeCounsel. CPAI has its origins in Wikipedia and presents as the first ranking methodology on rankings of US universities. This gives it legitimacy because it has been positioned first among other rankings which are not original research and for which readers can verify the conclusions drawn by referencing published sources. The fact is Wikipedia does not deprive readers of useful information as you suggest (that information is there for all to see). Other Wikipdeia readers have pointed out that the information is not verified and so should not be there and yet it remains. You are correct that this is an appropriate forum to reference and debate CPAI hence why I posed my question in the first place. </p>
<p>IMO, it is great that searches on Bing (do people still use Bing?) and other search engines now refer to this thread. The alternative would have been to refer to only the original Wikipedia article which would have misled people about its general use and acceptance. </p>
<p>Well, this debate could go on forever. I’m still impressed how solid a list of top colleges the CPAI measure produces. No one has disputed that. Yes, there are always going to be anomalies, but that happens with EVERY ranking system. Bottom line, no one has pointed to a better measure. </p>
<p>Using first year retention rate could lead a college to drastically lower it’s grading standards to encourage everyone to stick it out, thereby raising it’s retention rate. As I’ve said many times, no measure is perfect. </p>
<p>Well, no, it’s more a measure of which colleges you take home to meet your mother.</p>
<p>Still, in the end all it tells you is which colleges are hardest to get into. You don’t need a pseudo-precise index to give you that information, and it’s really not very useful information at all. The OP’s big argument in favor of it is that it confirms what he or she already thinks.</p>
It is nothing new here. The yield to admit ratio has been published on Mathacle and CC for years. It is only getting popular because Stanford’s number is higher than Harvard’s.</p>
<p>
It has nothing to do with someone at Stanford, but a Stanford / Google parent.</p>
<p>Just google “yield to admit ratio” and you will see.</p>
<p>What about HYPSM cross admits? Anyone wants to know?</p>
<p>Speaking of Stanford, just yesterday I was talking to my Dr, who is a Stanford alum & who needed to take a few classes at a community college before she applied to medical school.
She said she was impressed by the quality of the courses at the community college.
The profs were genuinely interested in teaching, which raised the quality of the class, compared to the bulk of her courses at Stanford, which she said were either led by graduate students or taught by profs who werent interested in undergrads, but couldnt wait to get back to their own research with their own grad students.</p>
<p>I think quality of instruction, trumps US news ranking.
;)</p>
<p>She perhaps was not speaking of the large lectures but the smaller class discussions.
But in any case, it must have been frustrating to realize she paid out all that money for bored professors.</p>