What’s more impressive? Northwestern having 26 students winning a fulbright or that it took 125 applicants to do so?
You should go check out the data for new college for florida as well.
Vandy dominates number of alumni in MBB (use linkedin). You might discredit us news, but there are facets of their rankings that are hard to game (i.e. Reputational rankings from an academic collective). It’s definitely a bit more credible than your outdated data.
@blah2008, well, 26/125 is close to Harvard’s 31/139 and better than Princeton’s 19/113 (and Brown’s 18/96 & Georgetown’s 17/100). Maybe you don’t consider those schools impressive either? Not sure what that says about Vandy. Either not many students thought they had a good chance of winning or Vandy’s percentage was even less.
I also looked at LindedIn profiles a while ago and I don’t know where you get your numbers, since when I looked, Vandy didn’t have the representation in MBB that the Ivies/equivalents do.
None of the schools in the group of the Ivies+ Stanford, MIT, Duke, Georgetown, & Northwestern placed fewer than Brown’s 43 in to elite b-schools.
Vandy had 9.
Hard to assess this ranking without access to your methodology.
For instance, how are you defining “elite” professional schools? What is your source for this information?
Over what time period? One year out, 5 years, 10 years, lifetime?
What are you including in the category of prestigious national student awards?
Is the American Leaders category by percentage? If not, what is your reasoning for using percentages for the other categories but not this one?
@Sue22, the original post I made that I link to has the sources (at least 2014 data for Forbes). I’m constrained by the data I have. The elite professional schools certainly have an East-Coast bias to them as I noted (WSJ made the list, and they counted where various matriculants to the professional schools went to undergrad the year they made the list). The more recent elite b-school data is pretty consistent with that ranking, however.
The other 3 are from Forbes, and they have the gory details for their methodology online somewhere (I looked once).
However, while some schools may move a bit if you jigger the data, I don’t think you’d see any big jumps like “other good schools” to HYPSM-level or completely outside the list to Ivy/equivalent-level.
And as I mentioned, certain departments/schools may be much higher than the university as a whole. NYU, USC, and CMU aren’t very high, but Stern, Tisch, USC film school, and CMU SCS are at what would be considered Ivy-level in their respective fields.
Your first link on the older thread doesn’t work and the second is a ranking from the Center for College Affordability without methodology. I also have to ask in what way your ranking is an improvement over that one.
Where is the WSJ info? The Poets and Quants info seems to give absolute feeder numbers but not percentages, meaning that smaller schools are not going to show up on the radar. As the wife of an HBS grad who finds Facebook creepy I’m also not really impressed by the use of Facebook data.
You seem to give us some of your methodology but it’s scattered all over the two threads and various links, some of which don’t work or require a login.
Perhaps it’s just in my nature to be critical of college rankings but I tend to like to kick the tires on data sources. I’ve seen too many horrible school rankings put out by publications, some of which were so bad they had to be withdrawn altogether, to trust without verification.
I picked Scripps over Smith in a heartbeat. Rankings like these are interesting but it’s important to remember that there are just so many factors (desired major, personal preferences, etc.) that make it impossible to make a perfect ranking system.
@AnneKatherine, I meant Boulder. The numbers are what they are.
But I definitely agree that everyone should choose based on fit and goals. Too often, I see kids being slaves to the USNews or international rankings when stuff like these tiers (and other data I see) may show that 2 schools that are far apart in a ranking may be quite close together by other criteria or that 2 schools that are close together in the rankings may be far apart by other criteria.
@PurpleTitan - Thanks for the analysis. Whenever someone produces an opinion like this, the critics come out of the woodwork. My criticism is that using percentages as the criteria is that is it penalizes larger schools, especially state flagships. For example, the entering class size at the New College of Florida is slightly more than 200 students.
I would think that the top 200 students at a quality state flagship like Penn State (7,800 freshman) or Georgia (5,300 freshman) will outperform the student bodies of small LACs like the New College.
Thanks, @Zinhead, definitely, the very top undergrads at giant publics are stellar.
The top quartile of the student body at a top public like UMich may be as good and as numerous as the student body at an Ivy. The rest of the student body still exists, though, and at schools like UGa and PSU, the Ivy-like would be less than a quarter. Even so, it’s conceivable that PSU has as many brilliant students as at tiny Caltech. However, the experience would be quite different. They would be spread out. Granted, at big U’s like UIUC, NYU, & USC where a handful of schools/departments are elite, being in those schools/departments may be similar to being at an elite college, but I don’t think you’d find the same environment at a PSU/UGa outside of maybe honors colleges.
Do note that absolute numbers do contribute to the “American Leaders” category.
Thanks @PurpleTitan. The WSJ listing looks good. They used actual data collected from the grad schools and did their rankings by percentages so smaller schools weren’t penalized for having fewer admitees. It’s unfortunate that Stanford wasn’t included; my guess is that they didn’t cooperate. It looks like they included UCSF in order to provide some geographic balance.
Using percentages makes sense to me in that it indicates what chance the average kid who attends a school has of getting a PhD, ending up with a Fulbright or Rhodes, going to an elite law school, etc. What would be useful, if it could be done, would be to gather stats for students in the honors colleges of public universities. I would imagine outcomes for some would rival those of the elite schools on PurpleTitan’s list.
@PurpleTitan, I did attend in late 70s and I can assure you that no where near 50% did not finish there. My class started about 600 and, IIRC, about 500 graduated. The class back then was small enough that you knew a good chunk of them. Amongst my dormmates, there were only a handful who did not graduate from UC, and most did within 4 years.
Adjusting performance metrics for enrollment sizes also may make sense if you are trying to compare the quality of peer-to-peer learning environments.
66% of Williams College freshmen scored 700-800 on the SAT-CR. That represents about 300 students.
9% of Colorado-Boulder freshmen scored 700-800 on the SAT-CR. That represents about 600 students.
So there may be about 2x as many high-scoring freshmen walking around the campus of CU Boulder as there are walking around the campus of Williams College.
What if anything do those numbers (or other indicators of student ability/achievement, on either the input or the output side) suggest about the quality of classroom discussions, dining hall and dorm room conversations, or small-team research projects? Which campus is a better Meet Market (for making life-long friendships with talented, motivated students who are likely to be successful and influential … or for having good conversations about interesting topics with thoughtful, articulate students?) The numbers are not only about your odds of landing a job at Goldman Sachs. They’re also about whom you’re meeting and what you’re learning along the way (including from other students).