The current USN&WR methodology uses acceptance rate, but not yield.
However, the methodology has changed over the years. US News did use yield in the past, but [dropped it in 2003.](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/us/college-rating-by-us-news-drops-factor-in-admissions.html)
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
This rating system implies that slots at Annapolis or Liberty or BYU are highly valued, by the members of their respective applicant pools. And I’m sure that this is true.
But it seems possible that those particular applicant pools may not have a great deal of overlap with the applicant pools for, say, Yale or Johns Hopkins or UCLA. And if that’s the case, the apparent similarities between the rating numbers may not be terribly meaningful.
So I would’t take this rating system too seriously. But I say that about all of the ratings systems, and people take them seriously anyway.
Yeah, there’s a reason USN&R dropped yield from its formula back in '03.
It would be interesting to see this list broken out by gender. The admit rate for female applicants at tech schools is generally far higher than for male applicants. The opposite is true for some LACs.
If you want to see what was the yield to admit ratio for schools six years ago, check this out
http://mathacle.blogspot.com/2010/03/yield-to-admit-rate-yar-index-for-class.html
Not that it matters, but there are a lot of ties in there that you don’t mention as ties, but rather, individual spots.
Yeah, not seeing it. Measuring by yield and selectivity alone, without even considering the caliber of the typical student who are applying, leads to a not very useful result, IMO.
Yeah, sorry, that is my bad. Noticed it after it was too late to correct. Ties should have the same rank
The subject of yield-to-admit ratio (YTAR) was discussed recently on at least one other thread; following is what I said about it there, edited lightly for clarity (I was using numbers for the 2015-2016 admissions season, compiled by @spayurpets, so the ratios are slightly different, but the basic points stand):
No. This metric is the ratio of the Yield and Admission rates, not a multiplication of the two. So the proper calculation is:
(# enrolled / # accepted) / (# accepted / # applied) = (# enrolled)*(# applied) / (# accepted)^2
@foosondaughter : Thanks for the correction.
While it is obvious that the Yield to Admit Ratio is not a direct measure of prestigiousness (much less Prestigiosity, on which I believe @hunt has a copyright), it is actually pretty remarkable how just using (1) the number of students applying, (2) the number admitted, and (3) the number enrolled, one can produce a relatively accurate representation of the USNews and other ranking systems.
p.s. a log-transform of the Ratio will maintain the rank order but give a value that is less extreme at the top ranks.
In my eyes, the ratio visually represents the relative prestige differences between two schools. So just by looking at the ratio, I would assume that Cornell has a long way to go before it will catch up to Stanford in terms of prestige, however shallow that might sound. Again this has nothing to do with the quality of the institution, its just the way the schools are perceived by students/parents right now. A decade from now that could all change. Who knows. Post #25, gives an interesting historical perspective on how the position of these universities has changed over just a few years. That is itself an interesting visual.
That is precisely the point. The ratio doesn’t tell you why, it just tells you right now Harvard and Stanford have a more powerful brand and prestige relative to Princeton and Yale. Again it says nothing about quality of education, just perception. As you can see from Post #25, this was not the case even a few years ago. Stanford, Yale and Columbia were more tightly bunched together.
Pretty much any metric is gameable, if by gameable, you mean the University can take concrete measures to move the numbers. Even output based measures are eminently gameable. If a University decides tomorrow that it wants to increase the number of Nobel Prize winners on its faculty, it can just allocate a budget and go poach these winners from other universities. With enough money, resources and motivation, you can move any metric in the direction you want. I think this term is thrown around rather pejoratively in CC. as in, “Oh, that’s gameable, so it has no value”. The fact is Universities are reacting to “metrics” that seem to drive decisions of one of their important stakeholders, like any rational actor would or should.
That’s three variables. You can also get a rather decent approximation, at least for private universities, with just two variables: (1) endowment, and (2) number of students.
Go to this [Wikipedia page](List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia). Scroll down to the table labelled “Endowment per Student”. Click on the column heading labelled “2015 Endowment per Student” to sort on that basis.
Top 20 Private Universities by this system:
Princeton
Yale
Harvard
Stanford
MIT
Caltech
Rice
Dartmouth
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Chicago
Duke
Penn
WUSTL
Emory
Brown
Vanderbilt
Columbia
Cornell
Rochester
This system, like any other, is imperfect. For example, it penalizes Johns Hopkins for its (relatively) small endowment. But that’s arguably unrealistic, because JHU is also (by far) the top university for [receiving R&D funding](Johns Hopkins leads U.S. in research spending for 36th year in a row | Hub), which compensates to some extent.
Just to be clear, that list leaves out all the LACs.
Pomona, Amherst, and Swarthmore should be number 5, 6 and 7, just after Stanford and just ahead of MIT, Williams and Grinnell are between MIT and Caltech, Wellesley and Bowdoin are between Rice and Dartmouth, etc.
I broke out the universities separately, because USNW&R separates universities and LACs, and because more people are interested in universities. But you could certainly use the same approach to rank LACs in terms of endowment/student, and that list would have a lot of similarities to conventional rankings.
For example, Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore have traditionally dominated the top of the USN&WR LAC rankings. Those schools also occupy 3 of the top 4 slots by endowment/student.
@CollegeAngst
“That is precisely the point. The ratio doesn’t tell you why, it just tells you right now Harvard and Stanford have a more powerful brand and prestige relative to Princeton and Yale. Again it says nothing about quality of education, just perception. As you can see from Post #25, this was not the case even a few years ago. Stanford, Yale and Columbia were more tightly bunched together.“
Harvard has always had a more powerful brand and prestige relative to Yale and Princeton. The why is pretty straight-forward. Harvard has stronger graduate programs and schools, more awards and international achievements associated with the school and a bigger, more impressive research output, way more resources and a richer/more successful alumni base than Yale or Princeton. It is ranked consistently amongst the top 3 US universities along with Stanford and MIT in every international ranking while Princeton is usually in the lower end in the world top 10 and Yale most often does not even crack the top 10.
Stanford has risen in the past 10-15 years gradually from being more closely grouped with Yale and Princeton (I personally wouldn’t group Columbia with them), to join Harvard and MIT in terms of international prestige and recognition. This had to do a lot with the rise of silicon valley but also with the sound investments and strategic decisions made by Stanford which helped all of its graduate programs, research output etc to rise to further prominence.
I do not see any way that this is just a temporary phenomenon and do not see how Princeton or Yale will truly catch up to Harvard or Stanford. There is a reason Stanford, Harvard yields are in the 80%+ range and Yale, Princeton are around 69-70%.
I created this ratio on mathacle back in 2010. At that time, I was merely trying to measure how strong Stanford was compared with Harvard, as at that time my son was a undergraduate at Stanford. The ratio measures the perception, and may only be meaningful when the numerical numbers are large enough. Some sensitivity analysis needs to be done. So, I stopped measuring all schools except HYPSM through the years.
The ratio can offset some manipulations, and it is better than just looking at yield and admit rate. I have been hoping someone to pick it up and study it. In the past, only some Stanford students/people had interests in this. The Wikipedia has a doc on it.
It was for Stanford, but not anymore. Stanford has achieved to a level that I don’t need to measure and compare.
In my eyes, when I think of University prestige, I think of Universities that everybody wants to get into and dreams of attending. So a measure of prestige would be how picky the school can be because of the number of people who apply relative to the slots available. Another measure is how frequently would someone turn down an offer? In my eyes, the more prestigious an University, the less willing students are admitted would be willing to walk away for whatever reason. That is why I think this ratio when it is a large number indicates a lot of brand strength/prestige. Now of course there are ways folks can try to manipulate that, but the point still stands nonetheless.