<p>The implication from newmassdad and others is that HYP (especially H) seem to draw plenty of students from outside the Northeast, including from Canada and the Caribbean. Why can’t Stanford and other schools do the same? </p>
<p>I agree with you that many students probably do prefer to stay close to home, and in fact I have heard some specifically state that they won’t seriously consider any distant school…except for Harvard. For example, I know plenty of Californians who were perfectly content to attend an instate school - either a UC, Caltech, or Stanford - and applied nowhere else outside of the state except at Harvard, for which they would have taken had they gotten in. Similarly, I know some former Michigan residents who were perfectly satisfied to have gone to UM, unless they had gotten into Harvard. But again that simply begs the question of why Harvard has attained the lofty position of the ‘geographical exception’, and why other schools can’t do likewise.</p>
<p>There can be only one school that the highest percentage of people consider to be number one, so the question is: why is it Harvard and not Stanford? I’d guess the major reasons are Harvard’s history and location.</p>
<p>Well, no, frankly, I think you’ve fished your data. For example, you say that Stanford matches Princeton in terms of Rhodes winners since year 2000. Yet Stanford has been an elite school probably since at least the 1970’s. How does Stanford match up against Princeton in the 80’s or the 90’s in terms of Rhodes? Seems to me that you specifically picked out the timeframe in which Stanford looks best.</p>
<p>^My point is that Princeton no longer “tends to have more Rhodes winners” than Stanford. I don’t think I need to include those 80s/09s data, do I? Do I really care if England was more powerful than America 300 years ago?</p>
<p>Well, actually, I think you do, in order to rule out a spurious effect. Perhaps the 2000’s just happened to be a lucky decade for Stanford, or an unlucky one for Princeton. By the same token, I could fish my data to “conclude” that James Madison University now has a better football team than does Virginia Tech, if I were to only examine 2010 game data (i.e. yesterday’s game data). Yet somehow, I suspect that VT is still a better team going forward. After all, VT’s loss was its first ever loss to a FBS team, and was also JMU’s first win over a FCS team in 20 years. </p>
<p>If you would show that Stanford was gaining over time throughout the 80’s until today, then I would agree that your hypothesis would have more merit. </p>
<p>The other tactic is to make a bold prediction: will Stanford win more Rhodes than Princeton in the 2010’s? Personally, I don’t care; I have no connection to either school so I don’t have a dog in that fight. But if you’re sure about your hypothesis, then you should have little problem in making such a prediction. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for 10 years for the data.</p>
<p>However, I’ll make a “bold” prediction: next year, when Virginia Tech plays James Madison again, VT will win.</p>
<p>Well, my <em>reasonable</em> prediction is that Stanford is gonna be as good as, if not better than, Princeton in the next 10 years. In many ways, Stanford is already ahead of Princeton. In terms of research and world/graduate rankings, they are not even close these days. Stanford also got more Marshall winners the past decade. Your JMU vs VT analogy doesn’t apply here. Given a choice, every HS player would want to be on VT team. It’s clear VT has better talents but just played a bad game (that’s college football and they are still kids after all). The Stanford/Princeton cross-admit battle is an entirely difference story. Stanford’s acceptance rate/yield are now second to Harvard. In fact, a Yale article in the early 2000s indicated that Yale got a 50:50 split with Stanford; Stanford was a more fierce competitor than Princeton. All these data suggest it’s highly unlikely “luck” explains the last decade.</p>
<p>It is impossible to draw any conclusions in comparing individual institutions using Rhodes data over time, at least with any semblance of scientific accuracy. Consider:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Rhodes selection process and criteria have changed several times in the past few decades. In the 1970s they first selected women scholars. Before that it was all male. In the early 2000s they went from a selection process that first selected state semifinalists then went to 8 regions with four scholars each to a process that directly went to 16 regions with 2 scholars each.</p></li>
<li><p>the data is very noisy. For example, to use the most extreme, Harvard had no winners in 2006, followed by 6 in 2007 (and preceded by 5 in 2005!). Are we to presume they had a sudden dip in student quality in 2006? </p></li>
<li><p>Universities change with time. For example, Duke was hardly a national university (in most people’s minds?) forty years ago. It is now. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>So, you have a changing selection process over time, matched with a changing pool of university talent over time, together mixed with very noisy data. </p>
<p>Fun to talk about, yes. Impossible to answer, too.</p>
<p>On the contrary, you can answer the question to quite accurate statistical significance values. For example, I doubt that anybody would seriously dispute that Harvard has been a more successful school for winning Rhodes Scholarships than, say, SouthEast Missouri State University, regardless of the statistical noise, as the effect size overwhelms that noise. To use statistical parlance, the p-value would be extraordinarily low regardless of whatever reasonable null theoretical distribution you might attempt to impose. Hence, it is entirely possible to compare and contrast many institution dyads. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your presumption is that pure student talent is deterministic. However, I think we can all agree that it’s not simply a matter of the raw power of your student body, but what your school does with it, and in particular, that certain schools are noted for providing the institutional infrastructure that is highly conducive towards producing Rhodes winners, whereas other schools do not.</p>
<p>As a case in point, consider Ankur Luthra’s sad words about why he thinks Berkeley has won relatively few Rhodes, particularly considering the size of the school. </p>
<p>*"…his conviction that not only should more Berkeley students be applying for the Oxford education the Rhodes supports, but the institution should be more active in identifying potential selectees and guiding them through the process.</p>
<p>That neither of these things are happening to the extent he’d recommend, Luthra says, is easily accounted for. Berkeley undergrads, he believes, tend to “psych themselves out” about their chances of winning a prize that they see as awarded more often to their private-college counterparts than to public-university students. Yet as a group, he insists, his peers are far more accomplished than they give themselves credit for — with nothing to fear from competition with the Ivy League types who are selected for the Rhodes on what sometimes seems a revolving-door basis. (Harvard, for example, placed 5 students among the 32 selected nationwide this year; last year it placed 6.)</p>
<p>The second discouraging factor, according to Luthra, is that Berkeley faculty aren’t doing as much as they could to encourage qualified students to apply.</p>
<p>The fact that Berkeley has sent precisely three students to Oxford in just under 30 years, with long intervals between each winner, has a self-fulfilling aspect to it, Luthra believes. “There’s a slippery slope of self-confidence,” he says, “that you encounter when someone hasn’t won from here in two years, then three, then thirteen. I was talking to some juniors who I thought would make great candidates, and they believed no one from Berkeley had ever won! “*</p>
<p>Hence, I would agree that Harvard (and Stanford) are better at producing Rhodes winners than is Berkeley. Given the sheer size of the school - now nearly 26k undergrads, nearly 4 times the size of Stanford - you would think that Berkeley should be dominating at least the California district of the Rhodes competition. The lack of institutional support hinders them from doing so.</p>
<p>For example, a comparison of numbers from SouthEast Missouri State, much less Berkeley, to Harvard with regard to Rhodes achievement is meaningless without controlling for the composition of the class. </p>
<p>If one assumes that Rhodes winners are highly accomplished, one might conclude that they are part of the statistical tail. This assumption is supported by quite a bit of external evidence. When examining tails, or outliers, means, medians and other measures of populations are meaningless. There are statistical tests for tails, but this is never reported. </p>
<p>Therefore, the fact that two populations may have identical means in measures such as GRE score tells us nothing about the tails or outliers. </p>
<p>Because of this, it is entirely possible that Berkeley over-performed in getting 3 students to Oxford in 30 years, and that Luthra is misinformed. </p>
<p>But, as I said before, we just don’t know. And random quotes or speculation will not answer the questions.</p>
<p>If you truly believe that argument is no substitute for data, then why even participate in this discussion at all, or any discussion in CC for that matter? Every thread on CC should then simply consist of a handful of posts that present data without any further detail. For example, that Harvard has had the most Rhodes winners of any school in the country is not a matter of discussion. That’s a fact, supported by public data, leaving nothing to discuss. {People can and do discuss whether Harvard will continue to have the most Rhodes winners in the world going forward or how they managed to garner the most winners, but the simple question of who has the most winners is not a topic of debate.} </p>
<p>The inherent value of CC is its venue to discuss issues where clear data does not exist, or at least, isn’t publicly available. It serves as a forum for people to discuss how to interpret the data that is available, and in the questions where no data is available - which is quite often - how to conceive of thought experiments and logic that might help you to answer that question. </p>
<p>For example, one of the most common questions on CC is ‘which school among a particular subset of schools to which I have been admitted should I attend’, or its cousins, ‘Which school is better for me, X or Y’ or ‘Which schools should I apply to’? Obviously nobody truly knows the answers to those questions, and barring the ability to view multiple outcomes in the quantum multiverse to examine the life outcomes of the same person applying/attending different universities, we’ll never know truly know the answers. Yet CC helps people by providing new ways to think about those questions to make more informed decisions. Otherwise, we all might as well just invoke a random number generator to decide which school to attend, because nobody can ever provide “definitive” answers about which school is ‘better’. </p>
<p>To put it bluntly, I’ve noticed a general theme in your posts: you seem not to be shy to pronounce your opinions and arguments about plenty of other matters where data is sparse, only, when challenged, to retreat behind the convenient mantle that ‘argument is no substitute for data’. If you truly believed that, why did you bother trying to argue at all? One would expect then to weigh in only on topics where the data is crystal clear. I agree with you that random quotes and speculation will never completely answer the questions - but if you believe they provide no value whatsoever, then why do you post your speculations?</p>
<p>The fact is there is lots more that goes into becoming a Rhodes winner than being an outstanding student/person. Some places have that figured out and know how to best package their people for success. Rhodes is as much a beauty contest as an academic one. The right handling/packaging is a key factor.</p>
<p>I presented nothing of the sort. At no time have I ever denied that argument should have data as a basis. Obviously it should. As I’ve always said, if somebody has more data, please present it. </p>
<p>But in almost every discussion on CC - certainly the ones that tend to garner the most interest - proper data does not exist, in which case, argument must necessarily move beyond the data. For example, nobody really knows exactly why Berkeley seems to have so few Rhodes winners relative to Harvard, as no public data exists that will definitively answer that question, so you’re forced to deduce from what is available, whether it’s a theoretical thought experiment or the opinions of a past Berkeley Rhodes winner. </p>
<p>The irony is that people like nmd feel free to offer their opinions about topics whenever it fits their narrative, but will demand data from posters offering contradictory opinions. As a case in point, in post #49 nmd asserted that it is easier to win a Rhodes if you’re from the Canadian Maritime provinces than from any of the US Districts*. Perhaps true, perhaps false, but notice how he never offered any data definitively demonstrating that it is true. He only asserted that it was true. </p>
<p>He then curiously invokes a discussion of statistical variance and outliers in post #74, which then leaves him wide-open for a whopper of a logical flaw: perhaps the Canadian Maritimes for some reason produce a plethora of outlier superstars who would provide harsh competition for the Rhodes - far more harsh than the competition within some or perhaps every US district. He never presents any data to allay this concern. Yet he contends that statistical outlier concerns confounds my analysis regarding Harvard vs. Berkeley. </p>
<p>In other words, he demands a standard of data integrity and verifiability from others and their opinions that he’s not willing to demand from himself and his opinions. That’s what’s so concerning. If he’s not willing to allow me to speculate that Berkeley is not as good of a school as Harvard in terms of the institutional support for the Rhodes Scholarship, then perhaps he shouldn’t speculate himself about whether the Maritimes are indeed a less difficult Rhodes competition district than any of the US districts. </p>
<p>*For the record, I happen to suspect that that is probably true, meaning that the Maritimes probably don’t have a plethora of outlier stars and so the competition might indeed be easier than in any US district but, again, that only begs the question of why Harvard is able to preferentially attract Rhodes winners from the Canadian Maritimes while other schools cannot.</p>
<p>“If you truly believe that argument is no substitute for data, then why even participate in this discussion at all, or any discussion in CC for that matter? Every thread on CC should then simply consist of a handful of posts that present data without any further detail.”</p>
<p>nmd never claimed that presenting data means no argument or discussion, yet your diatribe assumes he did.</p>
<p>No, you misunderstood me (or perhaps nmd). What he said was that argument is no substitute for data. To that I wholeheartedly agree: if somebody has more data, please present it. Data, when available, is always better than mere arguments. I have never claimed otherwise. </p>
<p>The problem, again, is that he rarely presents data to support his arguments, yet he demands that others do so. I have yet to see any data that demonstrates that the California Maritime Rhodes districts are easier than the US districts. </p>
<p>Like I said, whenever a discussion erupts within CC, it is almost always because hard data does not exist about the topic. If this thread was simply about which school won more Rhodes, somebody would have posted the winners list and that would have been the end of a uninteresting thread. The reason why this thread is now 6 pages long is precisely because it sparked questions for which no hard data exists, such as what it really takes to win the Rhodes and how does one define ‘better’ in terms of ‘better’ schools for winning Rhodes. For these questions, no definitive data exists, which leaves us only with argumentation, perhaps bolstered with incomplete data, but perhaps not.</p>
<p>So, like I said, those posters who don’t appreciate the opinions expressed within a particular discussion because they aren’t supported by definitive data probably shouldn’t participate in the discussion at all. The lack of hard data is inherent to the discussion. </p>
<p>Again, my real concern is that he demands a level of data from others that he’s not willing to provide himself. Exactly how much data has he actually provided? Instead, he provides arguments, almost exclusively. But, like he said, “argument is no substitute for data”, right?</p>
<p>If he is allowed to use argumentation when the data is not definitive, then he should allow others the same privilege.</p>
<p>Sometimes the data is so obvious to most educated folks that I see no reason to post it. For example, just look up the population numbers for the Canadian Maritimes versus US districts. The data is there. You just need to be smart enough to look it up.</p>
<p>New to this whole process…and have to read up. Do most of the top colleges have guidance/staff that work with the students interested in Rhodes, etc.?</p>