When I was deciding on what colleges I wanted to apply to, I created a system to rank colleges in terms of desirability. I used RD Yield Rates and Acceptance Rates to create a general “desirability index” - after all, the most “desirable” colleges have the highest yield rates and lowest acceptance rates. Then I used Standardized Test Scores to balance the scores. These were the rankings I calculated.
Important Note: Many schools are NOT ranked on this list. This is because I only ranked the schools that I was personally interested in. If you would like me to calculate a score for a school just comment below.
All data used came from the Class of 2018.
Other areas of note:
NYUAD's applicant pool is not as strong as its competitors although the enrolled student body has high test scores.
WUSTL has a shockingly low RD yield rate (perhaps due to its stingy financial aid policy?)
NYU Abu Dhabi 168.3273
Stanford 118.6139
Harvard 110.9553
Yale 97.28006
Princeton 87.55889
Columbia 84.99853
Brown 74.74201
U Penn 69.15258
Pomona 62.26104
Dartmouth 61.38664
Duke 58.13777
Cornell 54.3058
Vanderbilt 52.28183
Northwestern 52.20273
Claremont McKenna 51.59428
Amherst 50.19004
Rice 47.20898
Bowdoin 46.50919
Washington and Lee 45.86469
Johns Hopkins 45.15044
Middlebury 43.4
USC 42.61795
Williams 42.2109
Tufts 40.70697
WUSTL 40.55108
Colgate 31.15461
Bates 30.53146
Emory 25.3352
What are your thoughts? I personally would have put Dartmouth over Penn. W&L a bit lower, WUSTL a bit higher.
@JustOneDad NYUAD is NYU Abu Dhabi - 3% acceptance rate 84% yield. Basically NYU’s “Honor’s College” in the middle east built with the help of oil money.
@JustOneDad Most who know about it would say so - it has basically the equivalent stats of the Ivies (scores, gpa, student/faculty ratio, resources available to students etc.), but its so new that it’s hard to tell. There’s no way I would put it in the top five though. Students will quite often turn down the lower tier Ivies for it.
@PurpleTitan I see what you were saying, but I wasn’t trying to rank schools based on quality of education, more to see what schools students like best.
With one exception, your ranking identifies pretty much the same set of top schools that several other rankings identify. It includes one school (NYUAB) that those other rankings miss. It omits several schools (like the top publics) that those rankings include. Do these differences make your ranking a better indicator of what schools are desirable? I don’t think so.
UC Berkeley gets nearly 70K applicants per year. How many does NYUAD get? Less than 1000?
I think the reason NYUAD appears to be “desirable” by your measurements must be because it attracts a very self-selecting applicant pool. Very few American students would even consider attending college in Abu Dhabi. It isn’t desirable to them at all. In contrast, a very high percentage of top students in California (and perhaps in neighboring states) would seriously consider UC Berkeley.
A confounding problem with your method is that schools such as Amherst and Williams accept circa 50 percent of their classes with a 100 percent yield rate, but a significantly higher acceptance rate (40 percent for ED versus slightly less than 20 per cent for RD).
So your method doesn’t look at the quality of the self-selected pool.
I think desirability would also look at to which schools high stat students apply versus those to which they don’t apply.
Incidentally, if you rank schools by SAT alone Cal Tech is number 1 on both the Math + CR list (Forbes) and the Math + CR + Writing list (Business Insider).
@GMTplus7 I’d hypothesize a high correlation between the SAT scores of spouses. To test this, we’d have to control for meeting your spouse at college, and look at marriages between people who attended different colleges.
I’d be more concerned with how desirable each school is to YOU in terms of things like atmosphere, size, majors available, geographic location etc. instead of spending time manipulating last year’s admission stats.
@tk21769 NYUAD had 15k applicants last year. UCB isn’t considered THAT desirable because they have a low yield. Parchment is alright, although the room for error is large as they really don’t have that much data. That being said, their methodology is the best - I agree.
@happy1 Considering I didn’t apply to most of those colleges for the reasons you specified I don’t believe you are directing your comment at me?
@latichever That’s why I used only the RD yield rates, so the percentage of the class taken ED wouldn’t matter. Yes, I made a general assumption that the quality of applicant pools for these colleges are similar - most schools don’t publish data on that. NYUAD did note that their average applicant had an ACT score of 27 (largely due to NYU students being able to apply to NYUAD with no additional work necessary).
@GMTplus7 I think genome analysis would be a better way to find the most compatible spouse no?
My personal goal for this ranking was to compare liberal arts colleges with the universities, not so much create a ranking system - that was a byproduct. My predictions weren’t actually very far off (I thought beforehand that Pomona and Dartmouth would be around the same).
Fig leaves, your entire premise is wrong. You figure out the most desirable schools for YOU by figuring out which ones you like, not by figuring out what other people may happen to like. Your premise is about as nonsensical as selecting your ice cream flavor by figuring out which flavors other people like. Don’t be the kind of person who only decides they like something if a mass of other people like it, okay?
According to the NYUAD Admissions Profile page,
15,520 “dual NYUAD & NYUNY” applications were submitted for the class of 2016,
but only 2,470 for “NYUAD primary”, up from 957 for the class of 2014
(http://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/admissions/information-for-counselors/admissions-profile.html).
Doesn’t this mean that for 13,050 (or 84%) of applicants, NYUAD was not a more desirable choice even than NYUNY?
How many of those NYUAD applications were from US residents?
How many were admitted to both NYUAD and a “top” US college, but chose to attend NYUAD?
At least with respect to US high school students, I think we’re talking about a tiny niche population of self-selecting students.
Still, in the course of figuring out which are the most desirable colleges for YOU, I don’t think there is anything very wrong with looking at which colleges are most desirable for some appropriate population of other people, according to some appropriate measurement.
