USNews rankings are dominated by surveys, so they’re basically determined by popularity. Caltech is so small that it doesn’t try to be a school for everyone, or even a super selective group. Nor does it try to win a popularity contest (it certainly doesn’t do anything to game its ranking). Only people in certain circles really know the school and among those people it’s held in the highest esteem.
"Does that mean BYU is as “strong” as Harvard? And nearly twice as strong as Caltech? "
BYU was not in the top-10 or 20, because they didn’t win enough of the cross-admit battles or there wasn’t enough comparisons for them to be ranked. I don’t recall any of the academies being in their either. Using parchment, BYU and Harvard didn’t have any results, so assuming not enough data, but Stanford BYU is 60/40, Yale BYU is 67/33, MIT/BYU is 67/33, Berkeley is 56/44, Michigan is 60/40. Those actually aren’t bad numbers for BYU and they do win some vs selective colleges but they wouldn’t be in the top-20, much less top-10.
I suspect you are referring to the Avery paper which used a sample of high class rank students who graduated HS in the year 2000. The author notes that he intentionally excluded BYU from the national ranking, even though it won the Elo cross admit battles because it was regional. However, he did include it in the regional rankings. His ranking for region 8, which includes students from 8 western states including Utah, was as follows. BYU ranked #6 in this group. Had the ranking only looked at students in Utah instead of a combination of students in 8 states, I wouldn’t be surprised if BYU took the top spot. BYU applicants are primarily from Utah where BYU ranks extremely well, so it’s consistent with BYU having a very high yield.
Region 8 Cross Admit Ranking
- Harvard
- Caltech
- Yale
- Stanford
- Princeton
6. BYU
In the paper, Avery makes the following comment about BYU, explicitly stating that Utah students find BYU more desirable than top academic colleges.
"Perhaps the single most interesting college in Table 6 is Brigham Young, which appears in the top 10, between Princeton and Brown, in region 8 (which contains Utah). We have checked and determined that, if we were to compute a Utah-specific ranking, Brigham Young would rank even higher. The dramatic appearance of Brigham Young in the top 10 almost certainly occurs because the college is particularly desirable in the eyes of Mormon students.18 We cannot verify this conjecture because we did not ask students about their religion, but this leads us back to our general point about latent desirability and self-selection into applicant pools. The reason that Brigham Young wins so many tournaments with Utah students is that it is truly more desirable to them. "
A lot has changed in the past 20 years since the Avery sample, As far as I know Parchement is the only one who still does the Elo chess ranking for cross admits, but much of their sample is self-reported, making the validity and accuracy questionable – garbage in = garbage out. Nevertheless, BYU did fairly well. Their 2020 rankings had BYU in the top 20 and Harvard not in top 20, with the following top 10. Note that 3 of the top 10 are service academies.
2020 Parchment Cross Admit Ranking
- MIT
2. Air Force - Pomona
4. Navy - Swarthmore
- CMC
- Amherst
8. Coast Guard - Stanford
10… Bowdoin
… - BYU
… - Harvrard
wrong thread.
wrong thread.
That’s not to say, however, that had you actually been admitted and applied for FA that something might not have been awarded. Harvard’s NPC doesn’t seem all that granular and we all know of instances when awards have differed from the NPC.
WSJ/Higher Times Rankings just came out. https://www.wsj.com/articles/2021-best-colleges-in-america-harvard-leads-the-university-rankings-11600383996?mod=hp_lead_pos6 It is behind a pay wall, so highlights.
"The Top Ten
These schools achieved the highest overall scores in the Wall Street Journal/Times
Higher Education College Rankings
- Harvard University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Yale University
- Stanford University
- Brown University
Duke University
- California Institute of Technology
Princeton University
- Cornell University
- Northwestern University"
Factors:
"Those are all key indicators in the WSJ/THE rankings, which are based on 15 factors across four main categories: Forty percent of each school’s overall score comes from student outcomes, including graduates’ salaries and debt; 30% comes from academic resources, including how much the college spends on teaching; 20% from student engagement, including whether students feel prepared to use their education in the real world, and 10% from the learning environment, including the diversity of the student body and academic staff…
Some other college rankings focus on the quality of incoming students at a university, examining standardized-test scores and how students ranked in their high-school class. Some also give significant weight to outside opinion, conducting surveys of university administrators to find out if they think competing colleges are doing a good job. But the WSJ/THE College Rankings take a different approach, emphasizing the return on investment students see after they graduate. Schools that fare the best on this list have graduates who generally are satisfied with their educational experience and land relatively high-paying jobs that can help them pay down student loans."
Next 10:
- JHU
- Dartmouth
- UPenn
- U Chic
- Columbia/Rice (tied)
- Vandy
- Wash U St L
- USC 20 CMU
Other schools that CC members follow:
- Amherst/Williams (tied)
- UMIch
- UCLA
- NYU
- Notre Dame
- UCB
Not surprising that Wall Street and consulting target colleges are at the top of the list.
@BKSquared the ranking seems to differ from that on the THE website? Obviously the weighting WSJ applied changed it a fair bit in some cases? THE overall rankings here:
Nice to see other countries too for a bit more context. Oxford and Cambridge are the only two non-US colleges in the top 10.
Top 4 US colleges in order are Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, MIT according to this. Berkeley at #5 in the US is a big difference to that ranking done with WSJ too. I guess when you get significant differences in rankings for the same colleges in the same year with the same company involved in both lists, it helps show the weaknesses in relying on them.
That's a link to world rankings. US rankings use a different methodology, so they have a different order. More specifically:
Top 5 US Colleges in World Rankings
2. Stanford
3. Harvard
4. Caltech
5. MIT
7. Berkeley
Top 5 US Colleges in US Rankings
- Harvard
- MIT
- Yale
- Penn
- Caltech
Some of the colleges with especially large differences in the two rankings are:
Berkeley – #7 in World vs #34 in US
Brown – #7 in US vs #61 in World
Dartmouth – #12 in US vs #101 in World
@
@RichinPitt Stanford being stuck at 5 to 7 just seems lower than you would expect given Stanford’s reputation, endowment, yield and selectivity. It seems Stanford should be ranked in the top 3 or at least above Columbia. The fact that Princeton and Williams have been ranked number one for what seems like 10 years now also suggest that the system just accrues benefits to the incumbents.
Interesting, the ranking on the WSJ site for the US is different slightly from the Times Higher Education site. The ranking list I posted above was a direct cut and paste. Penn is 13 on the WSJ webpage. Michigan is ahead of UCLA.
As to World vs US ranking, the Times Higher Education site says, “The student-focused WSJ/THE College Rankings differ considerably from the THE World University Rankings, which have a heavier emphasis on research excellence on a global scale.”
"It seems Stanford should be ranked in the top 3 or at least above Columbia.
I don’t think Stanford cares too much about Columbia. They have 80% yield and most of the 20% that don’t go to Stanford go to Harvard. Some to MIT, Yale and Berkeley/UCLA. Until Columbia goes EA or SCEA, they’re not going to be taken seriously.
“I suspect you are referring to the Avery paper which used a sample of high class rank students who graduated HS in the year 2000.”
I just googled that and you’re right, that’s what it was. Anyway if BYU is #6, then that’s their ranking. All rankings have flaws, that would be one. The service academies is not that surprising, they were extremely tough to get into when I was applying (early 80s) because of them being free, maybe totally free.
There have been a lot of rankings discussed in the thread, and all of them have a different order, depending on the criteria used. For example, Berkeley excels in ratings based on academic research, academic reputation, quality of faculty, etc; so it does very well in the THE world rankings (60% research+citations, 30% teaching). Berkeley does not do as well in rankings that emphasize criteria that is well correlated with endowment per student, so it does not do as well in the the THE US rankings (40% weighted on resources) or USNWR (bulk of weightings well correlated with endowment). You can make almost any quality college do very well or very poorly, depending on how you choose the weightings.
Rather than look at rankings based on some website’s arbitrary weighting percentages of 11% endowment per student, 7% faculty salary, 7% average debt, 2% rate of international students… it’s far more meaningful to look at how different colleges do in the criteria that is important to you, which is certain to be very different from the weightings used in any of the website ranking lists.
Doesn’t the THE ranking consider graduate school academic output while the WSJ / THE focus just on undergraduate ?
The THE US college rankings use the following weightings: I expect WSJ uses something extremely similar. You are probably thinking of the THE world ratings, which emphasize research, citations, quality of faculty, and academic reputation… things a grad student might be more concerned about than undergrad.
12% value added to graduation salary
11% finance per student
11% faculty per student
11% graduation rate
10% academic reputation
8% research papers per faculty
7% student engagement
7% debt after graduation
…
@Data10: Do the factors “academic reputation” and “research papers per faculty” include the graduate schools in the THE US college rankings ?
And, yes, I was thinking of the THE world ratings & rankings. Do the rating factors differ between US & world rankings ?
Re #114, the WSJ site lets you customize the rankings by changing the weightings of the 4 primary categories.
The research papers per faculty is total number of academic publications by faculty during the years 2013-17 divided by the number of faculty. They use the IPEDS category for total faculty, which does not distinguish between graduate and undergraduate. I expect many faculty teach both grad and undergrad, making it difficult to separate the 2. I think the more critical distinction would be to exclude medical schools and similar. IPEDS excludes med school in their category, so I’d expect the med school is also excluded from the publication total.
Academic reputation is based on a survey of “leading scholars.” They only considered the rating in the “teaching excellence” category on the survey. I don’t know the specific wording of the survey and if they separated “teaching excellence” in undergrad vs overall.
Yes, the world and US use completely different weightings and factors. More detail is earlier i the thread.