<p>Professors from Harvard, Boston U and Wharton have developed a new model to rank US Universities under the grant from National Bureau of Economic Research.</p>
<p>Table 3 on Page 29 has the rankings. The SAT curves are also interesting.</p>
<p>Link first posted by rooster08 on Princeton board</p>
<p>some kid (hormesis already copied the table).</p>
<p>1 Harvard 2800
2 Yale 2738
3 Stanford 2694
4 Cal Tech 2632
5 MIT 2624
6 Princeton 2608
7 Brown 2433
8 Columbia 2392
9 Amherst 2363
10 Dartmouth 2357
11 Wellesley 2346
12 U Penn 2325
13 U Notre Dame 2279
14 Swarthmore 2270
15 Cornell 2236
16 Georgetown 2218
17 Rice 2214
18 Williams 2213
19 Duke 2209
20 U Virginia 2197
21 Northwestern 2136
22 Pomona 2132
23 Berkeley 2115
24 Georgia Tech 2115
25 Middlebury 2114
26 Wesleyan 2111
27 U Chicago 2104
28 Johns Hopkins 2096
29 USC 2072
30 Furman 2061
31 UNC 2045
32 Barnard 2034
33 Oberlin 2027
34 Carleton 2022
35 Vanderbilt 2016
36 UCLA 2012
37 Davidson 2010
38 U Texas 2008
39 NYU 1992
40 Tufts 1986
41 Washington & Lee 1983
42 U Michigan 1978
43 Vassar 1978
44 Grinnell 1977
45 U Illinois 1974
46 Carnegie Mellon 1957
47 U Maryland 1956
48 William & Mary 1954
49 Bowdoin 1953
50 Wake Forest 1940
51 Claremont 1936
52 Macalester 1926
53 Colgate 1925
54 Smith 1921
55 U Miami 1914
56 Haverford 1910
57 Mt Holyoke 1909
58 Connecticut College 1906
59 Bates 1903
60 Kenyon 1903
61 Emory 1888
62 Washington U 1887
63 Occidental 1883
64 Bryn Mawr 1871
65 SMU 1860
66 Lehigh 1858
67 Holy Cross 1839
68 Reed College 1837
69 RPI 1835
70 Florida State 1834
71 Colby 1820
72 UCSB 1818
73 GWU 1798
74 Fordham 1796
75 Sarah Lawrence 1788
76 Bucknell 1784
77 Catholic U 1784
78 U Colorado 1784
79 U Wisconsin 1780
80 Arizona State 1774
81 Wheaton (Il) 1750
82 Rose Hulman 1745
83 UCSC 1736
84 Boston U 1736
85 UCSD 1732
86 Tulane 1727
87 U Richmond 1714
88 CWRU 1704
89 Trinity College 1703
90 Colorado College 1698
91 Indiana U 1689
92 Penn State 1686
93 American U 1681
94 Hamilton 1674
95 U Washington 1629
96 U Rochester 1619
97 Lewis & Clark 1593
98 Wheaton (MA) 1564
99 Clark 1551
100 Skidmore 1548
101 Purdue 1525
102 Colorado State 1513
103 Syracuse 1506
104 Scripps 1479
105 Loyola U 1221</p>
<p>This interesting study was the subject of a lengthy thread some months ago on the Parents’ forum. It is not government funded, as above, nor is it 'I wish I worked there" junk. If you actually read it, you will learn that it is based on what the authors call “revealed preferences” of applicants accepted at multiple institutions, e.g., among students accepted at Harvard and Yale in a given year, what is the probability that the majority will choose one over the other. Thus we see in table 4, that in a given year, there is a 96% probability that the majority of cross-admits will choose H over Y, a 100% probability that the majority will choose H over S, a 95% probability they will choose H over C, a 58% probability the majority will choose S over C, a 62% chance the majority will choose S over M, a 76% likelihood they will choose S over P, and A 100% probability that the majority will choose S over all other institutions.</p>
<p>These head to head competitions, called “tournaments” because the system is based on a system devised for Chess tournaments, are what gives the statisticians a claim to objectivity. It’s not based on manipulable factors such as yield and admission rates, but on “revealed preferences”–which college do the students accepted to both prefer. There was a lot of hostility expressed about this ranking in the last forum, most of it irrational, though there were some legitimate objections to the methodology, especially for colleges further down the list, so let’s be clear: NO ONE SHOULD CHOOSE THEIR COLLEGE BASED ON THIS LIST. However, it is a fascinating and revealing statistical study, and the results come as no great surprise.</p>
<p>As the authors concede this is still measuring the preferences of high school seniors and not actually measuring what happens when the student attends that college for four years. We could use a statistical method to measure academics: we might compare admitting sats to the tests the college seniors take for admission to grad school, GREs MCAT LSAT etc. Granted these are also multiple choice tests and dependent somewhat upon the taker’s test taking ability, but what we are measuring is the difference between the entering percentile and the exiting. For example in medical school the part I board exams correlate very strongly with the MCATs taken in college. There is one school whose admitted class averages 40th percentile with respect to entering MCATs. Their part I boards average 60th percentile. Possibly the only school to shift their percentile so significantly. Yet they would rank only 40th percentile in MCATs and probably even lower in a preference scale.</p>