<p>i hope pton makes it to No. 1 this year!!</p>
<p>When are 2007 rankings out? September?</p>
<p>mid-August.</p>
<p>Why would Cornell go down 2 places in the rankings when their acceptance rate just dropped by 9% this year </p>
<p>(30% to 21% for the entire university, Arts and Sciences is quite a bit lower considering ILR saw an increase in acceptance rate)</p>
<p>HeavenWood, I wouldn’t say Cornell makes Dartmouth look like a city. I take it you haven’t been to Ithaca. Even our campus resembles a small city, and it has quite the undergraduate population. </p>
<p>Dartmouth is a great school, but:</p>
<p>Total Residents:</p>
<p>City of Ithaca, NY:29,287
Hanover, NH: 10,850 </p>
<p>Ithaca is almost three times the size of Hanover. Not even taking into account the 13,000 undergraduates, and I think about 5000 in Ithaca College.</p>
<p>Although Hanover is just Dartmouth’s town, the local area (upper valley, NH) has about 75K residents.</p>
<p>Ithaca is better than Hanover though in my opinion. Hanover’s too ritzy.</p>
<p>A lot of people are bemoaning the public schools for their high acceptance rates, but there is a reason for this. Most public schools post on their websites the percentage of applicants that were accepted based on their test score and GPA. They basically tell students what their chances are of being accepted. More than numbers are taken into account otherwise all students with similar GPA’s and test scores would eitherbe rejected or accepted. Private schools are much more coy about who they accept or reject. They do not let students know the odds of acceptance and many students who shouldn’t even be applying end up doing so because they think they have a shot at getting in. The reality is that acceptance rates shouldn’t really matter in college rankings. The public universities are tellin people to save their money, and the University’s time if their odds of getting in are slim. If anything, an open admissions process, where students are kept informed should help a ranking. The current rankings system encourages colleges to be deceptive about their admissions practices.</p>
<p>Actually most colleges publish profiles of admitted students, its not a public school thing only.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the universities are looking for people to save their time if their chances of admissions are slim. They might have to deal with more applicants, but they could get a few they wouldn’t otherwise, it improves their score in many rankings, it makes the school look better as it’s harder to get into, and much more.</p>
<p>Are the published SATs and GPAs those of the applicants accepted, or of the people who actually attend?</p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t think the public schools are really out to help the public save money on app fees.</p>
<p>After all, think of it this way. Many of the public school’s graduate programs, particularly, the doctoral programs, are just as inscrutable and selective, if not more so, than that of the private schools. I know several people who got admitted to doctoral programs at Harvard and MIT, but got rejected from the doctoral program at Berkeley. You can have stellar grades, test scores, rec’s, and research experience…and still not get admitted to a Berkeley doctoral program. The whole doctoral admissions process at Berkeley (and at every other school, public or private) is shrouded in secrecy, such that nobody really knows what they need to get admitted. The upshot is that, just like you say that the mysterious admissions process of private undergrad schools may encourage people to apply who have no chance, the same thing happens in the doctoral programs, but to both public and private schools.</p>
<p>So if public schools were really trying to encourage people to save app fees, then wouldn’t they want to publish clear admit statistics for ALL of their applicants, undergrad and grad, so that they can ALL save money? Why would they want the undergrad applicants to save money on app fees, but not the grad applicants? Are you saying that if you’re a grad-student applicant to a public school, you don’t deserve to save money?</p>
<p>You also talk about how acceptance rates should not affect rankings. To that, I would say that that cuts both ways. If you say that the rankings of undergrad programs should not be affected by acceptance rates, then fine, neither should the grad programs. The grad programs of some public schools have some of the lowest accept rates in the country - lower than many private schools. For example, the UC Medical Schools have some of the lowest acceptance rates of any medical school in the country; UCSF Med and UCLA Med, for example, have lower acceptance rates than do Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins Med and Washington University Med. The UCBerkeley Haas School of Business MBA program has a lower acceptance rate than do the MBA programs at Wharton, MIT Sloan, and Northwestern Kellogg. </p>
<p>The point is, if the public undergrad programs should not be ‘hurt’ in the rankings because of their relatively high acceptance rates, then the public grad programs should not be ‘helped’ in the rankings because of their relatively low acceptance rates. What’s fair is fair.</p>
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<p>I would confirm this statement. However, i would argue that graduate programs are not generally intended for commoners/public. The graduate programs are dedicated for research, instead of providing sufficient education training required for high level jobs. In this case, those public universities don’t have to oblige to cater all the regional students, i.e. dropping their responsibility of taking ‘weak’ students in the graduate level, and therefore may have similar pattern on acceptance as many private universities.</p>
<p>Grad rankings don’t rely that much on student stats. Many programs do post their stats.</p>
<p>I think that acceptance rates should influence rankings, but not be the most important factor in them, as they are in many ranking systems. Do you think that contradicts what you’re saying, sakky? Also, don’t you think that the nature of different programs changes what acceptance rank means? Do you think that the difference between the function of different types of programs affects what acceptance rates mean?</p>
<p>rtkysg: I would add that at the graduate level many of the #1 ranked departments are at public universities, which occasions may private school students’ applications, making them even more selective.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if I agree with this. What about medical schools? Their sole purpose of existence is to train doctors. Let’s be honest. What’s more beneficial to society - 1 more trained doctor, or 1 more person majoring in Leisure Studies? Yet the fact is, many of the public med-schools are extremely selective. </p>
<p>In fact, I would say that if you are a California resident, and you want to go to med-school, then unless you are an academic superstar, you are basically getting a raw deal. The fact is, all of the UC med-schools are all extremely selective. California has no middle-tier public med-schools. They are all top-tier. If you were a resident of some other state, then it might be easier for you to gain in-state admission into the public med-school of that state. But because you’re a Californian, then the only in-state admission you can gain are to the UC’s. Hence, if you can’t get into one of those, then you either have to go to a private school or try to get OOS admission to the public med school of another state.</p>
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<p>I am saying that if public undergrad programs should not be punished for high acceptance rates, then public graduate programs should not be rewarded for low acceptance rates. What’s fair is fair. You can’t have it both ways.</p>
<p>Yes you can, if you say it’s a minor factor, but a factor nonetheless. It is important, really, but it’s not the most important thing. Also, I do think that the different situations greatly affect how we should perceive acceptance rate. Cal has fairly low acceptance rate, around 21%. But the applying students are from high schools, and while they scored highly on test scores and in their GPAs, that the average MCAT and college GPAs from the applicants to UCSF Med is far more impressive. Does acceptance rate effect quality? I don’t think it’s causation, but correlation, to a high degree, and that it’s a fairly good measure of student body quality. Because graduate school is very different from undergraduate, I do think that acceptance rates should be viewed differently, but what they measure, primarily student quality and difficulty of admissions, is the same in each case.</p>
<p>A couple of the UC Med schools have pretty average stats. Not impossible to get into but similar to some of the larger midwest schools.</p>
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<p>Every one of the UC Med schools is ranked in the top 50. </p>
<p>Furthermore, it’s not the stats I am talking here, but rather the acceptance rates. The one with the highest rate is UCI Med with a rate of 7.9%. That is an extremely low percentage compared to most public med-schools. Even the University of Michigan Med School has an 8.4% accept rate. And Michigan residents who aren’t good enough for UM can apply to Wayne State Med which has an acceptance rate of 17.8%.</p>
<p>Now, I know what you’re going to say. Admissions rates, by themselves, are not terribly meaningful. There is such a thing as self-selection. Yes, of course that is true. But the context of this thread is that acceptance rates should not be considered when determinining undergraduate program ranking. If you subscribe to this theory, then you have to agree that acceptance rates should also not be considered when determining graduate program ranking. It’s hard to justify one, but not the other.</p>