What's Your Definition of "Elite"

Parents Forum
181

@theloniusmonk

Yale and Stanford are well represented in Congress: https://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-top-10-colleges-for-members-of-congress?slide=2.

I’m not sure where your VC numbers come from, but I’m sure Stanford alumni raise more than $5 million a year. That’s what, about a series B round for one company. According to this ranking, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford take three of the top four spots for startups.
http://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-vc-backed-entrepreneurs-2016-9/#3-massachusetts-institute-of-technology-mit-15

182

ThankYou – as I noted above, Yield overlaid with admit rate (ytar) is the very best metric. Takes care of byu and berea, but leaves nd (correctly) on the list as a top school.

183

@roethlisburger

That article was from 2010 (John Kerry and Joe Lieberman are no longer senators), here’s a more recent one:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/find-colleges/articles/college-news-trends/house-of-reps-where-did-the-house-go-to-college-infographic/

Yale has four now in HOR, maybe an indication of a loss of power and influence.

I’m not arguing against Stanford on startups, it’s a clear leader, MIT is not though and is more in the second or third tier.

184

@theloniusmonk

Other than Princeton and Georgetown, all the schools with more members in the House have 5x or more undergrad enrollment than Yale. Senator Cruz is the only Princetonian in the Senate.

185

@northwesty, YTAR can be driven by many factors that have little to do with the academic quality of the school, including such things as how the school games the application process, as being a service academy, as a result of a religious affiliation, as a result of a specific mission, or the desirability of a school’s location. This is not an indictment on the resultant quality of the education, but as you correctly noted it’s not an apples to apples comparison whether it’s Berea, BYU or others - let’s use the same measuring stick for all.

186

Yes, of course there are limits, but those limits can be pretty high. Penn, for example, fills about half its class ED. Their overall yield in 2016 was 67.4% (3,674 admitted, 2,491 enrolled). I’m sure they don’t get 100% yield on ED admits, but it’s probably something close to that. Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they did get 100% yield on ED admits. Pulling the 1,336 ED admits out of the totals for admitted and enrolled freshmen, you’d be left with a RD yield of 49.4%. That’s a huge difference.

Of course, many of the ED admits would have chosen to attend Penn if offered admission RD; presumably applying ED signals that Penn was their first choice. But without ED Penn would have a harder time identifying which applicants were making Penn their first choice. And some may have applied ED because they figured it boosted their chances of admission to a very good school, so that if Penn didn’t have ED, they might have applied to another school that did. Bottom line, you have to assume that without ED Penn’s yield would have been somewhere between 49.4% and 67.4%, but probably short of 67.4% by a sufficient margin that it calls into question the value of comparing Penn’s yield to that of a school that doesn’t have ED, or that uses ED less aggressively

187

@theloniusmonk, I can’t see how election to the HOR is a recognition of a significant achievement as it appears that most get paid for getting little done, unless that’s the achievement - IMHO.

188

@Chembiodad

If you don’t think being in Congress is impressive, perhaps we can at least agree members of Congress are influential. HYMS are target schools for foreign elites.

189

@roethlisburger, hard to call them influential when they have a 20% approval rating - maybe the next HOR class will fair better on the approval/influence meter. Are you saying that HYMS are elites because wealthy families from abroad covet those schools like they do Armani or Gucci - hmm…

190

“Yes, of course there are limits, but those limits can be pretty high. Penn, for example, fills about half its class ED. Their overall yield in 2016 was 67.4% (3,674 admitted, 2,491 enrolled). I’m sure they don’t get 100% yield on ED admits, but it’s probably something close to that.”

Sure Penn, Duke, Northwestern fill half their seats through ED, which improves their yield (and also admit rate stats). But to deploy ED in this way, you need to find very high quality students who are willing to ED to your school. University of Whatev can’t do that. It only works for schools that are pretty strong who want to get stronger. And the really really strong (HYPS) achieve even higher yields without using the ED tool.

End of the day, USNWR does it the right way. They come up with a multi-factor formula with various weightings that measures financial resources, student selectivity, graduation rates, student test scores, peer surveys, counselor surveys, etc. etc. etc. Overlaying all of those metrics eliminates the outliers (BYU’s high yield) and also minimizes the gaming (although gaming still happens). Hard to do better than what they do.

But if you want one single metric instead, I’ve not seen anyone point to anything better than YTAR. It produces a list that most would agree with. Because it measures the things that most would see as elite indicators.

Schools that people wish they could go to, that are very hard to get into, and schools that people rarely turn down if admitted. As Groucho says, the clubs you want to belong to but won’t have you as a member.

The YTAR list also correlates highly with many of the other metrics that have been mentioned – test scores, endowment per student, need blind/full need, high full pay percentage. Elite schools are the total package.

191

@northwesty, agree that elite schools are the total package, but for me YTAR doesn’t measure that - I’ll keep looking…

192

^^ I agree with you about the consistently trashed USNWR college ranking system. I like it and think it gets pretty close to it.

193

Chem – here’s a YTAR list someone else put together using data from 2014. USNWR imho is better. But this is a surprisingly good list for just one non-subjective metric. And unlike USNWR, it puts universitiies and LACs into one list.

Thoughts?

Rank Name Y/A Ratio A-Rate Y-Rate

1 Stanford 15.6 5% 78%
2 Harvard 13.5 6% 81%
3 Yale 11.7 6% 70%
4 Princeton 9.4 7% 66%
5 MIT 9.0 8% 72%
6 Columbia 8.9 7% 62%
7 UChicago 6.7 9% 60%
8 Brown 6.6 9% 59%
9 UPenn 6.5 10% 65%
10 Claremont McKenna 4.5 11% 50%
11 Duke 4.4 11% 48%
12 Dartmouth 4.3 12% 52%
13 CalTech 4.3 9% 39%
14 Pomona College 4.0 12% 48%
15 Cornell 3.8 14% 53%
16 Northwestern 3.5 13% 46%
17 Pitzer College 3.5 13% 46%
18 Bowdoin 3.3 15% 49%
19 Vanderbilt 3.2 13% 42%
20 UC-Berkeley 2.9 16% 46%
21 Amherst 2.9 14% 40%
22 Georgetown 2.8 17% 47%
23 Harvey Mudd 2.6 14% 37%
24 Swarthmore College 2.5 17% 43%
25 Notre Dame 2.5 21% 53%
26 Tufts 2.4 17% 41%
27 Middlebury College 2.4 17% 41%
28 Williams College 2.4 19% 45%
29 Rice 2.3 15% 35%
30 Johns Hopkins 2.3 16% 37%
31 Colorado College 2.2 18% 40%
32 Washington & Lee 2.2 19% 41%
33 WashU 2.1 17% 35%
34 Barnard 1.9 24% 46%
35 Davidson 1.9 22% 42%
36 UCLA 1.9 19% 36%
37 USC 1.8 18% 33%
38 Chapel Hill 1.6 28% 45%
39 Careleton 1.6 23% 36%
40 Haverford College 1.6 25% 39%
41 Bates 1.5 25% 38%
42 Vassar College 1.5 24% 36%
43 UVA 1.4 29% 41%
44 Wellesley College 1.4 30% 42%
45 Wesleyan University 1.4 24% 33%
46 Hamilton College 1.3 26% 35%
47 Colgate University 1.3 26% 34%
48 Michigan 1.3 32% 41%
49 CMU 1.2 25% 30%
50 Colby College 1.2 28% 33%

194

“End of the day, USNWR does it the right way. They come up with a multi-factor formula with various weightings that measures financial resources, student selectivity, graduation rates, student test scores, peer surveys, counselor surveys, etc. etc. etc. Overlaying all of those metrics eliminates the outliers (BYU’s high yield) and also minimizes the gaming (although gaming still happens). Hard to do better than what they do.”

US News is a highly flawed ranking system since every metric can and has been manipulated by the universities to improve the rankings, some examples that have been done:

  • of course the move to ED to artificially improve yield, acceptance rate and rankings with no change to the underlying university
  • universities telling their students with low tests scores to enroll in the winter or spring or come in as transfer students, so they don't count in the fall stats that's given to US News
  • seminars and tutorials with smaller class sizes are scheduled in the fall so a lower student to faculty ratio is reported to US News, when in fact the actual student to faculty ratio is higher
  • fund raising campaigns that focus on increasing the percentage of alumni (measured by US News) vs. trying to raise more money, meaning that they prefer 100 alumni donating $1 than 5 alumni donating $50
  • colleges ranking themselves high and their competitors low to influence the reputation part of the survey. In fact deans have said - "I don't know how to rank these schools" but they do because they don't want to be left out.
  • the GC part of the ranking I believe has been discussed on CC - how flawed that is and how can a GC in one part of the country rank schools that they have no experience with in another part of the country.

Another flaw in the rankings is outside of grad rates, no metric on outcomes, and that’s a big one. Now of course, salaries, number going to professional schools etc. can also be manipulated, but it would be good to have another outcome-based metric.

And lastly the biggest flaw is no student input on the experiences of the college. Can you imagine Consumer Reports ranking cars without taking into account the experience the owners had with them?

And US News took out yield out of its formula because it felt that colleges were making decisions on whether to offer ED or EA based on the rankings, so one good thing they did. However acceptance rate and yield are highly correlated so increasing one automatically decreases the other.

195

“Yes, of course there are limits, but those limits can be pretty high. Penn, for example, fills about half its class ED. Their overall yield in 2016 was 67.4% (3,674 admitted, 2,491 enrolled). I’m sure they don’t get 100% yield on ED admits, but it’s probably something close to that. Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they did get 100% yield on ED admits. Pulling the 1,336 ED admits out of the totals for admitted and enrolled freshmen, you’d be left with a RD yield of 49.4%. That’s a huge difference.”

Superb point, @bclintonk one of the best I’ve seen on this topic, here or anywhere for that matter. Here’s something that backs up your point, from an Atlantic article on the ED scam:

"Finally, suppose that the college decides to admit fully half the class early, as some selective colleges already do. It will need to send out only 4,000 offers to get 2,000 students. Its selectivity will become an impressive 33 percent and its overall yield will be 50 percent. With no change in faculty, course offerings, endowment, or characteristics of the entering class, the college will have risen noticeably in national rankings.

That is how Penn used an aggressive early-decision policy to drive up its rankings—and not just Penn. Swarthmore’s yield for regular applicants, the so-called open-market yield rate, is 30 percent. Because of its binding ED program it can report an overall yield of 40 percent. Amherst has a 34 percent open-market yield, but it can report a 42 percent yield because of binding ED. For Columbia the percentages are 41 and 58, for Yale 55 and 66."

We should use the open market, RD yield not the overall yield which includes ED or EA or SCEA. That would represent true market power for a college.

196

“Other than Princeton and Georgetown, all the schools with more members in the House have 5x or more undergrad enrollment than Yale. Senator Cruz is the only Princetonian in the Senate.”

Well on the surface they do but let’s take Michigan which has 8 to Yale’s 4 in the HOR. UM has undergrad enrollment of 29K, Yale’s of 8.5K. Michigan has a lot more colleges though, in fact of the 29K , 10K are in engineering, another 3500 in business, another 5000 in science, nursing, information technology, computer science, architecture, design, music, etc. The actual number of undergrads in majors that would lead to a career in political science is closer to 6-7K, now of course you have to do the same for Yale, but the fact is that 8 grads in HOR out of 6500 studying law, public policy, econ, political science, IR say will be close to Yale’s, such that going to Yale would not gives a signficant advantage. Harvard and Stanford I agree, but again I’d say Georgetown gives as much advantage as Yale to put Yale second tier.

197

Thelonious – lighten up.

If you are trying to define elite schools, USNWR does an excellent job despite the imperfections in the data and the gaming opportunities. Despite their aggressive gaming of the system and march up the rankings, no one thinks Northeastern is an elite school.

Second, we all know about how the ED game works. The Atlantic article on Penn is from 2001 after all. The Penn, Duke, NW band of schools have been doing that for a long time. Despite that, their data puts them (in USNWR or in YTAR methodologies) about where most people think they should be. You can only game this stuff so much. In the data you cite above, I note that you get same order regardless of whether you use the reported yield or (as you prefer) the open market yield – Yale, Columbia, Amh, Swat. Same thing.

Third, our discussion here is about which schools are the most elite. Not the ones that kids like the most, or the ones that graduate the most kids, or the ones that would be most appropriate for any particular kid.

If you are talking about elite-ness, you are basically talking about “Harvard-ness.” Since USNWR and YTAR put Harvard at the top, that suggests those are pretty good methods for measuring “elite-ness.” There’s other ranking systems if you want to focus on student happiness or other factors not being discussed here.

Last, if you’ve got a better or alternate methodology, let’s hear it. Is it something other than the schools that Thelonious subjectively likes the most?

198

Once again, no it doesn’t take care of Berea. Berea has to be manually removed because its YTAR is 2.21 - at #31 on your ranking above. I guess you probably had to manually remove the service academies too.

199

How about we start with average test scores and go from there…Aside from the variabilities of superscoring, which could have a .50+/- impact, it’s non-subjective; I’ll use ACT, albeit we can slice the banana using SAT scores as well.

@northwesty, while you may not consider Northeastern elite yet, they certainly have assembled a very smart student population.

ACT
1 California Institute of Technology 34-35
2 Harvey Mudd College 33-35
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 33-35
4 Columbia University 32-35
5 Harvard University 32-35
6 Princeton University 32-35
7 Rice University 32-35
8 University of Chicago 32-35
9 Vanderbilt University 32-35
10 Johns Hopkins University 32-34
11 University of Notre Dame 32-34
12. Washington University in St. Louis 32-34
13 Stanford University 31-35
14 Yale University 31-35
15 Amherst College 31-34
16 Brown University 31-34
17 Carnegie Mellon University 31-34
18 Duke University 31-34
19 Haverford College 31-34
20 Northeastern University 31-34
21 Northwestern University 31-34
22 University of Pennsylvania 31-34
23 Williams College 31-34
24 Bowdoin College 31-34
25 Hamilton College 31-33
26 Cooper Union 30-34
27 Cornell University 30-34
28 Dartmouth College 30-34
29 Georgetown University 30-34
30 Pomona College 30-34
31 Boston College 30-33
32 Case Western Reserve University 30-33
33 Colgate University 30-33
34 Georgia Institute of Technology 30-33
35 Grinnell College 30-33
36 Tufts University 30-33
37 University of Southern California 30-33
38 Vassar College 30-33
39 Washington and Lee University 30-33
40 Swarthmore College 29-34
41 University of California—​Berkeley 29-34
42 Carleton College 29-33
43 Claremont McKenna College 29-33
44 Emory University 29-33
45 Reed College 29-33
46 University of Michigan—​Ann Arbor 29-33
47 University of Virginia 29-33
48 Wellesley College 29-33
49 Middlebury College 29-33
50 University of Rochester 29-33
51 Wesleyan University 29-33
52 Barnard College 29-32
53 Davidson College 29-32
54 Lehigh University 29-32
55 Macalester College 29-32
56 Scripps College 29-32
57 Stevens Institute of Technology 29-32
58 Tulane University 29-32
59 Union College (Schenectady, NY) 29-32
60 University of Richmond 29-32
61 Villanova University 29-32
62 Colby College 29-32
63 Brandeis University 29-32
64 Mount Holyoke College 29-32
65 Pitzer College 29-32
66 United States Air Force Academy 28-33
67 Bucknell University 28-32
68 College of William and Mary 28-32
69 Colorado School of Mines 28-32
70 Kenyon College 28-32
71 Oberlin College 28-32
72 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 28-32
73 Southern Methodist University 28-32
74 University of Miami 28-32
75 Colorado College 28-32
76 New York University 28-32
77 Bates College 28-32
78 Bryn Mawr College 28-32
79 Smith College 28-32
80 Worcester Polytechnic Institute 28-32
81 Occidental College 28-31
82 College of the Holy Cross 28-31
83 Connecticut College 28-31
84 Franklin and Marshall College 28-31
85 Wake Forest University 27-33
86 Santa Clara University 27-32
87 Trinity University 27-32
88 United States Military Academy 27-32
89 University of California—​San Diego 27-32
90 University of North Carolina—​Chapel Hill 27-32
91 Wheaton College (IL) 27-32
92 Whitman College 27-32
93 Binghamton University—​SUNY 27-31
94 Boston University 27-31
95 Brigham Young University—​Provo 27-31
96 Clemson University 27-31
97 Fordham University 27-31
98 Hillsdale College 27-31
99 Lafayette College 27-31
100 New College of Florida 27-31

200

Chem – You cannot be serious.

H at 5? S at 13? Rice/Vandy/ND/WashU all better than Y and S? When talking about prestige?

Test scores are a way worse way to measure prestige. Much easier to game than YTAR or USNWR. Example: NE=NW? Come on.

OHMom – Schools that are tuition free and/or military academies are obvious sui generis types of schools. If all you can throw up against YTAR is free Berea, that tells me it is a darned good metric.

Free is irrelevant to this discussion, since paying through the nose is certainly a key component of prestige.