[2317] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: [Mit-talk] We're #1!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Shawn Kelly)
Mon Aug 14 18:30:01 2006
From: "Shawn Kelly" <skkelly@mit.edu>
To: <mit-talk@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 18:29:38 -0400
In-Reply-To: <20060814220558.GB10081@katamari.csail.mit.edu>
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
All true. But I do appreciate a list that ranks Harvard at #28. And 19
places below South Carolina State University...
Shawn
-----Original Message-----
From: mit-talk-bounces@MIT.EDU [mailto:mit-talk-bounces@MIT.EDU] On Behalf
Of laura47@MIT.EDU
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 6:06 PM
To: Steven M Kelch; mit-talk@mit.edu
Cc: mit-talk@mit.edu
Subject: Re: [Mit-talk] We're #1!
It is definitely not a method I would use.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.methodology.html
This explains their methodology, they claim to have three sections
weighted equally (with some extra conditions). Their "Community
Service" score is based on percent of students in ROTC, percentage of
alumni in the Peace Corps, and percentage of federal work-study grants
devoted to community service projects. I would personally not base a
third of my opinion of a college based on ROTC and the Peace
Corps. Especially ROTC. But that's my personal prejudices.
The "Research" score is based on research spending and PhDs and the
like, I have no idea how good a measure it is.
The last category in the "Social Mobility" score, and I really don't
know what I think about how they did it. It says that last year, they
constructed a formula to predict the school's graduation rate based on
how many students are on Pell grants. (They also refer to them as
"lower-income kids", and I am of course bothered to see them refer to
college students as "kids".) Then they rewarded the school if they
managed to have a higher graduation rate then Washington Monthly
predicted based on the assumption that having lower-income students
would drag down their graduation rate.
This year, well, I will just copy and paste the rest.
"Because this formula disproportionately rewarded more academically
exclusive schools (whose students were high achievers and inherently
more likely to graduate), however, our formula this year has been
altered to predict a school's likely graduation rate given its
percentage of Pell students and its average SAT score. (Since most
schools only provide the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of
scores, we took the mean of the two.) Schools that outperform their
forecasted rate score better than schools that match or, worse,
undershoot the mark.In addition, we added a second metric to our
Social Mobility score by running a regression that predicted the
percentage of students on Pell Grants based on SAT scores. This
indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly
correlated with SAT scores) are making the effort to enroll low-income
students. The two formulas were weighted equally."
Doesn't seem to really be much in their about the actual quality of
the classes, or the professors, or campus life, or student happiness,
or most of the things that I looked at when I was college searching.
Laura
On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 05:28:00PM -0400, Steven M Kelch wrote:
> Neither ranking is worth very much, but the Washington Monthly is fairly
> suspect.
>
>
>
> On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Jessica H Lowell wrote:
>
> > Well, considering that the criteria used are completely different in the
two
> > sets of rankings, it's not exactly surprising.
> >
> > - Jessie
> >
> > Quoting "Richard J. Barbalace" <rjbarbal@MIT.EDU>:
> >
> >> Quoting Jeff Roberts <thejoker@alum.mit.edu>:
> >>> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.national.html
> >>
> >> So, the #1 university by USNWR is ranked #43 by the Washington Monthly,
> >> and the
> >> #60 university by the former is ranked #5 by the latter? I think I can
> >> write a
> >> random number generator that yields more consistent results.
> >>
> >> + Richard
> >>
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