I've taught at several US universities, and it's an open secret that the administrative takes steps to manipulate numbers in order to secure better rankings.
Typical example: a small, prestigious liberal arts college always has smaller class sizes in the fall semester than in the spring semester. Why? Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring.
It was an open secret when I was in Boston that Harvard actively encourages people to "give it a shot" when they know full well they're not getting in to boost that metric.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/us/harvard-admissions-rec...
Though, maybe it's just confirmation bias and ego. Maybe there was something in my application that gave Michigan pause but seemed fine to MIT. At that time, Michigan did ask which other schools to which you were applying. I'm not sure if that's still the case.
It's still frustrating as both his parents are alumni. Thanks to Covid and test waivers, 2021 seemed like a rougher year than normal to be applying to the higher end of schools.
It's basically saying "other people seem to think this college is good, so we'll nudge them up a few points"
In other words, it's attempting to measure public perception about the college instead of the actual results it produces. How the public _thinks_ a certain college is shouldn't factor into how good you _tell_ the public that that college performs
So does page rank or citation index - popularity begets visibility, begets popularity.
I mean it’s a pretty darn conservative proposition to say “we think that averaged over the entire population of applicants that the schools that students spend their time applying to will trend, however small, to better schools.
Where the flip side of “it’s all noise and it’s impossible to evaluate a school better than flipping a coin without actually attending” is an incredibly strong assertion.
It's like the XKCD about Wikipedia entries being cited in articles, which get cited in papers, which then get cited in the same Wikipedia article.
If you have the big name degree it might push me to interview you when otherwise I'm borderline about tossing your resume, but that is it. I need to know you are good not your school.
The rest is bunk. Undergraduates aren’t connecting with famous professors. A faculty team with deep expertise in a particular area is relevant but not in the rankings.
It doesn't do a great job comparing across categories, but then, neither does US News...
Maybe they'd be richer if their admissions was more open about taking quasi-bribes, but I suspect you're dramatically underestimating the orders of magnitude of difference that appear on this metric. You find clear tier gaps.
Don't get me wrong, this is a silly proxy metric about three degrees out from anything you'd actually want to know. But it gets surprisingly good results for how simple it is to tabulate.
Assuming that the college is selecting students for attributes that you are looking for in fellow students, then the college that denies more people will have students with more of the attributes you are wanting to be around. So it isn't just about perception. There is some math behind it as well.
Except "average SAT score of incoming class" is another field of the rankings. All the measurable criteria are handled as independent variables - there's no need for a poor proxy.
My anecdote is that I was once recruited by one of the best departments in the world in my field, at a very junior level ... and then, before I started, my contract was rewritten to be at a higher level, because they'd found out that that would allow them to count my grants in their metrics. Not only is this obviously dodgy, but I think it's actually illegal in Australia (since better-qualified candidates weren't given the opportunity to apply for the post at the higher level), but they did it anyway.
The common app has made this worse. In "the old days" you had to fill out a full application, write different essays etc.
I always suspected it was a way to fudge numbers, but at the same time I knew I was genuinely on the bubble of being admitted so I took the opportunity gladly.
(My memory is that the other spring admits were, like me, from racial groups considered “over represented” so they may have been trying to affect diversity numbers too.)
What a bizarre and totally unnecessary restriction.
How's it supposed to do that? Universities all already collect the data on enrollment for every class they offer.
A few years ago when 50 million went missing, I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the budgeting process, and it was worse than you could possibly imagine.
There was an attempt to go the software route, but a nepotism deal left the budgeting department with a worse system than manual spreadsheet entry.
The pay is abysmal either way. You would make more money at an entry level software job anywhere.
In any case, the quality of the argument doesn't really matter. If the number is being gamed so trivially and yet US News continues to ignore spring classes, then the restriction has gone from bizarre and unnecessary to actively malicious. US News is basically colluding with the universities to engage in fraud.
The city's tracking of student attendance only lasted a portion of the year or a portion of each quarter.
During those times, much more effort went into calling the homes of missing students and finding out why they were not showing up to class.
I remember asking about why all the calls were happening or not happening and it was sort of quietly explained by the staffer: measurement of attendance affected how the school was being evaluated by the district. Presumably, budget was hooked to it in some way.
I didn't make any waves about it because "working" in this office was super powerful and the staffer always brought in cookies for us. Amazing gig.
Teachers take attendance on other days for internal use, but Count Day is special and you must not be absent!
> If instruction is cancelled on count day due to conditions not within the control of school authorities, with the approval of the State Superintendent, the affected instructional programs must use the immediately following day on which the district resumes session for count purposes
per the rules at:
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mde/Year/2...
I do recall my cousins at a poor rural school in Barry county having a couple snow days on Count Wednesday, and then subsequently calling one on Thursday when it wasn't really required and another on Friday where it really wasn't required, so that counts were as high as possible on Monday. Their snow days were much more frequent due to bad roads and bad road maintenance, and their state funding was much more important compared to my wealthy district.
Though shrinking the admit size is another well worn tactic, as it's the easiest way to increase how "selective" you are which is another major ranking element, plus it helps you more cheaply achieve smaller average class sizes, though of course you're forgoing some revenue to get there.
If not accepted for any of them, there's a follow-up matchmaking service (called 'clearing' in the UK) to help find an unallocated spot.
Based on a conversation with my nephew who applied to a double-digit number of colleges this past year, the application fees are apparently more the exception than the rule these days.
You can if you admit on objective metrics. If you only take people who are 215 pounds or above, you can fairly claim to reject everyone lighter than that, regardless of whether they apply.
It's a fantastically anti-consumer market they've managed to create.
He used to say two things: that he has estimated to have taught at least 100 thousand people in his life (seems just crazy boasting, but feasible when you are working in 5-8 different schools per semester and each class has 100-250 people) and that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class, and that the only reason that top universities are better is because of their selection process.
Forget class material, forget infrastructure and fancy facilities. What makes the best universities is the fact that the top students are there.
If you can not (dramatically) change your students and make them smarter, you can make your classes smaller and segment by performance. This at least stops your top 20 percentile from being dragged down by your bottom 20.
It's been my experience in college that most teachers just let the bottom quartile of the class fail (and likely switch into another major).
But in reality, even that doesn't matter. In the best universities, your worst students will be better than the average students at the second-rate institutions. If the teacher is simply giving the class to the top 75 percentile, the class will be even better still at the top uni.
How can somebody raise from the bottom 20% if they get subpar education?
Second, there can be individual mobility. A poor performing student with otherwise potential to improve might receive help to overcome whatever is bringing them down, and get them to thrive again. Even in that case, it would help them to be in a smaller class, as it's much easier to identify who among the low performers who want to be helped, and those lost causes who are a drag for everyone else.
Where this matters is in something like a lab or music practicum where the communication between instructor and students is the class. But I can tell you from experience that the variance among different years of students in a single university is large enough to disprove your uncle's point. I had one class that could have been confused for graduate students. Yet another might as well been sent by the Trump administration with the goal of destroying the institution of ear training.
You don't need to know everyone's level, just a rough idea about what the worst student of the class might need.
The first exam that students in test-prep schools take is before classes start, usually a mock university test that can be used precisely to assess your current level and to gather information about the class overall.
You don't need to know who are the worst performers. But if you know that your class of 250 has an uneven distribution of aptitude, you'd try to break the class apart.
I've taught some college classes and guest lectured in many others. The bottom 10% is trivial to identify in a matter of minutes.
You don’t need to know which specific 50 students are in the bottom two deciles, just that they exist and that your policy is to teach to what you’ve estimated is the 3rd decile and above.
You will find out who they are in the exams, but you know they exist in next year’s class even before that class is admitted to the uni.
If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. The class becomes less of a mere information dump and more of a mentorship.
I went to a relatively small private engineering school. It made a world of difference in my education knowing the professors, and having them know me, especially given that with small classes the professors offered office hours where I could come and discuss the material that was covered during class, as well as problems I encountered on midterms.
I still remember nearly all of my professors, fondly, precisely because of the dynamic small class sizes allowed for.
This most often comes in the form of prolonged rhetorical questions. A teacher, fearing he is losing the class' interest might pause to ask "And, what is the benefit of the scientific method?" The point here is clearly to gauge whether the class understands and is following along in the train of thought. Usually, the rhetorical question has multiple interpretations and valid answers. And usually, the students are not so much wrong, as they simply fail to track what answer the teacher is hoping for. For example, the students might answer the rhetorical question above with "It helps us understand the world.", "It allows us to test theories.", etc. In fact, the teacher was looking for something like "It allows for the independent checking and confirmation of the findings of others."
In a real world example, this sidebar of questions might have taken minutes, and more often than not, completely breaks my train of thought. Often, the teach has completely paused a valid train of thought to either measure or enhance class participation, and in doing so has made it harder for me to understand the lesson.
Sometimes this goes even more poorly, and the teach just wants to witness a "class discussion," which can often entail spending much of the class polling the students for their thoughts. Depending on the subject, this can be a total waste of time. Most of the students in the class are poorly informed, and their thoughts are much less useful than a traditional lecture would have been.
I certainly admit that interactive methods of teaching can be particularly effective, but they are not an unalloyed good. They can often be worse than a simple lecture.
A foundation of the bloated academic and teaching industry requires that that professors can not teach more than a small number of students at once, or at least not teach them well. And that people who were taught in schools with smaller classes that were more expensive must be better. All claims about teaching and learning should be considered with that in mind, especially when it comes from the industry itself.
That being said, interactivity with professors probably works better in most other settings than a lecture format.
That was quite the course.
I actually think that putting a bad teacher in a small class makes it worse than a large one.
The same is true for selectivity. It doesn't account for education at all, only the difficulty of getting in. But since it doesn't account for the applicant pool, it doesn't account for the difficulty of getting in either. You could use things like SAT scores as a measure of the difficulty of getting in and ditch the acceptance % completely. I work at an R1 that gets hit hard because we admit most applicants because, you know, we exist to educate folks, not to serve as a signalling device.
Where is this anecdote coming from? A billion years ago when I studied at a small liberal arts college with small class sizes, professors were keen to share with us exactly why they were teaching from particular texts or why they had selected certain materials to make it clear that while the class wasn't being taught by that famous guy from MIT, it was still his book and materials we were using. I knew all my professors by first name, knew where many of them lived, had access to them anytime it was needed, and that's directly counter to my partner's experience at a large university.
I went to a liberal arts college and had small class sizes (most around 9-15 in size, with the largest being 30) - I could see my professors 1:1 pretty much anytime I wanted, but there was also a preceptor (TA) for each class who didn't teach, but was available to answer questions related to assignments, projects etc. I went to the house of many of my professors for food or drinks too. Generally also was on a first name basis with professors.
The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. This means you don't have as many choices for advanced courses. However, the professors at liberal arts colleges really tend to be there for the teaching and tend to enjoy that. One of my math professors was the head of the mathematical association of America and also authored the books on Analysis (the mathematical subject - not a data science thing) we were using.
There are also research consortiums of small colleges. I did original geological research 2 out of my 3 summers in a small college via the Keck Consortium:
What's ironic about this though is how many universities won't accept their own undergrads into their grad programs... IE: they know that their undergrad programs are sub-standard but they don't seem to take action to improve them because the money and the focus is on the grad programs.
Class size naturally dropped as you got into niche subjects, of which there were many!
Where I was asking for clarification was on the idea that somehow people were getting better materials and a better overall experience in thee 500+ people lecture hall type experiences, rather than those 20-person intimate learning style classes.
- Honors sessions - Extra seminars - Quality of Material - Quality of student support groups
All of these things get better as the class size grows. In my last class at Georgia Tech, there were 900 students studying a niche topic from a particular professor. Due to class size, there were ~12 TAs and an extremely active slack discussion group where people could get support.
A smaller class just means the professor has limited resources to assist students.
If you have a given teacher, in a given classroom, with a given amount of TA help, blah blah, so that all else is equal, and then you reduce the class size, the students will do better.
The problem is that all else is far from equal in the data used in these rankings. Instructor quality drops off rapidly as you have more sections. TA help falls. The classroom may no longer be appropriate for the class, etc.
The rankings are not able to capture the effect you're talking about.
You wouldn't pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for lectures unless you were the kind of person that universities like Columbia try very hard to not admit.
Classes, however, are very valuable. You can ask questions when you don't understand things, you can talk with the other students to build shared understanding, you can get your homework graded and confirm that the things you weren't sure about on it were actually correct, you can take exams and test your skills. And those things are much, much better when there are 16 of you in the class rather than 128 or 512.
Great Classes Implies Larger Classes (pure supply / demand); Larger Classes doesn't imply Great Classes
Controlling for as many of the relevant variables as possible, there does seem to be a strong negative correlation between class size and test scores. Beyond that, who knows, but it makes sense that small classes would succeed more often (at least up to a certain point of course)
2) I guess they can actually by having massive classes in the spring and comparing to the fall.
The key problem of using a measure as a metric is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s law. The law is based on a 1975 paper on economic regulation, and is typically paraphrased as “When a measure becomes a metric, it ceases to be a good measure.” When managing a system, this problem is critical, but is deeper than it at first seems, as I’ll argue.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/09/goodharts-law-and-why-...
https://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/
Often I’d find the person in charge on linkedin and email them directly (work email obviously). And dig around until I found the particular person.
UIUC put up a particular fight when I FOIA requested information about their post-graduate surveys. They’re definitely manipulating there. I was in the process of filing a lawsuit when covid hit and gave up because I wasn’t sure if I’d need the funds (plus court shutdown at the time).
FOIA only applies to federal government agencies, universities (other than ones operates by the federal government, like the service academies) aren't subject to it.
State universities might be covered by state sunshine laws that are similar to FOIA, and generally the laws and policies around those only require a request from the public and aren't too particular about form or citing a completely wrong and irrelevant legal basis, so in that case an “FOIA” request might actually have some legal effect. But most private universities would just see it as a particularly pompously written discretionary request.
But I am really curious about the argument against the requested survey data. The poster linked to his web page which specifically lists UIUC as being exemplar and providing data without even the need for a formal FOIA request.
I’m sure they knew that lol
I requested: country of origin, gender, degree, gpa, salary range, field of work and a couple other fields I forget now.
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
That's the problem with the quote. Grades may not be the most important thing but they can, and often are, the most important thing for any given individual. For every Bill Gates that dropped out, there are a million John Doe's drowning in student loan debt with no degree and limited future prospects to show for it.
How is the thing you say a problem with the quote? These can both simultaneously be the case, and often are:
1. The most damaging thing John Doe learned in school was learning to get good grades.
2. Richard Roe didn't get good grades and is drowning in student loan debt with no degree and limited future prospects to show for it.
You have offered no reason to believe that if (2) is more true, or true in more cases, (1) is less true, or true in less cases, or less important. In fact, this tighter conjunction can also often be true:
1'. The most damaging thing John Doe learned in school was learning to get good grades.
2'. John Doe didn't get good grades (despite being damaged by learning how, he didn't learn how enough, or other things interfered) and is drowning in student loan debt with no degree and limited future prospects to show for it.
You've also offered no reason to believe that if (2') is more true, (1') is less true or less important.
I have an idea! Maybe you're misinterpreting the quote as meaning that, if you're in school, it would be a good strategy to stay there but not learn to get good grades. In that case there would be a sort of conflict: by diminishing the damage from (1') you may be increasing the risk of (2').
But that isn't what the essay advises at all, and I'm puzzled as to how you could have read it as suggesting that. It explicitly advises students to do exactly the opposite; it advises them to get good grades by hacking bad tests in the usual ways (cramming before exams, etc.) because everyone will judge them by their grades.
But that's not really the point of the essay, and it would be a pretty boring essay if it was. The point of the essay is its advice to people who aren't enrolled as students: unlearn how to get good grades, and instead of focusing on how to make your product look good, actually make a good product. Also, and maybe more importantly, try to work in fields of endeavor where the way to win is to do good work, rather than hacking bad tests like you do in school. (This might suggest not going into school at all, which would at least avoid the student loan debt problem.)
"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've WORKED in the private sector. They expect results."
Going to college optimizing for "learning" and to gyms for "fitness" are poor use of time and resources.
The essay is just pointing out that strategy to hack tests for grades stops working. You need to improv on it in startup land or in the kingdoms of BigCo.
[1] https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php?pag... [2] https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
According to their methodology[1] page, it looks like for student who gets multiple offers they do an Elo style ranking. The first problem; and which probably explains the weight to military academies, is that students tend to self select into tiers of colleges, so a group of students who are interested in the Air Force might not even apply to Harvard (even though the USAFA is a competitive school) and upon admission opt to go there (after all if you even were even considering of joining the air force, why would you reject your one shot there to go any other school)?
[1] https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php
LOL wut? Stanford is modestly well known, but obviously Harvard is the one that is unambiguously first.
Is that no longer Yale? From the perspective of someone who had a rather poor exposure to universities during my high school years—so, precisely what someone gets from pop-culture and osmosis without anyone in particular acting as a guide—my impression was that Harvard and Yale were unambiguously the Big Two, and everything else fell somewhere after them in terms of recognition and prestige.
Is this a CS perspective? I hear a lot about Stanford's CS program so I assume it's notably good.
A lot of the elites are hype-over-substance, and it's often hard for a naive audience to screen out which ones.
I have significant experience with HYP, less-so with Stanford. I don't think I am a naive audience, I know many people from these schools and have attended classes, either due to being a student there or online videos in the case of Stanford & Princeton.
I'd never have gone to Yale because it was a poor fit for my interests. That's different from being a poor school. Overall school quality is less important than fit. Given my interests, I would have pick Stanford over Yale (and in turn pick Caltech, CMU, or Georgia Tech over Stanford).
That said, Yale is a phenomenal experience. It's very academic in the classic sense -- deep, philosophical discussions, and thoughtfully exploring topics in a way that's increasingly rare in the fast-paced elites. It gives a lot of what people assume they'll get out of a small liberal arts college (which is different from the reality; most small liberal arts colleges are expensive and horrible).
I have little knowledge or Princeton. I know both Harvard and Stanford in great depth.
Stanford tied with Harvard for 6 Senators in the 117th Congress, impressively, but obviously Harvard dominates that metric over a longer time.
Harvard still has more than twice as many billionaire alumni notwithstanding how many billionaires these days are in the tech industry.
Also, this is a thread that's largely about undergrad, so I'm not sure Rayiner was talking about law school.
There are different rankings for law schools, and Yale has been considered the most prestigious for many years. I think SLS nabbed the top spot various times in the last decade, but Harvard is definitely not the uncontested leader in law schools.
As a result, if you have your sights set on anything other than the two in-state schools or BYU (strong Mormon influence here) the counselors don't know what to do with you and you are on your own.
It worked out and I have no doubt my kid will have strong opportunities post-college but he missed out on any chance at the truly life-changing schools, which I have no doubt he would have succeeded at had he gotten in.
Cambridge has a reputation for strongly preferring UK students.
If statistics were distributed in open format, transparently, and there were multiple rankers (each with their own weights and mixes), universities would be less incentivized to game "the US News metrics".
[1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?page=0&sort=threshol...
The fine print:
>The median annual earnings of individuals that received federal student aid and began college at this institution 10 years ago, regardless of their completion status.
So for the anxious parent, not a lot to go on.
We already have what you suggested as a solution, and look at where we are. The problem is more fundamental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France
> Almost any numerical standard, no matter how closely related to academic merit, becomes a malignant force as soon as universities know that it is the standard. A proxy for merit, rather than merit itself, becomes the goal.
Ripe for abuse...
> No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.”
A lot of HN commenters here trying to "fix" the details of the rankings.
As per the quote at the top of the report:
> Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score...
It would be shocking to me if Columbia was the only institution that fudged its numbers a bit in pursuit of a higher US News ranking. Given how important that ranking has become in US culture, I wonder if it's time for the methodology to change to require audited/auditable metrics rather than continuing to allow self-reporting.
1: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...