I remember when I was applying for colleges and the only reason I applied to Harvard was because they didn't require any specific essay, which was unlike any other school. If they did, I probably would have just passed on them. At the time, I thought it was nice because I was tired of writing essays, but now I realize that it's probably just a way to boost their selectivity.

"Recruit to deny" [1] has been getting more attention but still not enough.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/us/harvard-admissions-rec...

Michigan also seemed to waitlist me and several of the people I knew at MIT. If they know they're the backup school, and they think you're going to get into your first choice, it hurts their acceptance rate to accept you outright.

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.

I'm confused. How would Michigan know that they were your second choice?

They expect students of a certain caliber. If the applicant exceeds their expectations, the university assumes the student is using this application as a “safety school.”

My kid, got waitlisted at UM, while a classmate with similar but slightly lower GPA and extra-currs got in. Maybe his essay wasn't as convincing or maybe they thought he'd snub them for his first choice. He didn't get into the dream school either but ended up in a great place at a school that likely fits him better anyway (and is cheaper since UM's OOS tuition is insane).

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.

This is sometimes referred to as "Tufts Syndrome" or "Yield Protection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection

I used to live with an admissions officer - they've got data (and instinct) for "You're probably not going to go here". The same is true for graduate admissions in my experience.

Acceptance rates is a really poor choice of input for college ranking

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

> It's basically saying "other people seem to think this college is good, so we'll nudge them up a few points"

So does page rank or citation index - popularity begets visibility, begets popularity.

The difference is that applicants by definition don’t have personal experience of how good the school is, it’s all perception. With page rank and citations the expectation is those linking to or citing something have read it and have reason to value it.

Same with students applying. They’re betting that students aren’t applying completely randomly to schools and that the research they do beforehand isn’t entirely noise and has some signal that will show up in the average.

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.

I'm in the UK, but my eldest is starting Uni this September and rankings played a huge role in her selection of colleges. Yes of course she looked at their prospectuses and visited a few of them, but the shortlist of the ones to look at and visit itself was based on rankings.

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.

I usually love this kind of feedback loops in systems but this one is kinda sad

Much (often most) of the value of a degree is in signaling. So public perception is very important

Not really. There are only a handful of schools where it matters, the rest nobody has even heard of. Odds are half the people you are competing with have a degree from a university I've never heard of, and the other half it is a local college that I know of but I have no idea how it stacks up compared to yours. The local school when you are local can be a negative though - I know the bad local schools.

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.

Perception is the result. Average SAT score relative to others tells you roughly average IQ difference for the student body.

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.

My impression has long been that the endowment per capita metric provides about as good a ranking as any of the third-party rankings within a category. Where it disagrees with US News, it usually matches my intuitions; and where it disagrees with my intuitions, I usually learn that the college in question has a better reputation than my impression.

It doesn't do a great job comparing across categories, but then, neither does US News...

Some top colleges don't have alumni/legacy preference so that endowment measure maybe gets skewed away from them. MIT and I think Caltech.

They still do great on this metric, though! MIT comes out looking a bit short of Harvard, on par with Stanford. These schools ride a bit higher than the top tier of LACs (Williams/Amherst/Pomona/Swarthmore), which isn't necessarily the fairest comparison, but Caltech fits right in with those.

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.

Imagine college A that 100 apply for and all 100 get in vs. college B where 10,000 people applied and only 100 got in. If both colleges are choosing students based off of some measurable criteria, let's say the SAT score. Would you expect to have higher average scores at college A or college B? Obviously college B would have students with better SAT scores simply because they are so much more selective.

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.

> If both colleges are choosing students based off of some measurable criteria, let's say the SAT score. Would you expect to have higher average scores at college A or college B?

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.

Even so, you don’t need to guess the reasons for acceptance on aggregate data - you can check if the SAT scores were higher. At least that would tell you for certain.

It depends if school A costs 100,000 and school B almost free. I would put my money on the 100 who spent 100,000 over the free 10,000.

I didn't know that about Harvard. That's so sad. I've seen how devastated the rejects can be.

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.

> 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.

The common app has made this worse. In "the old days" you had to fill out a full application, write different essays etc.