Combining Multiple Undergrad Rankings To Get One! Interesting Results

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is US News on UChicago’s payroll? Essentially every other rankings has them doing way worse. Same with Hopkins.

Chicago is pretty well known to stay within "allowable lines" (not like Columbia) but do everything possible to game the USNWR system (since honestly, the USNWR ranking should probably be weighted as 80-90% of any combined ranking based on its compare significance). Chicago is also not nearly as transparent about some of their data, which does make a lot of people wonder. It has worked very well over 20 years and Chicago really is thought of as a very top school right now (it was always good reputation wise and has always had a few amazing departments, don't get me wrong). It seems like half the kids from DC's elite private schools are there now after so many have applied ED2 over the last 2 years!

Because Chicago takes very average students (B students) from elite private schools because it is desperate to increase its endowment.

Why would they be desperate to increase endowment? Compared to their main competitors, their endowment is only behind HPSM, Yale, Duke, UPenn, Columbia, Northwestern, Notre Dame, and WashU. That's just 11 schools, they're doing fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is US News on UChicago’s payroll? Essentially every other rankings has them doing way worse. Same with Hopkins.

Chicago is pretty well known to stay within "allowable lines" (not like Columbia) but do everything possible to game the USNWR system (since honestly, the USNWR ranking should probably be weighted as 80-90% of any combined ranking based on its compare significance). Chicago is also not nearly as transparent about some of their data, which does make a lot of people wonder. It has worked very well over 20 years and Chicago really is thought of as a very top school right now (it was always good reputation wise and has always had a few amazing departments, don't get me wrong). It seems like half the kids from DC's elite private schools are there now after so many have applied ED2 over the last 2 years!

Because Chicago takes very average students (B students) from elite private schools because it is desperate to increase its endowment.

Do you have evidence that they're taking worse students to build better connections? Otherwise this is hearsay. I don't think B students would survive well at Chicago

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UNC is really good, I don’t get why more people on here don’t mention it. This kind of confirms it’s perhaps been overlooked! Easily a top 5 public IMO.

Easily top 5 publics. It's so hard to get into OOS (last year OOS 8% accepetance rate), that not many students from the DMV even have the option of going there.

Is it easily Top 5 though? There's also UCLA, Berkeley, UMich, UVA, Georgia Tech, and UF. All those have strong claims to be top 5 publics too

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UNC is really good, I don’t get why more people on here don’t mention it. This kind of confirms it’s perhaps been overlooked! Easily a top 5 public IMO.

Easily top 5 publics. It's so hard to get into OOS (last year OOS 8% accepetance rate), that not many students from the DMV even have the option of going there.

Is it easily Top 5 though? There's also UCLA, Berkeley, UMich, UVA, Georgia Tech, and UF. All those have strong claims to be top 5 publics too

Bottom line UNC is great

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In which universe UF is better than UCSD?

What's so hard to believe about that? UF is the best school in the 3rd largest state in the country. UCSD isn't a top 5 school in its own state. Lots of local Florida talent heads to UF while UCSD gets the leftovers after Californians get into Stanford, Caltech, UCLA, Berkeley, and even Pomona, Harvey Mudd, USC, etc. UCSD is still a great school though and they have great students given how large Cali is.

What you are really saying here is California has much better universities than Florida, which is true.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In which universe UF is better than UCSD?

What's so hard to believe about that? UF is the best school in the 3rd largest state in the country. UCSD isn't a top 5 school in its own state. Lots of local Florida talent heads to UF while UCSD gets the leftovers after Californians get into Stanford, Caltech, UCLA, Berkeley, and even Pomona, Harvey Mudd, USC, etc. UCSD is still a great school though and they have great students given how large Cali is.

What you are really saying here is California has much better universities than Florida, which is true.

Florida has plenty of smart students, and UF gets first dibs on a lot of them

[Anonymous]

Junk in, junk out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Hopkins also got dropped by a lot, interesting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Hopkins also got dropped by a lot, interesting

It makes sense, I mean what does Hopkins excel at outside of medicine?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Hopkins also got dropped by a lot, interesting

It makes sense, I mean what does Hopkins excel at outside of medicine?

International affairs, writing, physics. Although I suppose if one is truly interested in IR, they should look more at Georgetown.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Pretty interesting that only 5 schools maintained their spot compared to US News. MIT at #4, Penn at #7, Dartmouth at #12, and Cornell at #17, and UVA at #25. It looks like US News is underrating Duke, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Georgetown, UCLA, UMich, UNC, and UCSD while it's overrating Yale, JHU, UChicago, WUSTL, Brown, Berkeley, CMU, and Emory

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Pretty interesting that only 5 schools maintained their spot compared to US News. MIT at #4, Penn at #7, Dartmouth at #12, and Cornell at #17, and UVA at #25. It looks like US News is underrating Duke, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Georgetown, UCLA, UMich, UNC, and UCSD while it's overrating Yale, JHU, UChicago, WUSTL, Brown, Berkeley, CMU, and Emory

You guys make up narratives to support your biases. These rankings have different criteria and different methodology, combining them makes little sense as some of them are not even measuring academics. Schools with great academics that send a lot of there students to grad school will have poor ROI lowering them on this list. See John's Hopkins, UChicago, and Emory as prime examples. On the ROi rankings they rank low. On the academic rankings they are consistent across the board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most kids that attend U Chicago from DC private schools are a A students and few of them cum laude.

Also a lot of DMV students at UChicago who went to public schools. They are almost always top of their class and high SAT scores. Chicago seems to like IB diplomas, which Fairfax & Montgomery county public schools have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is US News on UChicago’s payroll? Essentially every other rankings has them doing way worse. Same with Hopkins.

Chicago is pretty well known to stay within "allowable lines" (not like Columbia) but do everything possible to game the USNWR system (since honestly, the USNWR ranking should probably be weighted as 80-90% of any combined ranking based on its compare significance). Chicago is also not nearly as transparent about some of their data, which does make a lot of people wonder. It has worked very well over 20 years and Chicago really is thought of as a very top school right now (it was always good reputation wise and has always had a few amazing departments, don't get me wrong). It seems like half the kids from DC's elite private schools are there now after so many have applied ED2 over the last 2 years!

Because Chicago takes very average students (B students) from elite private schools because it is desperate to increase its endowment.

Do you have evidence that they're taking worse students to build better connections? Otherwise this is hearsay. I don't think B students would survive well at Chicago

This is my favorite sour grapes college admission rationalization. It’s not true that kids getting into UChicago from area privates are B students, but it makes people feel good to say its true, and then usually to follow that with “my (deferred or rejected elsewhere) DC should have applied ED to UChicago but it was just too [fill in the blank with negative adjective of your choice] for them”.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw this and thought it was interesting. Basically someone took the average ranking of each college from these sources and created a composite rank for each school relative to all the other schools. It was noted schools like Georgetown and Duke were underranked by US News and schools like UChicago and JHU were overranked. Some of these rankings included focus more on academics and some more on ROI, so with a composite I believe the idea was to see which schools excel in all the important metrics for undergrad.

Pretty interesting that only 5 schools maintained their spot compared to US News. MIT at #4, Penn at #7, Dartmouth at #12, and Cornell at #17, and UVA at #25. It looks like US News is underrating Duke, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Georgetown, UCLA, UMich, UNC, and UCSD while it's overrating Yale, JHU, UChicago, WUSTL, Brown, Berkeley, CMU, and Emory

You guys make up narratives to support your biases. These rankings have different criteria and different methodology, combining them makes little sense as some of them are not even measuring academics. Schools with great academics that send a lot of there students to grad school will have poor ROI lowering them on this list. See John's Hopkins, UChicago, and Emory as prime examples. On the ROi rankings they rank low. On the academic rankings they are consistent across the board.

Many of them measure academics, many of them measure ROI as well, the schools that rose to the top have great academics and provide a good ROI. Seems worthwhile since college is expensive. Also Johns Hopkins, UChicago, and Emory don't send more to grad school than other places necessarily. They just don't have as good outcomes for whatever reason.