Reply to If the colleges are all lying about their stats, why does anyone care about rankings?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some colleges "lie", but what many do is manipulate it within the rules.  An example of this is Northeaster, which accepts less qualified students for spring entry (putting them on one of their cooperative education internships to start).  They have had approval from USNews to omit these students (as well as international students who do not have to submit SAT/ACT).  In this way, they raised their standardized scores significantly.

Another example is the programs schools have put in place to increase the number of applications, even if the students aren't actually qualified.[/quote]

The schools that manipulated acceptance rate got burned when US News changed the methodology. At this moment, schools are plotting ways to get more Pell Grants recipients on board.[/quote]

Stanford, which I think had the lowest acceptance rate, recently announced it wouldn't report it any more.  When the rate is getting down to 4% or so, it really does get to be ridiculous.  There was a joke going around that Stanford acceptance rate had reached the inevitable zero.  Removing the acceptance rate from criteria may get selective colleges to expand their class size some.

Virginia schools (at least UVA, W&M, VT, and JMU) have historically had very low rates of Pell grant recipients compared to the University of California, for instance, which has 3-4X more on a percentage basis.  This probably explains how those schools went up.  UCLA is now the #1 public.  While it is a very good school, I'd never rate it above Berkeley, and would probably rather have a kid go to UVA or W&M all things being equal.  I lived nearby and it never seemed to be very undergraduate oriented in my experience.   UCLA has massive exposure, though.  They now get something like 115K applicants, and if you visit the campus, you will see it is swamped by sightseers from Asia, where it is very well known.[/quote]

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