Reply to Sidwell Basketball Article

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "Sidwell Basketball Article"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I just got around to reading the Wharton paper, which I couldn't do from my iPhone yesterday. Here's the link again: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1287.pdf.  I have to say, whoever posted the link and suggested that we all read up on "Revealed Preference" and then we'd agree that Sidwell is tops, didn't understand the paper.

The authors specifically reject measures like admissions ratios and matriculation ratios, as the PP at 1/4 @ 7:49 pointed out. For example, on page 34, the paper states, "Looking at Table 5, we observe that most of the top twenty colleges based on revealed preference are not in the top twenty based on the admissions and matriculation rates." If you open the link and check out Table 5, it shows that the admissions ratios are usually pretty different from the revealed preference ratios the authors constructed.

Also, the authors construct their measure of desirability based on a range of characteristics, and class size isn't even one of the characteristics they include in their model.  On page 10, for example (although you can find this restated throughout the paper), they say, "Our measure of desirability encompasses all characteristics of a school, including (perceived) educational quality, campus location, and tuition." Of particular note for the discussion  on this thread, the authors consider tuition amounts to be an important factor, and they specifically take financial aid offers into consideration in their model. On page 14, the authors write, "For some characteristics, we can measure variation across applicants: tuition, room fees, board fees, grants to the student, the subsidy value of loans to the student, the subsidy value of the work-study it offers the student, the cost associated with its distance from the student's home, its being in-state, its being in-region, and its being the alma mater of one or more of the student's parents."

So to conclude, it's pretty clear that nobody on this thread has the data we would need to replicate the Wharton study for local private schools, in a way that would prove that Sidwell, Gonzaga, or any other school is the preferred school. We might be able try if we had access to data on average SATs or exmissions results which we could use as proxies for the "educational quality" variable in the Wharton paper, but then Sidwell doesn't publish these.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics