Reply to The Absurdity of U.S. News College Rankings

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^^^ Sorry but you don't understand how statistics work.

You list only the extreme outliers and show differences in them as an example of a substantive difference.  If you showed a graph of yield rates of all colleges, it would show that the yield rates for Stanford and Princeton are virtually equal.

Also, you assume yield rates = prestige, which has several gigantic flaws.  First, it is a tiny cohort of people, and does not represent the general populace.  Second, you assume that tiny cohort makes the choice based on prestige.[/quote]

No one is claiming Princeton and Yale are not prestigious universities - they are. The question is whether they are as prestigious as Harvard/Stanford and even MIT today.

The answer is that they are not.

82% and 70% are not virtually equal. That is like saying the yield rate of Notre Dame and Princeton (58% and 70%) are virtually equal. They are not.[/quote]

You missed the entire point I was making.  Assuming you are the original poster, you said

[quote] while Yale and Princeton are quite a bit further down.[/quote]

My point was that you used a tiny selection of data, and that's not how data works.  Looking at all the data, you realize the answer is "slightly lower, but still very near the top".  Literally the opposite of "quite a bit further down"[/quote]

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