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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I heard Malcolm Gladwell explain this on Farid Zakariah’s program today this way:
There are five different variables in U.S. News algorithm, of which the one with the most weight is a given institution’s reputation.  To get this, all the college/university Presidents are asked to give their opinion of the reputation of all other institutions on a scale of 1 to 5.  What does a college President in one part of the country know about colleges in other parts of the country?  But this reputation value contributes the most to a college’s ranking in the results.  He said, some smart hackers got into the algorithm and they could correlate a college’s reputation value depends on three factors with a 91.3% correlation.  The three factors are the size of a college’s endowment, the annual tutu on fee it charges, and the percent of white students in its student body.  In other words, the richer a colleges, the more it serves the rich people (who can afford to pay high tuition fee), and the more it attracts white students, it’s ranking in the U.S. News list will be higher.  He said he could talk about the other four variables similarly.  No wonder we don’t see much of State Schools and none of HBCUs in the top 40 or 60 national colleges/universities.  Same thing goes for many liberal arts colleges where undergraduate education is the focus.[/quote]

Ah!  Gladwell, the know-it-all that knows nothing.  He's a good story teller that connects seemingly unrelated things and most fools that listen/read seem to walk away thinking he's right.  Remember 10,000 hours?  Seriously!

And Farid Zakaria is another plagiarizing clown.   Enough said.[/quote]

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