Reply to Pervasive Myths - set the record straight

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]that northeastern gamed the system for rankings [/quote]

But that’s not a myth.  It’s actually true.  Took about 2 decades but they did it.[/quote]

You can call it gaming, but Northeastern looked at the formula and sought to improve where they could.  [b]A myth would be that no other schools did the same thing.[/b]  They might not have been as effective, but so many have.  Schools took steps to lower admission rate when it was a factor (by inducing applications through push marketing), class size (through registration cutoffs), student faculty (by counting faculty that are peripheral to undergraduate education), same with resources (counting resources in IPEDS, the government database used by USNWR, that are peripheral to undergraduate education), improving alumni giving rate when it was a factor by dropping alumni from the database to lower the denominator (I think Berkeley was caught doing this), influencing other voters like it is Eurovision, admitting students that don't count against stats (foreign, Spring, etc.).  There is literally no factor on USNWR that could not be "gamed" to some extent.[/quote]

+1.

What they did was brilliant.  The fact that most people blindly follow "rankings" and do not understand how they are generated is more troubling.  Yes, NEU improved, but did they improve as much as rankings seem to imply?  I'll leave that up to you.  But go on the parents pages and there are a lot of issues---they grew faster than the infrastructure could support.  It's not very challenging for kids to get even one coop---I'd call a kid with a 3.8+ and sending out 250+ resumes "trying extremely hard" and yet some end up with nothing.  Housing is a nightmare and getting the courses you need is challenging as the undergraduate population has grown without the infrastructure support needed.  And advising is dismal in many instances---which often happens as a school grows.  Yes bad advising can happen at a 5-6K undergrad school, but it happens less and less and is typically easier to rectify if a student even makes an effort.  That is not the case at NEU

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