Poll: Undergraduate Alma Mater

I went to Wharton/Penn for undergrad, which favors me in these kinds of surveys, but I'm still against them.

Regardless of whether those rankings are accurate, most of us let them inform our college decision to one degree or another. Our affiliation with the various subsets of schools does suggest some traits about us and hence the HN population.

I'd love to see thoughts on ranking CS schools too. I always see MIT/Stanford posts but not much else.

But at the end of the day, the education is only as good as the effort you put in. You can graduate from a school that isn't ranked highly and still be incredibly successful

I don't know american schools (I'm UWaterloo) but the difference in Canadian schools seems to be whether you went to a school that took their program seriously or one that just has it their to round out another program (computer science at Wilfred Laurier for instance).

It is a great school. But until recently, rankings weren't really something that the administration paid much attention to.

I think a very math/theory heavy approach is better overall, but it's not a vocational training program

Rankings are a terrible way to select schools, not just because they don't even claim to rate quality of education, but also because many top schools explicitly IGNORE any measures of success that aren't included in major ranking schemes, whereas schools with no hope of ever cracking top 20 are forced to craft a different niche for themselves.

This approach was first used for college rankings by Avery, Glickman, Hoxby, and Metrick. I forgot to acknowledge them in the first post.

What we use is an algorithm that says, "For this desirable student (objectively 'desirable' to the schools that were impressed enough to admit them), which school did they choose?" I see this as the "virtuous" approach. In a sense, in this model, schools are rewarded for admitting desirable students and winning the competition for them.

This hinders gaming of the system because most things that you can do to game this generally helps students. Want to game it by admitting students who won't get admitted to your competitive peers? You'll fall in the rankings, because those students will pit you against 'weaker' opponents, giving you less of a chance to rise in the rankings even if you always win.

There's another ranking approach that is fun but naughty. I'll call it the "vicious" approach. This one takes all colleges that admitted a student and all colleges that rejected them. The ones who rejected the student are modeled as the winners, and the ones who accepted them are modeled as the losers. In this way, the colleges that are most selective in admitting a student rise to the top.

I've actually run this "vicious" algorithm, but we don't publish its results. (Gaming this one would hurt students: imagine you're City College. You could do well for yourself by getting all the future freshmen of your rival, State College, to apply to your institution, then rejecting all of them. The kids wasted money on their application, you probably rejected some great candidates just to game the rankings, and State College unfairly drops in the rankings.)

For example, I would guess that a non-negligible amount of students that get into Harvard (#1) and Columbia (#4) will choose to go to Harvard in large part because they beat Columbia in U.S. News (and thus they perceive it has a better reputation).

So despite your interesting methodology, it will still be tied somewhat to the U.S. News rankings.

I ask because I'm planning on going there next year for computer science.