“For 30 years, US News & World Report has been using a secret formula to rank the best colleges and universities in the United States. As a public service to our listeners, we hack the algorithm and discover the dirty little secret of the rankings game.” https://www.pushkin.fm/show/revisionist-history/ spoiler below
The most significant factor in the overall college rankings is the peer ranking – a survey of college/university administrators where they ask the administrators to rate every school in their category on a 1-5 scale. This is the only factor in the rankings for many program-level rankings (top undergraduate engineering schools – https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering). Analysis of the peer rankings from the overall lists and found that 55% of the peer ranking score could be predicted by endowment, and if you add in high tuition rates you can explain 76% of the peer assessment rankings. Rich expensive schools have a good reputation among their peers. And of course, reputation begets reputation – if you want to know how the administrators will rank the school, look at last year’s rankings – this alone will explain 85% of the peer assessment scores (https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/project-dillard/).
Recent Comments