College Ranking Formula

College Ranking Formula February 21, 2013 Should the college ranking formula be tweaked? The Freakonomics guys, pals of Bevs son, have brought to our attention a paper authored by economists Christopher N. Avery, Mark E. Glickman, Caroline M. Hoxby, and Andrew Metrick that concerns the  college ranking  formula. In the abstract, as brought to our attention by Freakonomics.com, the authors propose ranking colleges not by the current variables employed by US News World Report but rather by student revealed preferences. In light of the recent admissions scandals at Claremont McKenna College and George Washington University, it might be a good idea to adjust the algorithm or at least provide safeguards to prevent deans of admission from fudging data. Maybe a school would get booted from the US News World Report rankings for several years like a ban from the NCAA to compete in post-season play. Anyhow, heres the abstract of the paper: When a student chooses a college among those that have admitted him, that college wins his tournament. Our method efficiently integrates the information from thousands of such tournaments. We implement the method using data from a national sample of high-achieving students. We demonstrate that this ranking method has strong theoretical properties, eliminating incentives for colleges to adopt strategic, inefficient admissions policies to improve their rankings. We also show empirically that our ranking is (1) not vulnerable to strategic manipulation; (2) similar regardless of whether we control for variables, such as net cost, that vary among a college’s admits; (3) similar regardless of whether we account for students selecting where to apply, including Early Decision. We exemplify multiple rankings for different types of students who have preferences that vary systematically. Do you think these changes should be implemented by US News World Report? Whats your opinion on the important US News World Report rankings? Let us know your thoughts on the matter by posting below!