{"id":49156,"date":"2019-08-21T13:28:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T20:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=49156"},"modified":"2019-08-21T13:28:37","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T20:28:37","slug":"college-rankings-might-as-well-be-student-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/college-rankings-might-as-well-be-student-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"College rankings might as well be student rankings"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Each year various magazines and newspapers publish college rankings in an attempt to inform parents and prospective students which colleges are supposedly the best.<\/p>\n

U.S. News & World Report\u2019s\u00a0\u201cBest Colleges\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 perhaps the most influential of these rankings \u2013 first appeared in 1983. Since then, many other rankings have emerged, assessing colleges and universities on cost, the salaries of graduates and other factors.<\/p>\n

For example, in releasing its\u00a0new college rankings<\/a>\u00a0in August 2019, Forbes said it \u201ceschews common metrics like acceptance rate, endowment and freshmen SAT scores\u201d and focuses instead on outputs like \u201cstudent debt, alumni salary, graduation rate and student satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2018 The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education released their\u00a0new rankings<\/a>, which judge colleges on things that range from how much graduates earn to the campus environment to how much students engaged with instructors.<\/p>\n

But what, if anything, do all these college rankings really reveal about the quality and value of a particular college?<\/p>\n

In order to provide a new perspective on rankings, my colleagues\u00a0Matt I. Brown<\/a>,\u00a0Christopher F. Chabris<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0I<\/a>\u00a0decided to rank colleges according to the SAT or ACT scores of the students they admit. All three of us are researchers with backgrounds in\u00a0education and psychology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0our analysis<\/a>, we simply ranked all 1,339 schools by a standardized test score metric.<\/p>\n

Hierarchy of smarts<\/h4>\n

We\u00a0discovered<\/a>\u00a0that schools higher up on the rankings generally admit students with higher SAT or ACT scores. In other words, what the rankings largely show is the caliber of the students that a given college admits \u2013 that is,\u00a0if you accept the SAT as a valid measure<\/a>\u00a0of a\u00a0student\u2019s caliber<\/a>. Though there is often\u00a0public controversy<\/a>\u00a0over the\u00a0value of standardized tests<\/a>, research shows that these tests are quite robust\u00a0measures to predict<\/a>\u00a0academic performance, career potential, creativity and job performance.<\/p>\n

Critics of the SAT say it tests for students\u2019 wealth, not caliber. While it is true that wealthier parents tend to have students with higher test scores, it turns out the research robustly shows that test scores,\u00a0even when you consider socioeconomic status<\/a>, are\u00a0predictive of later outcomes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our ranking also disproves the notion that the No. 1 school in the land is slightly better than the No. 2 school \u2013 and so on down the list. Rather it shows that the vast majority of schools admit students who earn a score between 900 and 1300 on the SAT \u2013 that is, on the combined scores on the SAT\u00a0Math<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Verbal<\/a>. Greater variations in test scores appear in schools that admit students at the low and high end of the distribution \u2013 those students who earn below a 900 or above a 1300 on their SATs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In particular, most of the variation occurs between \u201chighly selective\u201d and \u201celite\u201d schools, between the scores of 1300 and 1600 in the illustration. Thus, test score rankings can mean different things depending upon which group of schools students and parents are considering. For example, if you are deciding whether to attend two different schools that fall into the vast middle range of scores where there is much more overlap, the ranking differences likely will not tell you very much.<\/p>\n

To our knowledge,\u00a0our graph<\/a>\u00a0represents the first illustration of how colleges and universities stack up against one another in terms of the SAT or ACT test scores of the students that end up on their campuses.<\/p>\n

For instance,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal-Times Higher Education rankings methodology<\/a>\u00a0does not include the SAT\/ACT scores of students. The U.S. News rankings include SAT\/ACT scores as part of their\u00a0student selectivity<\/a>\u00a0portion, but these scores are weighted only about 8% in the total formula.<\/p>\n

Different rankings, similar results<\/h4>\n

Our study<\/a>\u00a0also assessed the correlation \u2014 or how statistically similar \u2014 our test score rankings were compared to the U.S. News rankings themselves, as well as other rankings that are meant to assess entirely different dimensions of colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

A correlation of 1 indicates a perfect relationship between two variables whereas a correlation of 0 indicates no relationship between two variables. We found across our analyses that test score rankings correlated between 0.659 to 0.890 with other rankings. This suggests the schools that end up at the top of the test score rankings also will end up at the top of these other rankings.<\/p>\n

We first found high correlations between our test score rankings and\u00a0U.S. News national university rank<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 0.892 \u2013 and liberal arts college rank \u2013 0.890 \u2013 even though U.S. News weights these scores only about 8% in their formula.\u00a0Times Higher Education\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0U.S. school ranking was correlated 0.787 with SAT and ACT scores and Times Higher Education\u2019s full international school ranking was correlated 0.659. This suggests that the SAT\/ACT rankings could function as a common factor that connects all rankings.
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