Malcom Gladwell complains that US News rankings are arbitrary: Some years ago … a former chief justice of the Michigan supreme court … sent a questionnaire to a hundred or so of his fellow lawyers, asking them to rank a list of tend laws schools in order of quality. “They included a good sample of the big names. Harvard. Yale. University of Michigan. And some lesser-known schools. John Marshall Thomas Cooley. … They ranked Pen State’s law school right about in the middle of the pack. Maybe fifth among the ten schools listed. Of course, Penn State doesn’t have a law school.” … Reputational ratings are simply inferences from broad, readily observable features of an institution’s identity, such as its history, its prominence in the media, or the elegance of its architecture. …
I bet Penn State's law school is now, or will soon be, close to the rank that the questionnaire's respondents gave for it.
The US news list does have the benefit of indicating the received wisdom on school quality to those who don't have access to this info. This is valuable.
Regardless, it makes sense to me to have some schools that we regard as being "better" than other schools so that the smartest students and faculty will flock to those schools and fraternize with each other.
In reacting to the UPenn ranking as he did, Gladwell appears to be, well, assuming a fact not in evidence.
All that one can really glean from UPenn's reported ranking is that survey participants' typical weighting of existence was not so huge as to swamp the aggregate effect of the many other attributes (cost, dropout rate, faculty/student ratio, average earnings upon graduation, hire rate, ...) which are arguably relevant to a law school's quality.
Somewhat ironically (for an essay ostensibly stressing the value of objectivity and integrity in data analysis), Gladwell's own analysis appears to implicitly reflect his own bias that such a weighting is unacceptable.
I think the aetherial substance is called phlostatuston. There's a reactor that breeds the substance in the basement of Harvard, maybe MIT. Larry Bird went off tour one day and tampered with it directly and his hair went curly.
Not quite that extreme. Remember those guppy studies where a less-orange-than-ideal male can become a sex star if enough females are made to crowd around him, so that other females perceive him as higher status.
However, once his color brilliance slips below a threshold, the trick fails. So hype, good ratings, favorable word-of-mouth, etc., only works if they already meet some to-be-determined-empirically threshold of quality.
It's cute how when one initially tries to go deeper into the New Yorker article, the "subscribe" page initially features a blurry aristocrat appearing to give the reader his middle finger (he's actually holding a monocle).
I went to the University of Michigan, which was also ranked highly for some programs that did not exist. It was a convenient case study in survey research and evaluation.
I bet Penn State's law school is now, or will soon be, close to the rank that the questionnaire's respondents gave for it.
The US news list does have the benefit of indicating the received wisdom on school quality to those who don't have access to this info. This is valuable.
Penn State has had a law school for a few years now. It used to be called Dickinson.
Which would subsequently result in those very schools actually being better?
Regardless, it makes sense to me to have some schools that we regard as being "better" than other schools so that the smartest students and faculty will flock to those schools and fraternize with each other.
In reacting to the UPenn ranking as he did, Gladwell appears to be, well, assuming a fact not in evidence.
All that one can really glean from UPenn's reported ranking is that survey participants' typical weighting of existence was not so huge as to swamp the aggregate effect of the many other attributes (cost, dropout rate, faculty/student ratio, average earnings upon graduation, hire rate, ...) which are arguably relevant to a law school's quality.
Somewhat ironically (for an essay ostensibly stressing the value of objectivity and integrity in data analysis), Gladwell's own analysis appears to implicitly reflect his own bias that such a weighting is unacceptable.
I think the aetherial substance is called phlostatuston. There's a reactor that breeds the substance in the basement of Harvard, maybe MIT. Larry Bird went off tour one day and tampered with it directly and his hair went curly.
Not quite that extreme. Remember those guppy studies where a less-orange-than-ideal male can become a sex star if enough females are made to crowd around him, so that other females perceive him as higher status.
However, once his color brilliance slips below a threshold, the trick fails. So hype, good ratings, favorable word-of-mouth, etc., only works if they already meet some to-be-determined-empirically threshold of quality.
It's cute how when one initially tries to go deeper into the New Yorker article, the "subscribe" page initially features a blurry aristocrat appearing to give the reader his middle finger (he's actually holding a monocle).
I went to the University of Michigan, which was also ranked highly for some programs that did not exist. It was a convenient case study in survey research and evaluation.