the Sam Jackson College Experience

Just a head’s up:  I’m busy packing, spending last moments with friends, generally panicking about getting ready for school. I am leaving on Monday for FOOT, freshman outdoor orientation trips, where I’ll be heading to the berkshires for 4 days of backpacking with classmates and a couple non-freshman leaders. On the 31st I will return to Yale campus where my parents will help me unpack the stuff they’ll have brought down, then begins a week of orientation, then classes. I will be sure to let everyone know what’s going on during orientation and what we’re up to but until then I have to commit myself to getting ready…!  So you’ll probably hear from me in a week or so.

Here’s me at the Kyle Sampson hearings that I went to while I was in Washington D.C. interning–front page of theBoston Globe, March 30, 2007! I never got around to scanning it until I was just cleaning my room today.

Wait, what do you mean you don’t see me? Oh… well, you see, we had these really great seats but I was with my friend and occasional troublemaker Adam Kelly, who through a series of wacky misadventures and the intervention of a not very friendly or intern-loving Judiciary Committee staffer lost us said good seats. So we’re way in the back. Photo below, with me at left (circled) and Adam on my left as we strain to see the swearing in. The security people that day were very cool, as most of the Capitol Police were. We had fun chats with them whenever we got stuck in the back. : )

Anyhow, yeah… we were in newspaper and media photos all the time since we all went to lots of cool hearings like this one! Lots and lots of really great times down in D.C., I can’t wait to go back.

Our good friends at IvyGate, through what I assume must be great cleverness and sneakery, posted the top 25 overall and top 25 Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. News’ 2008 rankings earlier today. At first had ethical reservations about saying really anything on the topic since I felt I could be indirectly promoting the rankings which I criticize frequently for their negative impact on the college search and application process (as Thacker would say, for their commercializing of it).

Then I saw that some more of our good friends, this time at EphBlog, had reposted some of it (for the LACs) and so had some other blogs, so I said why not cover it myself! Those of you following logically should realize that that should do nothing to clear my conscience, but all the same I’m going to write about the rankings a little : )

I’ll relate the shocking news right now: The top 3 slots are the same as last year! Gasp! In the same order, no less–Princeton, Harvard, Yale. (For complete list, see the end of this post) While we’ve all become accustomed to the top 10 or so’s relative lack of volatility over the years, it’s worth remembering the way the methodology has been changed based more on editorial discretion than statistical or scientific merit. The methodology is explained on USNews.com; I will look through it and discuss the changes they made this year in another coming post.

Steve Hsu, who writes a totally awesome blog called Information Processing (he’s a physics professor at the U of Oregon), brought a Slate article to my attention back in July. It’s a fun read, centered around an explanation of the various ‘fudge factors’ that U.S. News uses to make sure the rankings maintain a certain… standard, shall we say.

The story of how the rankings were cooked goes back to 1987, when the magazine’s first attempt at a formula put a school in first that longtime editor Mel Elfin says he can’t even remember, except that it wasn’t HYP. So Elfin threw away that formula and brought in a statistician named Robert Morse who produced a new one. This one puts HYP on top, and Elfin frankly defends his use of this result to vindicate the process. He told me, “When you’re picking the most valuable player in baseball and a utility player hitting .220 comes up as the MVP, it’s not right.”

The article is from 2000, and I know there have been changes since then, but the points it makes are still entirely valid as they touch on the whole history of the rankings. In 1999 Caltech was #1 but the next year dropped to #4; the reason for this was the application of special ‘logarithmic adjusters,’ applied only in categories where Caltech had an edge on HYP. These ‘adjusters’ in place, Caltech dropped back down, HYP went to the top… problem solved, from U.S. News’ perspective.

…the credibility of rankings like these depends on two semiconflicting rules. First, the system must be complicated enough to seem scientific. And second, the results must match, more or less, people’s nonscientific prejudices. Last year’s rankings failed the second test. There aren’t many Techie graduates in the top ranks of U.S. News, and I’d be surprised if The New Yorker has published a story written by a Caltech grad, or even by someone married to one, in the last five years. Go out on the streets of Georgetown by the U.S. News offices and ask someone about the best college in the country. She probably won’t start to talk about those hallowed labs in Pasadena.

The fact that the formulas had to be rearranged to get HYP back on top doesn’t mean that those three aren’t the best schools in the country, whatever that means. After all, who knows whether last year’s methodology was better than this year’s? Is a school’s quality more accurately measured by multiplying its spending per student by 0.15 or by taking a logarithmic adjuster to that value? A case could also be made for taking the square root.

But the logical flaw in U.S. News’ methodology should be obvious—at least to any Caltech graduate. If the test of a mathematical formula’s validity is how closely the results it produces accord with pre-existing prejudices, then the formula adds nothing to the validity of the prejudice. It’s just for show. And if you fiddle constantly with the formula to produce the result you want, it’s not even good for that.

Caltech is #5 this year. Happy rankings everyone…

Here’s the Top 25, after the break:

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think sales and marketing go hand in hand with teaching, and I question whether they are the best match for honesty in college admissions.

That’s why I’m a little annoyed when I read through old posts like this one, delving into the past some: TargetX mentioned in an Email Minute back in January that NACAC’s annual report essentially put marketing at the top of the list for desired skills in chief enrollment offices.

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand in the corporate and commercial worlds. It’s increasingly obvious that they go together in the academic world as well. Admissions needs to rely on the marketing expertise of its chief officer to support the sales efforts of its recruiting staff.

In today’s state of college admission, marketing and sales are no longer dirty words.

In context, I don’t suppose I really take issue with what is being said: it’s relating to a survey question which resulted in sixty-eight percent of colleges saying that “marketing was the most important professional qualification for chief enrollment officers at their institutions.” What gets me frowning is the notion that marketing and sales tactics are necessarily ideal for college admissions. I don’t generally like the whole concept of “selling” a college as a brand, whatever currency that may have today–it can detract from the student goals of making a good fit and ensuring a good match (which should be the college’s goals too!).

‘Sales and Marketing’ reminds me of US News rankings, deception, etc. Fair? Not really. They can just as well be leveraged for good, informing students far and wide about the wonders of under-appreciated schools and programs. If marketing and sales skills are utilized in ways more suited to college admissions from the student perspective, then I’m all for them. If, however, they’re used to create branding and marketing schemes that are more traditional and, shall I say, unhelpful to the end viewer, then I’m upset by the additional ‘noise’ put into the field.

Oh, and for those non-industry types who hadn’t heard about it before but are interested in the NACAC annual report, download a copy here: NACAC’s 2006 State of College Admission. I don’t know if I would describe the 90+ page document as a ‘fun’ read, but it’s definitely interesting.

I was on vacation for a week with my family in Provincetown (same as last summer!) and was so rushed to leave that I didn’t put up a post. Back now!

edit note 2:40pm: a couple slight edits for clarification made to respond to commented concerns.

Mashable had a great post today, “DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING: 30+ Firefox Add-ons For Downloading Images, Videos & Files” many of which are very useful–check it out if you’re a Firefox user (and if you’re not, check it out so you can see why you ought to be). But nestled within those embedded video downloaders and screen grabbing extensions was one which struck me as elegant in its simplicity and dangerous in its potential: Facebook Photo Album Downloader.

Promising to allow users to “easily download whole albums off Facebook” (it does) this should be a good reminder of how easily photos people upload to Facebook can just as quickly be pulled down onto users hard drives and travel from there anywhere in the world.

Be careful, people! I stopped warning people about the content of their facebook albums sometime last year after I found no one would respond seriously to the links to real-life accounts of life implosions and job disasters from Facebook content. Just think about it!