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Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

176 points by pav3l 14y ago

sageikosa 14y ago
Unless the metrics used for the ratings are based upon things like per capita salary x-many years after graduation (broken out into specific fields of study and private/public sectors), then it all comes down to either a popularity contest, or a measure of how well a school's policies reflect the latest "progressive" education practices. In other words, unless it shows what the student "gets" out of the experience when done, they are selling dreams.
- armored_mammal 14y ago
  Too simplistic. There are a lot of things that bring bias into the equation if the question is about the effectiveness of teaching/education and not about the ability of a school to create (rather than select or influence) 'success' outside of it actually succeeding at teaching or educating.
- Zigurd 14y ago
  That would work for MBAs and perhaps JDs, but why tip the scales against, say, a med school that produces great GPs but not many cosmetic surgeons? A money-based measurement is also heavily canted toward the "old money" set and their legacy admissions to their alma maters. Money isn't everything. And often it isn't even accurate at measuring how well a school equips students to make it on their own.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    "Things like" would count things that mattered per category. If you wanted to go into pure science, most likely you'd be concerned about the freshman average GPA, the % of graduates who change majors, and the graduating percentage that find employment as researchers and educators. Medical school costs (and the insurance load to practice medicine) are already tipping the scales against GPs (low return on educational investment), and many medical students already know this. The real looming healthcare crises will be when the margins on being a general practioneer sinks below the educational investment cost, and all we are left with are specialists. As far as investment return on the cost of college education goes, earnings would be a useful metric, especially when one has to finance the education with student loans that have fixed rates of repayment. It is the most universally applicable metric, and although it may not make everybody's world go around, it does keep things from coming to a grinding halt (apart from coercion and intimidation). In any case, I doubt the college U.S. News college ranking is the largest signal to where most incoming freshman apply.
    - Zigurd 14y ago
      Maybe the problem is that, for many kinds of education that are useful and/or beneficial to society, money is a poor measuring stick and market forces are not a desirable influence. The effect on GPs you describe is already driving a health care crisis in the US. We may be left with an overhang of specialists who will surely argue their education should not become a "stranded asset."
- the_watcher 14y ago
  When you measure by these metrics, you end up getting the law school scam, where schools employ unemployed graduates for juuust long enough to count them as long term employed, and only make an effort to collect the salary of highly paid graduates (and use "reported salaries" as their denominator, not total grads)
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    OK, I'm not advocating that those metrics must be used, and must be collected in a certain way. What I am doing is being critical of rankings that aren't at least related in some way to the reasons most people seek higher education. If anything, I am most critical of a single ranking that is supposed to tell me how good something is crafted from within the community that is being ranked.
  - bvcqw 14y ago
    Nothing wrong with employment.
davidroberts 14y ago
"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist." Good thing this writer is unbiased.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  This is probably objectively true.
  - elliptic 14y ago
    Probably not for useful definitions of "generous," which should take into account the actual utility (in money or time), given away. Someone who donates half of their life savings of 50k is (I would say, at least) more generous than someone who donates 90% of 1 billion.
    - ryguytilidie 14y ago
      I would not define someone who gave 25k as more generous than someone who gave 900million, no.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Would you define someone who gave away until they only had 100million remaining as more or less generous than someone who gave away until they only had 25k remaining? How about if the person with 50k gave away 25k, but the billionaire gave away double that? Who is more generousness in that case? It seems fairly plain to me that utility of what was given away is by far the most important factor in determining generosity.
        ryguytilidie 14y ago
        I see your point, but I simply disagree. The utility to the person is much different, but after that, money is money and 900m provides much more utility to starving kids, etc than 25k does, no matter how you slice it.
stfu 14y ago
Couldn't this be just a side effect of what he advocated a few days ago in his WSJ commentary? [1] By putting a lot of pressure on measuring things, people use the data that is easy accessible/comparable. Consequently they put a lot of effort into constructing the argument why these factors are the most important ones. Getting unskewed data is incredibly hard, especially when there is so much to gain from subtly manipulating the data. [1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732353980457826...
Cookingboy 14y ago
The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country. That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.
- armored_mammal 14y ago
  Come on... it IS an east coast old money circle-jerk. And everyone knows it.
  - mattgreenrocks 14y ago
    Why does the stench of power always smell the same? It's all so predictable.
    - sp332 14y ago
      We all want to succeed. We all also want our friends and business partners to succeed. It's just that people who have lots of money and power are better at accomplishing that than the rest of us. We all help our friends out; only the scale is different.
      - christofd 14y ago
        That explains a lot actually. Powerful and simple explanation for the world we live in. However, pretty much the opposite of the so-called "trickle-down" mechanism... more like "trickle-up".
armored_mammal 14y ago
One of those ideas that's blatantly obvious, but which most will refuse to consider until someone 'big' mainstreams it. I have a hard time reconciling the various useful things the Gates foundation seems to do with the tendency towards obnoxiousness that defines Microsoft.
- Isamu 14y ago
  Making your fortune through ruthlessness and crushing the opposition, followed by generous philanthropy, is time-honored tradition. One prototype is Andrew Carnegie.
  - lordofmoria 14y ago
    LOL. This comment is awesome.
- dmhdlr 14y ago
  Obnoxiousness isn't the right word.
ojbyrne 14y ago
One of the absurdities of the various college ranking systems is that reputation is a large component of the ranking. So if you have a good ranking, you get a good ranking.
natural219 14y ago
When I graduated high school, all I wanted was a list of the top Computer Science schools in the world. I can't recall exactly what happened during that period, but somehow, I ended up at the University of Nebraska. Something is broken.
Irregardless 14y ago
> “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused" – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work. Students are notoriusly bad at rating their professors. This was proved with almost ideal control groups at the Air Force Academy [1] and again with groups of trained professionals/graduate students who learned first hand about the 'Dr. Fox Effect' [2]. Even teachers don't seem to like the teacher evaluations done by students [3]. Anecdotally, I can say that most students in my college classes either didn't show up on the survey days, or they walked out the door as soon as the surveys were being handed out. There's also no incentive to provide useful feedback from the student's perspective. If you're taking a survey about the class, it means the class is over and you'll probably never see that professor again, so why bother? I made an effort only because I felt an obligation to help future students, but I'm not sure there are many kids in college who share that feeling. > Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll. So you can have cheap and unreliable measurements, or you can have accurate but costly ones. Who's going to pay for the latter? The rating agencies? The schools? The students? Imagine the costs to enact such a program across all colleges in the U.S. alone -- some of the larger state schools easily have > 1,000 teaching faculty across a myriad of disciplines, and they're teaching increasingly diverse student bodies. The thought of trying to implement a thorough, standardized program of that scale is mind boggling. And that's probably why we've been facing this dilemma of measuring teacher effectiveness since the day the first schools opened. Bill Gates is right that we have a serious problem, but it doesn't sound like he's any closer to a solution. [1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_high-rated_professors_ar.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_h... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_course_evaluations_as_measures_of_teaching_effectiveness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_...
bluebearx 14y ago
not that interesting article..
guelo 14y ago
It seems like the graduate school entrance exams (GRE, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT) would be a good indicator of undergrad performance (though not so much for engineering and non-medical science). Are those scores available on a per undergrad-school basis?
- colincsl 14y ago
  I'm not sure about the MCAT/GMAT/LSAT but the GRE is a pretty bad indicator. For example, everyone who goes to grad school for computer science or engineering gets minimum a 750 on the quantitative section. The math only tests high school level ability. While I don't have any links, I think that there are many studies showing that SAT/GRE type scores don't mean very much.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I remember taking the GRE, I got 99 percentiles on quantitative and logical reasoning...and like 69 percentile on verbal. The verbal part was basically a vocabulary test.
SparrowOS 14y ago
It's weird -- I used to feel I had complete mastery of writing. I had no problem getting A's on papers. I have forgotten things, but I sometimes find myself bewildered while writing, doing a construct I have no clue proper punctuation or grammar for. The easy answer is just to rewrite and go with what I know. If I have to, I can do that. stay with one tense -- past don't use "I" don't use dangling prepositions. ---- What's awful is that I obsess on grammar while listening to radio interviews. It's a huge distraction. My favorite distraction is "me" or "I". Linking verbs use nomnative, but I think they almost never come-up. caring about grammar just distracts me. I'm an ass. God says... C:\Text\WORD2.TXT een the Seven Whistlers, &c." Both these superstitions are prevalent in the midland Counties of England: that of "Gabriel's Hounds" appears to be very general over Europe; being the same as the one upon which the German Poet, Burger, has founded his Ballad of the Wild Huntsman. NOTE V. PAGE 128 (302).--_Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle_. Henry Lord Clifford, &c. &c., who is the subject of this Poem, was the son of John, Lord Clifford, who was slain at Towton Field, which John, Lord Clif ---- God did some time travel -- Gabriel Giffords. I'm Terry A. Davis, 1440 SAT, but don't give a fuck about grammar, anymore. I feel stupid writing full sentences. Bullet points, mon!! You guys know that I pick from a fixed set of about 12 books? ---- I wonder if this is true: "A liar won't believe anyone." It seems probably true. I guess we could talk about Bible passages and passages that have become quotes from God. I don't know. I'm not in crisis. You'll have to work things out for yourselves. God says... C:\Text\HUCKFINN.TXT 's WELL for you to set there and blubber like a baby--it's fitten for you, after the way you've acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything --and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for 'em. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to BELIEVE that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make
nollidge 14y ago
Off-topic, but in Chrome I got the bar at the top saying "This page is in French. Translate?" This mis-identification of language in Chrome happens to me probably once a day, though usually when looking at code.
pokerfacer 14y ago
US News's rankings are based upon metrics like acceptance rate, retention rate, yield rate, charitable donations, faculty-student ratio, endowment, etc. These rankings don't predict the "best" colleges, but rather the most prestigious.
- lordofmoria 14y ago
  curious, how does faculty-student ratio relate to prestige?
  - pokerfacer 14y ago
    It's not a perfect proxy for prestige, but cash-rich universities with large endowments have more professor positions than less well-off colleges.
carbocation 14y ago
I don't mean to be incredibly dense, but I'll risk looking that way here. When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge. Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumably improved? Creativity? Problem solving? Social adroitness? Rote knowledge? Do I dare say that it may be different for different people? The notion that colleges could be measured along just a few axes correlating with a few particular purposes confuses me in a way that the elementary school debate does not. What am I missing?
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  The only thing you're really missing is capitalism itself, which demands that everything be put on a quantifiable measure in order to justify its existence to the ultimate quantifiable measure, money.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? Good question. The lack of a good answer certainly undermines the justification for colleges continued existence and pervasiveness. Tangentially, I'd argue that any institution which can't even define it's goals should not receive any taxpayer dollars.
ivan_ah 14y ago
I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}. Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher because some data fit decided that you are a bad teacher? No way! Anyone who is willing to put in the energy and spend time with kids teaching them stuff should continue to do it. Metrics for self assessment YES, but metrics for firing teachers NO. Also, the whole idea of "Value added" score has been called bullshit upon here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 --> http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-million-dollar-lie/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... . [ quote: ... the correlation is so low that I, and many others who have created similar graphs, concluded that this kind of measurement is far from ready to be used for high-stakes purposes like determining salaries and for laying off senior teachers who are below average on this metric. ] The author basically says that there is no correlation of the "value added" metric that a teacher brings from year to year. This lack of correlation is masked in the report "Measures of Effective Teaching" because "they averaged the predicted and actual scores in five percentile groups. In doing this, they mask a lot of the variability that happens" to make it look as if "value added" is a good stable metric.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  The author uses a bad graph to convince the reader that there is no correlation, even when (by his own admission, see the comments) one is present. The year to year correlation is 0.3. The correlation across percentile groups is much higher because that increases the sample size and thereby reduces statistical noise. The conclusion we can draw here is that measuring the performance of a single teacher based on a single class will yield a very large confidence interval. That's not the same as "bullshit".
- stch2 14y ago
  The author explicitly states there is a 24% correlation, and then says there is no correlation. Can he or she not make up their mind?
jmharvey 14y ago
If the primary benefit of attending a good college is education from professors, then yes, there is something perverse in the rankings. But I'm not sure that's how college actually works. At the undergrad level, a particular class at one college is likely pretty similar to a class at another college. And aside from a few exceptional students, you're likely to be able to find whatever classes you're looking for at any college you care to attend. There are more competent people who can teach, and want to teach, intro to Shakespeare, or second-semester thermodynamics, or whatever, than there are teaching positions available. Most of the benefit you get from choosing college A over college B comes from your interactions with your peers. Some of this is just people working together on class projects, but a lot of it is the pervasive culture of a place. At some schools, people will hang out and talk about political theory. At others, there's a culture of making art. Some places care more about sports. And at some schools there's a culture of building things. Actually, at most schools, all of these things happen to some extent, but you're more likely to encounter them at some places than at others. And if that's the benefit of college, then it absolutely makes sense to say that the best colleges are the ones with the best students.
- LarrySDonald 14y ago
  That's true, but also the problem. Which university should, then, these best students hang out at? I think we all agree they should be at the one that is the best at teaching them, or which has a style of teaching that works well for them. But we wouldn't know that because most of the ratings can't (or rather won't) discern this. Why is school A the best? It has the best students. Why do they have the best students? Because school A is the best school. So it's not bad for figuring out where the school you belong at is, but a complete non-metric for the school itself - they can't tell how they rate at actual education or if they're a good choice teaching wise (or if all the students would be better off congregating elsewhere - they'd still have each other as well as potentially better teachers).
ececconi 14y ago
Says the guy who went to Harvard
- slurry 14y ago
  And dropped out.
lordofmoria 14y ago
To avoid the needlessly vague allusions to schools going on in this thread: I went to Princeton University for undergrad. I'm sure Bill Gates has a more nuanced view on college ratings than this article suggests. Welcome to media. We all know why the college rankings are the way they are. Frankly, no one cares who the "most improved" olympic athlete was in London. People generally want the unambiguity of an outright set of winners. Unambiguous winners may be ok in sports, but not in colleges, where the rankings have a big impact on education here in the US. Gates points out this flaw and argues instead for a "most improved student" metric. Unfortunately, Gates' "solution" wouldn't really solve the problem either. What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates.
- bcoates 14y ago
  > What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates. If nothing else, colleges that are publicly known for effectiveness will have an easier time recruiting and retaining talented employees. They would presumably also be a magnet for results-driven philanthropists, either through direct donations or being somehow accredited for scholarships.
- foobarian 14y ago
  Wonder if that metric would cause colleges to recruit the worst possible students in order to maximize the amount of improvement.
- spikels 14y ago
  What? "Improving", that is educating, students is the primary purpose of colleges. Seems perfectly reasonable to want to measure how effectivly they do their job. The quality of the graduates of a college depend on a number of factors but probably the two most important are the quality incoming students and the college's ability to improve their quality. In effect colleges perform two functions: sorting and educating. Sorting people based on standardized testing, high school grades, essays, recommendations, interviews and application details is a useful service in itself. However most of the value and almost all of the cost of colleges comes from educating not sorting. The current college rating "system" can't possibly separate these two sources of quality. Clearly it would be something useful to know as within any group of similarly ranked colleges there will be differences in the quality of the education component. All else being equal prospective students would choose the school that offered a best education. More applicants would to schools that were better at their primary mission, educating their students. In turn these schools could be more selective. Building such a system will not be easy but should be very valuable. Please continue working on this Mr Gates.
CleanedStar 14y ago
Implicitly stated in this is the idea that all sectors of society want, and feel they would benefit, from this better education of everyone. We could posit a counter-point to that assumption. The counter-point being the posited, hypothetical idea that not all sectors of society think that "a rising tide lifts all boats". We could hypothesize that there are sectors of society who would be opposed to the working poor getting good educations. But with such a non-mainstream contrarian hypothesis being posited, we'd have to think of a reason for this. Why would some sectors of society be opposed to this? Well, perhaps they would have a desire for a "reserve army of labor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). Perhaps if they had a company, like say Microsoft, their company would pay dividends. Part of the money the company doesn't reinvest in continuing costs or re-investment, would not go to wages, but stock holders. Of course, with the small amount of stock options most Microsoft employees have relative to their wages (not to mention permatemping), in game theory it would be better for these workers, if money was to go to their wage or the dividend, for the money to go the worker. Perhaps for large MSFT shareholders like Gates, it would be better for the money to go to the dividends, and not to wages. How can you stop the workers from demanding higher wages? Perhaps having a reserve army of labor, an inflated unemployment rate etc. would help. Perhaps a worker knowing other people as skilled or almost as skilled as him are lining up to try to get work at MSFT to get the wages he is getting, and are being rejected in interviews, keeps him being happy with his wage. Of course this is all just wild, non-mainstream, out there conjecture. Obviously the world's richest billionaires like Bill Gates only have feelings of benevolence, and aligned interests with the rest of us. You can see how lauded he is for his charity and such in the press.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Well everyone knew that. It's just that nobody really has the singular clout to change the college ranking system.

176 points by pav3l 14y ago

Unless the metrics used for the ratings are based upon things like per capita salary x-many years after graduation (broken out into specific fields of study and private/public sectors), then it all comes down to either a popularity contest, or a measure of how well a school's policies reflect the latest "progressive" education practices. In other words, unless it shows what the student "gets" out of the experience when done, they are selling dreams.

armored_mammal 14y ago
Too simplistic. There are a lot of things that bring bias into the equation if the question is about the effectiveness of teaching/education and not about the ability of a school to create (rather than select or influence) 'success' outside of it actually succeeding at teaching or educating.
Zigurd 14y ago
That would work for MBAs and perhaps JDs, but why tip the scales against, say, a med school that produces great GPs but not many cosmetic surgeons? A money-based measurement is also heavily canted toward the "old money" set and their legacy admissions to their alma maters. Money isn't everything. And often it isn't even accurate at measuring how well a school equips students to make it on their own.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  "Things like" would count things that mattered per category. If you wanted to go into pure science, most likely you'd be concerned about the freshman average GPA, the % of graduates who change majors, and the graduating percentage that find employment as researchers and educators. Medical school costs (and the insurance load to practice medicine) are already tipping the scales against GPs (low return on educational investment), and many medical students already know this. The real looming healthcare crises will be when the margins on being a general practioneer sinks below the educational investment cost, and all we are left with are specialists. As far as investment return on the cost of college education goes, earnings would be a useful metric, especially when one has to finance the education with student loans that have fixed rates of repayment. It is the most universally applicable metric, and although it may not make everybody's world go around, it does keep things from coming to a grinding halt (apart from coercion and intimidation). In any case, I doubt the college U.S. News college ranking is the largest signal to where most incoming freshman apply.
  - Zigurd 14y ago
    Maybe the problem is that, for many kinds of education that are useful and/or beneficial to society, money is a poor measuring stick and market forces are not a desirable influence. The effect on GPs you describe is already driving a health care crisis in the US. We may be left with an overhang of specialists who will surely argue their education should not become a "stranded asset."
the_watcher 14y ago
When you measure by these metrics, you end up getting the law school scam, where schools employ unemployed graduates for juuust long enough to count them as long term employed, and only make an effort to collect the salary of highly paid graduates (and use "reported salaries" as their denominator, not total grads)
- sageikosa 14y ago
  OK, I'm not advocating that those metrics must be used, and must be collected in a certain way. What I am doing is being critical of rankings that aren't at least related in some way to the reasons most people seek higher education. If anything, I am most critical of a single ranking that is supposed to tell me how good something is crafted from within the community that is being ranked.
- bvcqw 14y ago
  Nothing wrong with employment.

davidroberts 14y ago

"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist." Good thing this writer is unbiased.

jiggy2011 14y ago
This is probably objectively true.
- elliptic 14y ago
  Probably not for useful definitions of "generous," which should take into account the actual utility (in money or time), given away. Someone who donates half of their life savings of 50k is (I would say, at least) more generous than someone who donates 90% of 1 billion.
  - ryguytilidie 14y ago
    I would not define someone who gave 25k as more generous than someone who gave 900million, no.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Would you define someone who gave away until they only had 100million remaining as more or less generous than someone who gave away until they only had 25k remaining? How about if the person with 50k gave away 25k, but the billionaire gave away double that? Who is more generousness in that case? It seems fairly plain to me that utility of what was given away is by far the most important factor in determining generosity.
      - ryguytilidie 14y ago
        I see your point, but I simply disagree. The utility to the person is much different, but after that, money is money and 900m provides much more utility to starving kids, etc than 25k does, no matter how you slice it.

stfu 14y ago

Couldn't this be just a side effect of what he advocated a few days ago in his WSJ commentary? [1] By putting a lot of pressure on measuring things, people use the data that is easy accessible/comparable. Consequently they put a lot of effort into constructing the argument why these factors are the most important ones. Getting unskewed data is incredibly hard, especially when there is so much to gain from subtly manipulating the data. [1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732353980457826...

Cookingboy 14y ago

The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country. That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.

armored_mammal 14y ago
Come on... it IS an east coast old money circle-jerk. And everyone knows it.
- mattgreenrocks 14y ago
  Why does the stench of power always smell the same? It's all so predictable.
  - sp332 14y ago
    We all want to succeed. We all also want our friends and business partners to succeed. It's just that people who have lots of money and power are better at accomplishing that than the rest of us. We all help our friends out; only the scale is different.
    - christofd 14y ago
      That explains a lot actually. Powerful and simple explanation for the world we live in. However, pretty much the opposite of the so-called "trickle-down" mechanism... more like "trickle-up".

armored_mammal 14y ago

One of those ideas that's blatantly obvious, but which most will refuse to consider until someone 'big' mainstreams it. I have a hard time reconciling the various useful things the Gates foundation seems to do with the tendency towards obnoxiousness that defines Microsoft.

Isamu 14y ago
Making your fortune through ruthlessness and crushing the opposition, followed by generous philanthropy, is time-honored tradition. One prototype is Andrew Carnegie.
- lordofmoria 14y ago
  LOL. This comment is awesome.
dmhdlr 14y ago
Obnoxiousness isn't the right word.

ojbyrne 14y ago

One of the absurdities of the various college ranking systems is that reputation is a large component of the ranking. So if you have a good ranking, you get a good ranking.

natural219 14y ago

When I graduated high school, all I wanted was a list of the top Computer Science schools in the world. I can't recall exactly what happened during that period, but somehow, I ended up at the University of Nebraska. Something is broken.

Irregardless 14y ago

> “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused" – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work. Students are notoriusly bad at rating their professors. This was proved with almost ideal control groups at the Air Force Academy [1] and again with groups of trained professionals/graduate students who learned first hand about the 'Dr. Fox Effect' [2]. Even teachers don't seem to like the teacher evaluations done by students [3]. Anecdotally, I can say that most students in my college classes either didn't show up on the survey days, or they walked out the door as soon as the surveys were being handed out. There's also no incentive to provide useful feedback from the student's perspective. If you're taking a survey about the class, it means the class is over and you'll probably never see that professor again, so why bother? I made an effort only because I felt an obligation to help future students, but I'm not sure there are many kids in college who share that feeling. > Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll. So you can have cheap and unreliable measurements, or you can have accurate but costly ones. Who's going to pay for the latter? The rating agencies? The schools? The students? Imagine the costs to enact such a program across all colleges in the U.S. alone -- some of the larger state schools easily have > 1,000 teaching faculty across a myriad of disciplines, and they're teaching increasingly diverse student bodies. The thought of trying to implement a thorough, standardized program of that scale is mind boggling. And that's probably why we've been facing this dilemma of measuring teacher effectiveness since the day the first schools opened. Bill Gates is right that we have a serious problem, but it doesn't sound like he's any closer to a solution. [1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_high-rated_professors_ar.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_h... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_course_evaluations_as_measures_of_teaching_effectiveness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_...

bluebearx 14y ago

not that interesting article..

guelo 14y ago

It seems like the graduate school entrance exams (GRE, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT) would be a good indicator of undergrad performance (though not so much for engineering and non-medical science). Are those scores available on a per undergrad-school basis?

colincsl 14y ago
I'm not sure about the MCAT/GMAT/LSAT but the GRE is a pretty bad indicator. For example, everyone who goes to grad school for computer science or engineering gets minimum a 750 on the quantitative section. The math only tests high school level ability. While I don't have any links, I think that there are many studies showing that SAT/GRE type scores don't mean very much.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I remember taking the GRE, I got 99 percentiles on quantitative and logical reasoning...and like 69 percentile on verbal. The verbal part was basically a vocabulary test.

SparrowOS 14y ago

It's weird -- I used to feel I had complete mastery of writing. I had no problem getting A's on papers. I have forgotten things, but I sometimes find myself bewildered while writing, doing a construct I have no clue proper punctuation or grammar for. The easy answer is just to rewrite and go with what I know. If I have to, I can do that. stay with one tense -- past don't use "I" don't use dangling prepositions. ---- What's awful is that I obsess on grammar while listening to radio interviews. It's a huge distraction. My favorite distraction is "me" or "I". Linking verbs use nomnative, but I think they almost never come-up. caring about grammar just distracts me. I'm an ass. God says... C:\Text\WORD2.TXT een the Seven Whistlers, &c." Both these superstitions are prevalent in the midland Counties of England: that of "Gabriel's Hounds" appears to be very general over Europe; being the same as the one upon which the German Poet, Burger, has founded his Ballad of the Wild Huntsman. NOTE V. PAGE 128 (302).--_Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle_. Henry Lord Clifford, &c. &c., who is the subject of this Poem, was the son of John, Lord Clifford, who was slain at Towton Field, which John, Lord Clif ---- God did some time travel -- Gabriel Giffords. I'm Terry A. Davis, 1440 SAT, but don't give a fuck about grammar, anymore. I feel stupid writing full sentences. Bullet points, mon!! You guys know that I pick from a fixed set of about 12 books? ---- I wonder if this is true: "A liar won't believe anyone." It seems probably true. I guess we could talk about Bible passages and passages that have become quotes from God. I don't know. I'm not in crisis. You'll have to work things out for yourselves. God says... C:\Text\HUCKFINN.TXT 's WELL for you to set there and blubber like a baby--it's fitten for you, after the way you've acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything --and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for 'em. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to BELIEVE that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make

nollidge 14y ago

Off-topic, but in Chrome I got the bar at the top saying "This page is in French. Translate?" This mis-identification of language in Chrome happens to me probably once a day, though usually when looking at code.

pokerfacer 14y ago

US News's rankings are based upon metrics like acceptance rate, retention rate, yield rate, charitable donations, faculty-student ratio, endowment, etc. These rankings don't predict the "best" colleges, but rather the most prestigious.

lordofmoria 14y ago
curious, how does faculty-student ratio relate to prestige?
- pokerfacer 14y ago
  It's not a perfect proxy for prestige, but cash-rich universities with large endowments have more professor positions than less well-off colleges.

carbocation 14y ago

I don't mean to be incredibly dense, but I'll risk looking that way here. When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge. Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumably improved? Creativity? Problem solving? Social adroitness? Rote knowledge? Do I dare say that it may be different for different people? The notion that colleges could be measured along just a few axes correlating with a few particular purposes confuses me in a way that the elementary school debate does not. What am I missing?

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
The only thing you're really missing is capitalism itself, which demands that everything be put on a quantifiable measure in order to justify its existence to the ultimate quantifiable measure, money.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? Good question. The lack of a good answer certainly undermines the justification for colleges continued existence and pervasiveness. Tangentially, I'd argue that any institution which can't even define it's goals should not receive any taxpayer dollars.

ivan_ah 14y ago

I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}. Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher because some data fit decided that you are a bad teacher? No way! Anyone who is willing to put in the energy and spend time with kids teaching them stuff should continue to do it. Metrics for self assessment YES, but metrics for firing teachers NO. Also, the whole idea of "Value added" score has been called bullshit upon here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 --> http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-million-dollar-lie/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... . [ quote: ... the correlation is so low that I, and many others who have created similar graphs, concluded that this kind of measurement is far from ready to be used for high-stakes purposes like determining salaries and for laying off senior teachers who are below average on this metric. ] The author basically says that there is no correlation of the "value added" metric that a teacher brings from year to year. This lack of correlation is masked in the report "Measures of Effective Teaching" because "they averaged the predicted and actual scores in five percentile groups. In doing this, they mask a lot of the variability that happens" to make it look as if "value added" is a good stable metric.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
The author uses a bad graph to convince the reader that there is no correlation, even when (by his own admission, see the comments) one is present. The year to year correlation is 0.3. The correlation across percentile groups is much higher because that increases the sample size and thereby reduces statistical noise. The conclusion we can draw here is that measuring the performance of a single teacher based on a single class will yield a very large confidence interval. That's not the same as "bullshit".
stch2 14y ago
The author explicitly states there is a 24% correlation, and then says there is no correlation. Can he or she not make up their mind?

jmharvey 14y ago

If the primary benefit of attending a good college is education from professors, then yes, there is something perverse in the rankings. But I'm not sure that's how college actually works. At the undergrad level, a particular class at one college is likely pretty similar to a class at another college. And aside from a few exceptional students, you're likely to be able to find whatever classes you're looking for at any college you care to attend. There are more competent people who can teach, and want to teach, intro to Shakespeare, or second-semester thermodynamics, or whatever, than there are teaching positions available. Most of the benefit you get from choosing college A over college B comes from your interactions with your peers. Some of this is just people working together on class projects, but a lot of it is the pervasive culture of a place. At some schools, people will hang out and talk about political theory. At others, there's a culture of making art. Some places care more about sports. And at some schools there's a culture of building things. Actually, at most schools, all of these things happen to some extent, but you're more likely to encounter them at some places than at others. And if that's the benefit of college, then it absolutely makes sense to say that the best colleges are the ones with the best students.

LarrySDonald 14y ago
That's true, but also the problem. Which university should, then, these best students hang out at? I think we all agree they should be at the one that is the best at teaching them, or which has a style of teaching that works well for them. But we wouldn't know that because most of the ratings can't (or rather won't) discern this. Why is school A the best? It has the best students. Why do they have the best students? Because school A is the best school. So it's not bad for figuring out where the school you belong at is, but a complete non-metric for the school itself - they can't tell how they rate at actual education or if they're a good choice teaching wise (or if all the students would be better off congregating elsewhere - they'd still have each other as well as potentially better teachers).

ececconi 14y ago

Says the guy who went to Harvard

slurry 14y ago
And dropped out.

lordofmoria 14y ago

To avoid the needlessly vague allusions to schools going on in this thread: I went to Princeton University for undergrad. I'm sure Bill Gates has a more nuanced view on college ratings than this article suggests. Welcome to media. We all know why the college rankings are the way they are. Frankly, no one cares who the "most improved" olympic athlete was in London. People generally want the unambiguity of an outright set of winners. Unambiguous winners may be ok in sports, but not in colleges, where the rankings have a big impact on education here in the US. Gates points out this flaw and argues instead for a "most improved student" metric. Unfortunately, Gates' "solution" wouldn't really solve the problem either. What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates.

bcoates 14y ago
> What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates. If nothing else, colleges that are publicly known for effectiveness will have an easier time recruiting and retaining talented employees. They would presumably also be a magnet for results-driven philanthropists, either through direct donations or being somehow accredited for scholarships.
foobarian 14y ago
Wonder if that metric would cause colleges to recruit the worst possible students in order to maximize the amount of improvement.
spikels 14y ago
What? "Improving", that is educating, students is the primary purpose of colleges. Seems perfectly reasonable to want to measure how effectivly they do their job. The quality of the graduates of a college depend on a number of factors but probably the two most important are the quality incoming students and the college's ability to improve their quality. In effect colleges perform two functions: sorting and educating. Sorting people based on standardized testing, high school grades, essays, recommendations, interviews and application details is a useful service in itself. However most of the value and almost all of the cost of colleges comes from educating not sorting. The current college rating "system" can't possibly separate these two sources of quality. Clearly it would be something useful to know as within any group of similarly ranked colleges there will be differences in the quality of the education component. All else being equal prospective students would choose the school that offered a best education. More applicants would to schools that were better at their primary mission, educating their students. In turn these schools could be more selective. Building such a system will not be easy but should be very valuable. Please continue working on this Mr Gates.

CleanedStar 14y ago

Implicitly stated in this is the idea that all sectors of society want, and feel they would benefit, from this better education of everyone. We could posit a counter-point to that assumption. The counter-point being the posited, hypothetical idea that not all sectors of society think that "a rising tide lifts all boats". We could hypothesize that there are sectors of society who would be opposed to the working poor getting good educations. But with such a non-mainstream contrarian hypothesis being posited, we'd have to think of a reason for this. Why would some sectors of society be opposed to this? Well, perhaps they would have a desire for a "reserve army of labor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). Perhaps if they had a company, like say Microsoft, their company would pay dividends. Part of the money the company doesn't reinvest in continuing costs or re-investment, would not go to wages, but stock holders. Of course, with the small amount of stock options most Microsoft employees have relative to their wages (not to mention permatemping), in game theory it would be better for these workers, if money was to go to their wage or the dividend, for the money to go the worker. Perhaps for large MSFT shareholders like Gates, it would be better for the money to go to the dividends, and not to wages. How can you stop the workers from demanding higher wages? Perhaps having a reserve army of labor, an inflated unemployment rate etc. would help. Perhaps a worker knowing other people as skilled or almost as skilled as him are lining up to try to get work at MSFT to get the wages he is getting, and are being rejected in interviews, keeps him being happy with his wage. Of course this is all just wild, non-mainstream, out there conjecture. Obviously the world's richest billionaires like Bill Gates only have feelings of benevolence, and aligned interests with the rest of us. You can see how lauded he is for his charity and such in the press.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Well everyone knew that. It's just that nobody really has the singular clout to change the college ranking system.