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This is interesting. What I like about it is that it tries to remove any criteria unrelated to a student's outcomes. Too often we see esoteric ranking methodolo

This is interesting. What I like about it is that it tries to remove any criteria unrelated to a student's outcomes. Too often we see esoteric ranking methodologies that, unfortunately, not many people bother to look at very closely. I'm the founder of PolarisList (https://www.polarislist.com https://www.polarislist.com), a high school ranking based on the number of students sent to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. This prompted us to take a stab at generating state rankings based on our own dataset, and came up with the following list. We calculated this by looking at the number of students in a state who matriculated to the aforementioned colleges from public high schools divided by the estimated 2017 population: 1 Massachusetts 2 New Jersey 3 Connecticut 4 New York 5 Vermont 6 Maryland 7 Maine 8 New Hampshire 9 California 10 Virginia 11 Alaska 12 Rhode Island 13 Illinois 14 Delaware 15 Pennsylvania 16 Colorado 17 Minnesota 18 Washington 19 Michigan 20 Oregon 21 Florida 22 Georgia 23 Nebraska 24 North Dakota 25 South Dakota 26 Texas 27 Montana 28 Arizona 29 Wisconsin 30 Missouri 31 Idaho 32 West Virginia 33 Indiana 34 North Carolina 35 New Mexico 36 Ohio 37 Kansas 38 Iowa 39 Hawaii 40 Nevada 41 Kentucky 42 Wyoming 43 Oklahoma 44 Utah 45 Tennessee 46 Arkansas 47 South Carolina 48 Washington DC 49 Louisiana 50 Mississippi 51 Alabama A couple thing stand out to me: - All 3 rankings have Massachusetts and New Jersey within the top 10 - All 3 rankings have Oklahoma and Louisiana in the bottom 10 - Our numbers differ from the other datasets the most on: - New York (#4 on our ranking, #30 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #31 on US News) - California (#9 on our ranking, #34 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #44 on US News) - Alaska (#11 on our ranking, #42 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #46 on US News)

masonic 8y ago
A metric showing that students going to northeastern universities mostly come from northeastern states isn't very meaningful. Given that it counts only students attending those schools and not all of those accepted by those schools (e.g. the full population of those meeting the actual qualification standard) and doesn't account for ability to pay renders it even less meaningful.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  It's really a horrible flawed metric. It doesn't mention background of students, nor the connections they might have made in school/life that help them get to those places. It also doesn't take into account students who don't want to necessarily go there (I was valedictorian and had a 4.0, 36 on ACT...I didn't apply Ivy because I didn't want to go there), etc. It's really just a "Hey, these schools have more kids here" ranking, saying nothing about quality of the schools themselves.

masonic 8y ago

A metric showing that students going to northeastern universities mostly come from northeastern states isn't very meaningful. Given that it counts only students attending those schools and not all of those accepted by those schools (e.g. the full population of those meeting the actual qualification standard) and doesn't account for ability to pay renders it even less meaningful.

dorchadas 8y ago
It's really a horrible flawed metric. It doesn't mention background of students, nor the connections they might have made in school/life that help them get to those places. It also doesn't take into account students who don't want to necessarily go there (I was valedictorian and had a 4.0, 36 on ACT...I didn't apply Ivy because I didn't want to go there), etc. It's really just a "Hey, these schools have more kids here" ranking, saying nothing about quality of the schools themselves.