An anonymous reader writes “US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all prone to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to calculate the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News’s data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn Say, which is #48 using US News’s methodology, could be the ideal university in the country, by other standards.”
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