WEEKLY WHINE

Who made us number one?!

Here at Caltech, we take pride in being better than other places. We complain about not being noticed by the general population, but in some cases, that's a benefit. We don't want to be one of those places like Harvard or something that has to "protect its image". We have an image that includes not having to protect it.

But in any case, we like being really good. That's why we were pleased to find that in this week's edition of the magazine US News and World Report, its annual college rankings found Caltech at the top of the list amongst national universities. Of course, we knew we were the best anyway.

But given that this is a research institution, we know how insignificant these rankings are. After all, Caltech had never been above third place previously. This is a clear sign of meaningless. [joke] But seriously folks, the fact that these rankings fluctuate arbitrarily reduces their value by a large amount, unless it's because these schools change so much year to year.

But that isn't the case. The magazine cites a few factors that put Caltech atop the list: the student:faculty ratio is 3:1, far in front of anyone else. The only close competitor in the top fifty was the University of Chicago, at 4:1. It also mentioned the small undergrad population, about 900, and the proportion of students who were in the top ten percent of their respective high schools - 100%.

These statistics have been essentially unchanged over the past decade, though. We have reason to believe that the other schools in the rankings also have not undergone radical reformations either. So there's only one thing that could have changed drastically, the ranking system.

One of the things that the magazine did differently this year was eliminating the use of ranks for statistical categories. For instance, in the Dark Ages, it would rank the schools in various statistical categories - spending per student, student:faculty, class sizes, and so on. Then it would give points based upon their ranks.

Caltech, for instance, spends US $192,000 per undergrad. The magazine says that this is more than twice that of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, the schools that tied for first last year. This earned Caltech more points in the rankings.

Some factors Caltech trails. Its "reputation score" is equal to that of The Johns Hopkins University and behind Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. 8% of froshes flame out, highest amongst the top twenty except Vanderbilt University's 9%. Although 97% were expected to graduate last year, only 85% did so. The "graduation performance" index, -12% for Caltech, was also an important statistical factor. Indeed, Caltech was the worst of all top 50 schools in this category.

Generally, the new rankings gave advantages to research and scientific institutions, where spending per student is high and the faculty consists largely of acclaimed researchers and theoreticians who really want to help out those poor little undergrads on the verge of flaming so that they'll have someone to help with their research.

So the benefit of being number one is that perhaps more people who would make good Techers will consider us. Of course, the downside is that more people who would make bad Techers will consider us. But our admissions office should be able to filter such people out.