{"id":475,"date":"2011-10-21T15:29:54","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T15:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/?p=475"},"modified":"2023-09-13T15:41:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T15:41:15","slug":"rank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/?p=475","title":{"rendered":"Rank"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pond<\/a>
Pond Scum photo by Max F. Williams<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Happiest Freshmen<\/a>?!”\u00a0 OK, time to get in on the action – lets start a new ranking!\u00a0\u00a0 First, we’ll need some data.\u00a0 That’s an easy one – most institutions post their “Common Data Set<\/a>” on line, and that’s a really great source.\u00a0\u00a0 It has data on admissions, retention, enrollments, degrees, race, gender, you name it.\u00a0 This is what institutions send to publishers of other admissions guidebooks and rankings – why don’t we get in on the free data?\u00a0 The top three places to find them on an institution’s website are probably the Undergraduate Admissions<\/em>, Institutional Research<\/em>, or About<\/em> areas.<\/p>\n

Or we can go to publicly available sources, such as the U.S. government’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES<\/a>), the National Science Foundation’s “WebCASPAR<\/a>,” and others.\u00a0\u00a0 The advantage of that is that we can download data by institution en masse.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, no one can claim that the data misrepresents them – hey, they provided it to the agency, right?\u00a0 So what if the data are a little outdated.\u00a0 We’re not building a rocket, just a racket.<\/p>\n

Or we could send each institution a questionnaire.\u00a0 Not exactly sure what to ask for or how?\u00a0 Don’t worry, those folks are experts, we’ll just send a general question and they’ll call other folks on their campus, hold meetings, and jump through all kinds of hoops to be helpful, and eventually send us something that we can then decide if we want to use.\u00a0 The kids at Yale have been doing this for years with their “Insider’s Guide.”\u00a0 Well, off and on for years (when they think of it).<\/p>\n

Maybe we could start a web site, and ask people to come enter data about the institutions they attend, or attended in the past, and then use that information for each institution.\u00a0 That’s what RateMyProfessor.com did, and they got covered by CBSMoneyWatch<\/a>,\u00a0 and others!\u00a0\u00a0 True, I spotted at least three Swarthmore instructors who have not been with us for some time among those ranked, and a few others I never heard of (with 175 regular faculty members, how could I possibly have heard of everyone) but that’s the beauty of it, right?\u00a0 Low maintenance!\u00a0 And PayScale.com has become a force to be reckoned with.\u00a0 Sure, their “average income” data for Swarthmore only represents about 2% of the alumni (estimating generously), but nobody bothers to dig that deep.\u00a0 It doesn’t stop well-known publications like Forbes<\/a> from using it.<\/p>\n

OK, so that’s where we can get data for our ranking, now what data should we use, and what shall we call it?\u00a0\u00a0 We can take a lesson from the Huffington Post story about the “Happiest Freshmen<\/a>.”\u00a0\u00a0 Now that’s clever!\u00a0 And I’ll bet it generated a ton of visits, because it sure got attention from a lot of people.\u00a0 The only data used in that ranking was retention rates – brilliant!\u00a0 One number, available anywhere, call it something catchy (or better yet, controversial) and let ‘er rip!\u00a0 (Shhh..\u00a0 as far as I can tell, it was the press that provided the label – the folks crunching the data didn’t even have to think of it!)<\/p>\n

I propose that we pull zip codes from NCES, sort in descending order, and do a press release about the “Zippiest institutions ever!”\u00a0 No that’s no good – if it’s not something that changes every year, how will we make money from new rankings?!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Happiest Freshmen?!”\u00a0 OK, time to get in on the action – lets start a new ranking!\u00a0\u00a0 First, we’ll need some data.\u00a0 That’s an easy one – most institutions post their “Common Data Set” on line, and that’s a really great source.\u00a0\u00a0 It has data on admissions, retention, enrollments, degrees, race, gender, you name it.\u00a0 This … Continue reading Rank<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1574,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions\/1574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}