9/13/2011: I’m no economist, but I hear one of them got a Nobel for proving that a perfect ranking system is impossible. US News must be familiar with Dr. Arrow’s work, because they don’t even bother to try and do it well. Still, I think this is a large improvement (#115 for 2009, #111 last year) and that’s more informative than the level.
On a related note a reader sent me to “The 10 second cynic” a blog run by an AVP of admissions. Great title, but don’t believe it – I spent 5 minutes at his site. Nice interactive visualizations of IPEDS data.
In an also related note the Center for Equal Opportunity released a study on admissions at UW-Madison by race, after a 10 year long public records fight for the data:
The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.
As President Barack Obama has argued, it is time to move away from race towards a broader definition of SES with more focus on class and income.
Does anyone know, why did UO rise so much this year?
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
I think saying that Obama thinks it’s time to “move away from race” simplifies things a little bit, no.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/03/18/text-of-obamas-speech-a-more-perfect-union/
It reallys says something that the disparities in standards based on race are so large, and that it’s so hard to uncork the information — 10 years in Wisconsin!
I wonder what the data for UO look like. Maybe they’ll release the data to UO Matters. Not holding my breath on that!