MyChances.net

2006 NYT College Preference Matchups

In 2006, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt wrote an article that was ostensibly about Harvard ending its early admissions program. The meat of the article, though, was far more interesting, filled with a discussion of college rankings*. A survey of 3,200 high school seniors from 500 high schools was performed in 1999. The students were asked about which schools admitted them, and which college they ended up attending. From this information, a model was created and used to calculate how often students would choose one college over another. See the NYT Chart for the results.

That data is now 10 years old, so over the past several months, MyChances developed tools to perform a similar analysis. For 2009, we surveyed 1,200 students at 950 high schools. How do our results stack up?

2009 MyChances College Preference Matchups

Let’s look at the same colleges as in the Leonhardt article, focusing on three examples: Harvard vs Stanford, Georgetown vs Brown,  and Duke vs Princeton.

73% of students would have chosen Harvard over Stanford in 1999. This is completely unchanged in 2009.

Among students admitted to Georgetown and Brown, only 22% were estimated to go to Georgetown in 1999. Now, our evidence suggests that Georgetown has pulled even with Brown, winning 53% of the matchups.

Finally, 91% of students admitted to Princeton and Duke previously chose Princeton. Now, we estimate that 35% would choose Duke – a far more narrow advantage for Princeton than before.

Though it is interesting to make some of the same comparisons as were made in the 2006 New York Times article, you’re not limited to those schools using our tools. We had enough data to rank over 200 colleges in 2009; hopefully we’ll be able to expand to 300 in 2010, ultimately providing estimates for all 1,700 colleges in our database in the near future.

* = Paper is “A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities” by Avery, Glickman, Hoxby, and Metrick

(Note: College Rankings #3, an exposition of our methods, has not yet been published.)