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.)
California Mom on 
James on 
Thomas Asaro on 
jdberg on 
Scatterplots: Now showing predictions, acceptance status | MyChances.net on
Harvard’s Steven Pinker Off-key on Oath of Office
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Essays should have consistent theses with relevant anecdotes, right?
Steven Pinker wrote an article in the New York Times yesterday about Chief Justice Roberts’s flub of Obama’s Oath of Office. Essentially, Chief Justice Roberts misspoke, saying “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully” instead of “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” as specified in the Constitution.
Pinker, a noted Harvard professor and the chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel, used this to lead into a discussion of split infinitives. His points are generally correct (or, rather, I agree with him). Distilled, his argument is that splitting infinitives has never been a grammatical problem in English, despite what some law journals may claim. While infinitives cannot be split in Latin (literally, you cannot split them, since they consist not of two words but of one), splitting them in English is easy, and allowed.
Both of these topics are interesting. However, what is odd is that he connects the two based on Roberts’s transposition of faithfully; Pinker infers that this was because Roberts wanted to move the “adverb ‘faithfully’ away from the verb.” That’s all well and good, but the Constitution’s version doesn’t split any infinitives! The adverb ‘faithfully’ in the predicate “… will faithfully execute” does not split an infinitive, but instead separates the auxiliary verb ‘will’ from the main verb ‘execute’. So he wanted to avoid a split auxiliary verb? OK, but if the split auxiliary verb is contentious, why not discuss that, instead of the much better-known disagreements over split infinitives?
In other words, Pinker wrote an interesting review of split infinitives that was incompletely relevant to the prompt at hand: the issue of a split auxiliary verb, which was hardly contentious.
Tags: grammar, harvard, obama, pinker, roberts
Posted in Commentary | 4 Comments »