Head-to-Head College Rankings: Harvard #1, Caltech #2, Yale #3

Christopher N. Avery (Harvard University, Kennedy School), Mark E. Glickman (Boston University, School of Public Health), Caroline M. Hoxby (Stanford University, Department of Economics) & Andrew Metrick (Yale University, School of Management), A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities:

We present a method of ranking U.S. undergraduate programs based on students’ revealed preferences. When a student chooses a college among those that have admitted him, that college “wins” his “tournament.” Our method efficiently integrates the information from thousands of such tournaments. We implement the method using data from a national sample of high-achieving students. We demonstrate that this ranking method has strong theoretical properties, eliminating incentives for colleges to adopt strategic, inefficient admissions policies to improve their rankings. We also show empirically that our ranking is (1) not vulnerable to strategic manipulation; (2) similar regardless of whether we control for variables, such as net cost, that vary among a college’s admits; (3) similar regardless of whether we account for students selecting where to apply, including Early Decision. We exemplify multiple rankings for different types of students who have preferences that vary systematically.

	Revealed Preference Rank
Harvard	1
Caltech	2
Yale	3
MIT	4
Stanford	5
Princeton	6
Brown	7
Columbia	8
Amherst	9
Dartmouth	10
Wellesley	11
Penn	12
Notre Dame	13
Swarthmore	14
Cornell	15
Georgetown	16
Rice	17
Williams	18
Duke	19
Virginia	20

(Hat Tip: Freakonomics.)