First of all, I respect those who were engaged on building those rankings because I am assuming
that those were only with good intentions in their hearts.
But in my point of view these rankings are somewhat nonsense.
Rankings are objective, for example, in sports. You won the game you get 2 points. Draw 1. Loss 0. It is
a nice indicator of how each team is performing and everyone accepts the fact that the champion should
be the team that end up finishing in the first place on the ranking. There is no subjectivity involved.
I understand that is natural to extend the notion of a ranking to other things than sports, and in some cases
it might work as well. But ranking MFE programs? For me it makes more sense, for example, to divide into 3 (or 2? or 4? or k?
how to select k?) groups 'top programs', 'ok programs' and 'we just want your money programs' for example. I mean,
choosing the best program is a highly personal thing. Of course it you should consider other´s opinion, but
the ranking is just the best quantitative estimator of one person - namely, the creator of that specific ranking criteria. This is
kind of artificial because I am sure that even the creator of the ranking cannot tell which that one program is better than the other
for everyone else, since there are subjective factors which are impossible to translate into algorithms.
I mean, who can assure that NYU´s program is better than Columbia´s or CMU´s? This question is even not well defined at all
and thus it is impossible to be answered, and thus it doesnt make sense to assign numbers #1, #2 and #3 to them. No one with brains will make his decision based on
the ranking position. I think that it is more fair and respectful to the universities and more useful to the intelligent future student
to instead of showing a cold ranking, present the data used to build the ranking and let each one use this data the way he wants.
just my .02$
You are entitled to your opinion. I am trying to make this study into less of an opinion ranking and more of a statistical ranking. If it was an opinionated ranking I would not ask anyone for inputs.
This is a research project. It will include a full fledged paper that will go up as a working paper.
I do not want to categorize programs as any you suggested. That is VERY subjective and I wan't to keep this ranking as possibly non-subjective as possible. People think many programs are just money-making programs, we will know soon enough of how much of that is true.
Presenting all the data and letting people do the job?
This is already done. It is called the internet, but you still see hundreds of threads being made asking people to compare. Maybe this ranking system will help them make the decision.
It is good, that you know where you stand with your decisions, but unfortunately a good % of the population don't and this study is to possibly aid in their decision as the study will aim to include as many important factors.
This ranking is to help students .... not to promote a university or downgrade a university. It will merely show how the universities compare against each other when some of the key factors are included. The paper will also include rankings for each and every variable and then a combined ranking.
There will be external factors checks , robustness check , dummy variables, etc. We will try to make the model as accurate as possible at predicting the rankings.
I now have a total of 5 volunteer including myself who have agreed to help, so it might end up being a solid ranking with a larger number of universities.
I will put up more details as the days go. It will be a while, maybe a month or so, before we have any results.
My aim is to help the general population... not 1 or 2 people. People who are "brainy" enough to get into schools like NYU, Berkeley, and Princeton also ask for comparisons.