Word: surveys
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TIME: For readers who might not be familiar with it, what's the methodology behind the rankings? Morse: [They're] based on 15 indicators, [including] a reputation survey, admissions data, faculty data, financial-resources data, alumni giving and graduation and retention rates. We're not comparing all 1,400 schools. We're dividing them up into 10 categories, like national universities and liberal arts. We assign a weight to each of the variables. The peer survey, or the academic reputation, is the highest-weighted variable - it's 25%. (Read about a new college-rankings system...
...mentioned the reputation survey. How do you respond to the criticism that some people charged with filling it out may not have direct experience with the schools they're rating, so they may just be going on rumors? I think there is a small group of schools, mainly in the liberal-arts category, that have strong feelings about the reputation survey. Generally speaking, our response rate did tick up a little bit this year - it went to 48% from 46% - so there's some indication that this boycott [among schools that are refusing to fill out the reputation survey...
...college rankings floating around, there's still one area students and parents can't find much concrete info about: how much an undergraduate degree will pay off. Enter PayScale.com, which claims to be the world's largest salary survey. Its 2009 College Salary Report uses data supplied by 1.2 million visitors who went to the site and plugged in all sorts of info to find out whether their salary was in line with those of people doing the same kind of work in their geographic area...
...based on as few as 100 people. And the salaries are not adjusted for factors like cost of living. Another problem with the ranking is that it excludes anyone with a graduate degree. As a result, a huge portion of alumni can be left out; a recent Dartmouth survey of its 2008 grads found that 80% of them were either attending graduate school or planning to apply in the next five years. (Read "An Antidote to College Rankings...
...with a lot of people leaving positive comments - proof that her racy posters meet the approval of many Berlin voters. And that only adds to the CDU's good news. Even before the posters were put up, Merkel's party was storming ahead in national opinion polls. One recent survey by the Forsa Institute showed the conservative CDU/CSU bloc with 38% of the vote, while the Social Democrats, Merkel's partners in the current grand-coalition government, are trailing with 21%. The conservatives' campaign also got a huge boost on Aug. 13, when new figures were published showing that after...