According to the NBER report, NBER arrived at the rankings by considering each of 3,240 high-achieving high school students' matriculation options. "Our method is based on 'wins' and 'losses' in thousands of 'tournaments' in which students are choosing the college at which to matriculate," NBER researchers wrote. "When a student makes his matriculation decision among colleges that have admitted him, he chooses which college 'wins' in head-to-head competition. The model exploits the information contained in thousands of these wins and losses."
The NBER report notes that many competitive colleges try to manipulate their rank in reports like the U.S. News one. They do this by encouraging students who are unlikely to be admitted to apply. They also sometimes reject highly-qualified applicants they feel will choose another school in order to boost their yield rate, the rate at which all students matriculate.
However, according to an Associated Press article, the ranking system proposed by NBER is not impacted at all by the colleges' or universities' attempts to decrease their acceptance rates. In the NBER system, the only way for a college to improve its position is to get more high-achieving high school students to apply and to convince them to matriculate.
President Anthony Marx believes that the NBER method of rankings have advantages to the U.S. News method. "The advantage of this form of ranking is that it doesn't have some of those ill-conceived signals or incentives built into it," he said. However, Marx also noted that even this ranking system does not perfectly reflect school quality. Students' choices can be impacted by factors that may not reflect the quality of the education at any given institution.
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Tom Parker is not sure whether the NBER report will impact any high school students' decisions to apply to or matriculate at the College, but like Marx, Parker noted the value of the report. "The methodology is completely different [from U.S. News]," he said. "It's more meaningful because it is about actual people making choices instead of colleges manipulating yields."
For Marx, the NBER study is particularly valuable because it places the College on the same level with all other institutions, rather than simply comparing it to other liberal arts schools. "[I]t is validating to know that when students makes choices between colleges, Amherst College is able to compete with the very top research universities in the country and that students recognize that we are in that league," he said.
"In the real world, students do make choices between Amherst and the major research universities," Marx added. "We need to think of ourselves in that context, not that we are a major research university, but we need to be clear about why we think this is a better quality of education and that we can and must compete."
According to the NBER report, Harvard, Yale University, Stanford and California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology fill the top five spots. The report ranks Wellesley College at 11, Swarthmore College at 14 and Williams College at 18.