Oh no you didnt. You didnt just say I have no education is statistics and math. I'm probably one of the few people on this board who has a job in math and algorithms. Uh, I did. I showed how the Expected Earnings of Rice is right there with all the top schools, yet if you adjust for cost of living in Houston vs SF, Boston and NYC, that would make Rice like 20-30% higher than any other school in the US, if not the world. Which implies the Economist did not factor in City to Realized Earnings, either. I guess you didn't read that post. Many statisticians have already done this. And I've studied it for the sheer purpose of having good data when I negotiate my salaries for moving cities, and now it's part of my job wrt hiring high-quality software developers. Have you ever interviewed engineers from UT, Rice, Carnegie Melon and MIT, and put them through a technical interview on a whiteboard. I have. Further, have you looked at UT's freshman class books and course curriculum in Computer Science to see what they are learning versus Rice. I have. It's part of my job to know. Salary data is very basic, and very available on the Internet. You've never heard of normalized salaries across cities, by job function? I'm supposed to provide references; otherwise, my words are just mine, alone. Really? On such a known stat. There are also many available database for normalized and mean cost of living across all cities. C'mon. I don't have to prove stats. They are out there. Everyone knows it. I'm cutting down this ranking because apparently the Economist writers did not tap into that. You make it sound like their business analysts/statisticians contribute to this academic study, when their job is to study the corporate market. Like any litmus test of a hypothesis, if you data produces bad results, you should go back to the lab. Data that puts Yale and Rice in the bottom 10 of 1200 schools is bad results, no matter how you slice it. It puts every school in the ranking in question. very simple bottomline: Just for fun,,,,here is what my best friend from Rice said about this article. He is a banker, yet liberal, and used to read the Economist religious. It was a great publication.
