Six months after the results first appeared, I was recently alerted to an intriguing ranking that purported to list America’s “Smartest Colleges.” This is not your standard college ranking. Rather, Dr. Daniel A. Sternberg, Ph.D. and his fellow “data scientists” at brain training company Lumosity (you’ve probably seen their ads), felt that traditional college ranking methodologies relied too much on standardized test scores and non-cognitive metrics such as student-faculty ratios and capital endowment rates. By contrast, the youthful Sternberg and his Lumos Labs compadres — using “self-reported email addresses and/or the web domain associated with” a student’s “IP address” — selected out the scores of 60,000 students at 411 colleges and universities on a series of Lumosity “cognitive training games.” These games measured intelligence in the “Five Lumosity Brain Areas: Speed, Attention, Flexibility, Memory, and Problem-Solving.” To my shock, and private glee, my undergraduate Alma mater of Northwestern University ranked fourth, above such academic stalwarts as Yale (5), Penn (12), and the University of Chicago (16). Perennial U.S. News darling, Princeton, came in at 39. Other surprises included the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (9), theUniversity of Portland (13), my undergrad safety school of Macalester (18), and Columbia University (61), which holds the well-deserved honor of rejecting me four straight times to their graduate school of journalism. The University of California-San Diego – darling of the politically correctWashington Monthly study, whose methodology was excoriated in a previous Crotty on Education column – came in at 66. The 2013 NCAA Basketball Final Four schools ranked as follows: University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (59), Wichita State University (139), Syracuse University (141), and University of Louisville (289). The academic institutions with the smartest students in the Lumosity study were MIT (1), Harvard (2) and Stanford (3). The colleges with the three worst performing students were Kean University (ranked 409), California State University-San Bernardino (ranked 410), and Michigan’s very own Baker College (ranked dead last). Before you slam Steinberg’s research, keep in mind that he and his team strove hard to control for gender, age, and demographics. For example, they only used the scores of players between the ages of 17 and 25 as a way to approximate the current undergraduate population. My problem with the Lumosity rankings is that they tend to select out those more likely to play games or go to a site like Lumosity. Moreover, as Sternberg himself admits, selecting based on email addresses may net users who are not undergraduate students, but, rather, staff or graduate students. In addition, for a school to make the list of 411, only 50 players from that school needed to provide “complete score and demographic data.” Hardly a robust sample. Finally, the accuracy of Lumosity’s rankings depend upon the reliability of their games as a measure of cognitive ability. And there is tremendous controversy on this head, especially on whether success at Lumosity games is a factor of repetition and gamesmanship, rather than innate cognitive ability. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to find a national ranking that looks solely at student-specific cognitive variables, instead of secondary variables – from “diversity” to “rowdiness” to “affordability” — that might be important in determining whether you want to attend a school, but tell you little about the intellectual quality of the students with whom you will spend four precious years of your life. Here are the top 25 schools in order: 1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2. Harvard University 3. Stanford University 4. Northwestern University 5. Yale University 6. Washington University in St Louis 7. Dartmouth College 8. Wellesley College 9. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 10. Duke University 11. College of William and Mary 12. University of Pennsylvania 13. University of Portland 14. University of California-Berkeley 15. Vanderbilt University 16. University of Chicago 17. Carnegie Mellon University 18. Macalester College 19. Worcester Polytechnic Institute 20. University of California-Los Angeles 21. Emory University 22. Lafayette College 23. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 24. Case Western Reserve University 25. Boston College Source
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