http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/

Here are the rankings of the top ten colleges according to U.S. News and World Report (a continuation of the rankings, on a year by year basis, exists in the link below). The rankings were created by averaging the rank of each institution over the last ten years (1998-2007). 8 of the 10 schools have been ranked in the top ten 10 times. The runner-ups Columbia and Dartmouth were outside of the top ten once and thus get the number 9 and 10 spot on the list. The average ranking is indicated."

1. Princeton 1.3 **(1.2 if 2008 factored in, 1999-2008)

2. Harvard 1.5 **(1.5 if 2008 factored in)

3. Yale 2.6 **(2.6 if 2008 factored in)

4. MIT 4.7

5. Stanford 4.9

6. Caltech 5.5

6. U Pennsylvania 5.5

8. Duke 5.9

9. Dartmouth 9.1

10. Columbia 9.6

Here are the Rankings for ALL Top 100 SCHOOLS going back to 1983 (Universities and LACs).

http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/

Subject: Yale D.N. Recognizes the Awesome Power of US News Rankings

"US News rankings are as inert as the Constitution" says Yale Daily News

Yale Daily News

"US News rankings are as inert as the Constitution"

It’s application season — time for turkey, eggnog and a look at the academic rankings.

The US News and World Report rankings are low-hanging fruit for columnists. Countless writers have criticized the study for methodological skulduggery, over-reliance on manipulable criteria, favoring small schools and whatever else. Yet, I’ve seen students agonize over their school’s placement in the coming year, dreading further drops or praying for a rally. Just this week, I came to a realization.

We can all stop scrutinizing. No matter what happens at the actual schools, it’s very unlikely that the substantive rankings will ever meaningfully change.

Why? Because the US News rankings are very much like the Constitution and the Uniform Commercial Code. And anyone who saw that coming just earned my respect and sympathy in roughly equal measure.

What common thread binds the fundamental law of the United States, a uniform act that standardizes the law of commercial transactions and an arbitrary, over-used sorting matrix for largely incomparable academic institutions?

Each filled a yawning void in its time. Before each, the world was a vague and messy place. And what’s striking about all three documents is their resultant stability.

First, the Constitution. For a newly independent land with no central government, confederation meant stability, binding the states for their common defense and welfare. There was an obvious push to get something on the books and ratified rather quickly; virtually any document that accomplished the main objectives was decidedly better than nothing. The Articles of Confederation was a good first stab, but its weaknesses were many. In 1788 the Articles were supplanted by the more thorough U.S. Constitution — a document legendary in its stability. Of the roughly 10,000 amendments proposed since 1789, only 27 have been ratified, 10 of those in the first two years. A good chunk of constitutional jurisprudence these days involves convoluted intellectual acrobatics construing aged passages to allow or disallow some decidedly modern action.

The Constitution quickly became entrenched, relied upon, known. Interests have staked out positions on either side of its words. To fundamentally revise or even freshly interpret the text today would meet intense resistance: just imagine the Supreme Court actually ruling on whether the Second Amendment really does confer the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms: an uphill battle in either direction.

I’ll spare readers the history of the UCC, but suffice to say that a similar process occurred. Before its adoption in the 1950s the law governing simple commercial transactions was a mess, often highly inconsistent between states. There was a very real benefit to a common and uniform standard, regardless of what that standard might be; So long as it was largely fair and achieved the goal of synthesizing the confusing pile of common law, it would be an improvement. Details could surely be ironed out later.

Except they couldn’t.

Since its adoption, attempts to revise the code have largely been frustrated. Parties rarely agree on revisions to the various rules; changes that benefit consumers are opposed by corporate interests, and vice versa. Although Article 2 revisions were finally proposed in 2003, only two states have moved to adopt them. Since the primary benefit of any uniform law is its uniformity, the system decays when states adopt revisions piecemeal. Once the first draft was out there, similarly uniform updates were just wishful thinking.

And that is precisely why school rankings won’t change much. By popularizing their hierarchy of colleges, law schools and whatever, US News captured people’s uncertain notions of academic reputation (once confined to a few “top” schools and a general sense of how local institutions might compare), added some rudimentary statistics and squeezed from it all an ordinate list. This list filled a void: It allowed people to affirm vague conceptions of “better than” and “worse than” and anchor them to a master document. The published ranking quickly supplanted the public opinion that hatched it and became the touchstone of academic quality. Today, the rankings are too widely used to change with the times.

Any substantial disruption of the rankings as we know them would be rejected as roundly as a major rewrite of the UCC. If the top schools were suddenly upset by a surge of also-rans, many would simply disown the US News list as rogue, and turn to another source that better reflected what we have come to accept.

The obvious message is to take the rankings with caution — at this point, they likely reflect stubborn inertia at least as much as meaningful quality.

But there is also a certain Frankenstein angle to all this —once unleashed, common standards take on a life of their own. So be careful, all ye Yalies who sully forth into positions of boundless power this year and beyond: when you tame the world with some hot new paradigm, think well on the first draft — your monster can be a nightmare to revise.

Michael Seringhaus is a first year student at Yale Law School.

"Epoch Times" world edition is touting US Rankings

Which are the Best Colleges and Why?

By Gary Feuerberg

Epoch Times Washington D.C.

U.S. News & World Report publishes by far the most popular college ranking system used by parents and students as well as college and university administrations and alumni. Over 1,400 colleges and universities fill out the voluminous paperwork each year. Princeton, Harvard, and Yale usually wind up as the top three in the national universities category as they did this year.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9204646)

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post Staff Writer

(excerpt)

"Consider this: What would life for students and parents searching for a college be like if there were no U.S. News rankings? I am old enough to remember that allegedly golden age before 1983, and I think families then were even more vulnerable to myth and marketing than they are today.

Without rankings like U.S. News, we would be back to judging schools by how famous they are. Harvard, Yale and Princeton would have even more clout than they already do, and students and their parents would have to struggle through the monster college guides (Peterson's, for example, is 3,087 pages) without any clue to, for instance, which schools have the best graduation rates or alumni support.

I admit that U.S. News and its competitors have done little to dampen the glow of the Ivies and other well-known colleges. There they are at or near the top of most lists. But right beside them are schools that most Americans have heard little about and could not even locate on a map. Among the top 20 national universities on the U.S. News 2006 list I see Washington University and Emory University. If you stopped people on the street how many would be able to tell you what cities they are in? (St. Louis and Atlanta)

U.S. News' top 20 liberal arts colleges have an even larger contingent of little-known schools. Pomona is my favorite example since I have a child there, and when I say the college's name, most people ask me where it is. On that list, I am willing to accept Amherst, Wellesley and Vassar as household names, but not Carleton or Davidson or Claremont McKenna. Those latter schools have excellent student faculty ratios and freshman retention rates, and deserve close attention, which is what the U.S. News rankings give them.

It is important to note that Diver's school, Reed, is to my mind better known than Haverford or Harvey Mudd or several other top 20 schools. This is one reason, I think, why Diver doesn't mind tossing the U.S. News questionnaire in the trash. His school has a reputation for independent minded students and talented faculty that goes back several generations. Wherever it pops up in the rankings, bright students with a rebellious streak are going to look for it.

In his article, Diver says U.S. News creates "powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one's score." This may be true, but Diver offers little evidence, and he neglects to remind us what college data was like before the rankings. In those days, when I was applying, each college presented its numbers in its own way, and making comparisons was very difficult. U.S. News forced everyone to present their data in the same way, once again helping us parents and our children make informed choices.

Diver says "the urge to improve one's ranking creates an irresistible pressure toward homogeneity." When I asked for examples, he said law school admissions (he is a former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School) are more focused on college grade point averages because of the U.S. News law school ratings. But I think undergraduate institutions, if anything, have more reason than ever to preserve their unique qualities. The more they distinguish themselves from their competitors, the more likely they will attract applicants and look good on the U.S. News selectivity scale.

I concede that Diver is right when he says the rankings "reinforce a view of education as strictly instrumental to extrinsic goals such as prestige or wealth." But since the GI Bill turned higher education into an attainable goal for the middle class, that is the way most of us have thought about colleges, and the U.S. News rankings didn't change that.

Two key U.S. News executives, education editor Ben Wildavsky and director of data research Robert Morse, sent me, at my request. their own view of the Diver piece. They say that although Reed ignores their questionnaire, it still puts nearly all the data that U.S. News needs on the Reed web site or sends it to other organizations like the American Association of University professors. The only rankings data it keeps secret is its financial resources, forcing U.S. News to make an estimate based on average expenditure per student at comparable schools.

The U.S. News executives say Diver was wrong to say "one can only guess" at how U.S. News calculates its rankings. They say the technical details have been distributed many times at annual meetings of the Association for Institutional Research and the list's yardstick described clearly in the magazine. The magazine's staff checks the data they receive by comparing it to data from other sources and asking schools to explain sudden changes in average SAT scores, acceptance rates and other measuring points.

One of Diver's critiques, however, stands out as surprising and astute. On the U.S. News list, Reed (number 47) ranks below many liberal arts colleges with similarly strong reputations because Reed's graduation rate is not as good. I checked the collegeresults.org website, not affiliated with U.S. News, and found that only 71.4 percent of Reed students graduated in six years or less, compared to 91.7 percent for Swarthmore, 91.9 percent for Haverford and 96.8 percent for Amherst.

That is a significant difference, and it hurts Reed in the ratings, in some ways unfairly because it reflects at least in part some of the college's most appealing traditions. Reed tends to admit adventurous students who are more likely to drop out if that makes sense to them. Reed also appears to have resisted much of the grade inflation that characterizes our best schools, putting more students in academic trouble that could delay their graduation. Divers says professors do not give Reed students their grades. They can ask to see them, but in the Reed undergraduate culture that is considered uncool. The persistent lobbying for better grades on Ivy League campuses does not happen so often at Reed.

To his credit, Diver does not oppose rankings in general. He welcomes more lists like the new Washington Monthly rankings based on public service programs. He says he would be far less worried if U.S. News were less of a juggernaut, and there were many similarly famous college assessments, each appealing to different tastes.

I agree. I rank high schools, and have done some limited college ranking. Those who say journalists shouldn't publish rankings are essentially saying that our readers are too stupid to judge the worthiness of such exercises. I, on the other hand, think nearly all of us are capable of looking at a ranked list of colleges in a magazine and not taking everything in it for granted.

So let's not stifle rankings. Let's have more. That will lead to more arguments, like the interesting one I had with Diver, and help us figure out how to make the system provide the best information to the most people, and find the colleges that are just right for us."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9217120)

Yale Daily News

"US News rankings are as inert as the Constitution"

It’s application season — time for turkey, eggnog and a look at the academic rankings.

The US News and World Report rankings are low-hanging fruit for columnists. Countless writers have criticized the study for methodological skulduggery, over-reliance on manipulable criteria, favoring small schools and whatever else. Yet, I’ve seen students agonize over their school’s placement in the coming year, dreading further drops or praying for a rally. Just this week, I came to a realization.

We can all stop scrutinizing. No matter what happens at the actual schools, it’s very unlikely that the substantive rankings will ever meaningfully change.

Why? Because the US News rankings are very much like the Constitution and the Uniform Commercial Code. And anyone who saw that coming just earned my respect and sympathy in roughly equal measure.

What common thread binds the fundamental law of the United States, a uniform act that standardizes the law of commercial transactions and an arbitrary, over-used sorting matrix for largely incomparable academic institutions?

Each filled a yawning void in its time. Before each, the world was a vague and messy place. And what’s striking about all three documents is their resultant stability.

First, the Constitution. For a newly independent land with no central government, confederation meant stability, binding the states for their common defense and welfare. There was an obvious push to get something on the books and ratified rather quickly; virtually any document that accomplished the main objectives was decidedly better than nothing. The Articles of Confederation was a good first stab, but its weaknesses were many. In 1788 the Articles were supplanted by the more thorough U.S. Constitution — a document legendary in its stability. Of the roughly 10,000 amendments proposed since 1789, only 27 have been ratified, 10 of those in the first two years. A good chunk of constitutional jurisprudence these days involves convoluted intellectual acrobatics construing aged passages to allow or disallow some decidedly modern action.

The Constitution quickly became entrenched, relied upon, known. Interests have staked out positions on either side of its words. To fundamentally revise or even freshly interpret the text today would meet intense resistance: just imagine the Supreme Court actually ruling on whether the Second Amendment really does confer the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms: an uphill battle in either direction.

I’ll spare readers the history of the UCC, but suffice to say that a similar process occurred. Before its adoption in the 1950s the law governing simple commercial transactions was a mess, often highly inconsistent between states. There was a very real benefit to a common and uniform standard, regardless of what that standard might be; So long as it was largely fair and achieved the goal of synthesizing the confusing pile of common law, it would be an improvement. Details could surely be ironed out later.

Except they couldn’t.

Since its adoption, attempts to revise the code have largely been frustrated. Parties rarely agree on revisions to the various rules; changes that benefit consumers are opposed by corporate interests, and vice versa. Although Article 2 revisions were finally proposed in 2003, only two states have moved to adopt them. Since the primary benefit of any uniform law is its uniformity, the system decays when states adopt revisions piecemeal. Once the first draft was out there, similarly uniform updates were just wishful thinking.

And that is precisely why school rankings won’t change much. By popularizing their hierarchy of colleges, law schools and whatever, US News captured people’s uncertain notions of academic reputation (once confined to a few “top” schools and a general sense of how local institutions might compare), added some rudimentary statistics and squeezed from it all an ordinate list. This list filled a void: It allowed people to affirm vague conceptions of “better than” and “worse than” and anchor them to a master document. The published ranking quickly supplanted the public opinion that hatched it and became the touchstone of academic quality. Today, the rankings are too widely used to change with the times.

Any substantial disruption of the rankings as we know them would be rejected as roundly as a major rewrite of the UCC. If the top schools were suddenly upset by a surge of also-rans, many would simply disown the US News list as rogue, and turn to another source that better reflected what we have come to accept.

The obvious message is to take the rankings with caution — at this point, they likely reflect stubborn inertia at least as much as meaningful quality.

But there is also a certain Frankenstein angle to all this —once unleashed, common standards take on a life of their own. So be careful, all ye Yalies who sully forth into positions of boundless power this year and beyond: when you tame the world with some hot new paradigm, think well on the first draft — your monster can be a nightmare to revise.

Michael Seringhaus is a first year student at Yale Law School.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9237431)

(excerpt)

"Fitzsimmons said Harvard does not plan to withdraw from the US News & World Report rankings, which consistently place Harvard within the top few spots.

The annual magazine issue containing the list boasts a readership of about two million, but opposition to the rankings has been growing, with some college presidents declining to provide the necessary information.

“We want to support a variety of different means of information students and parents might have,” Fitzsimmons said. “The kind of information they use is publicly available, and it’s important for us to provide such information.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9262500)

NOT A SINGLE ONE!!!!!

PS. If the chart reveals anything, it is that among HYPS over the past 25 years, only Princeton has shown a clear, positive trend. Over the past 10 years Princeton has received a #1 ranking 9 times.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9293101)

What are you going to do when US News switches things up like it inevitably has to to sell its crap, and puts Harvard in front of Princeton? Somehow I think you'll start finding my arguments useful all the sudden.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9293146)

PS. As for "switching things up" to sell magazines, try another SPIN. US News has had Princeton at #1 for eight years in a row and 10 of the last 11!!! That hardly qualifies as "switching things up" to sell magazines.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9293930)

I've elaborated on US News' treatment of Reed and Oberlin already on this board. I could name a bunch of other cases - like Sarah Lawrence - where US News has demonstrated its lack of concern with true educational merit.

Unless you've been inside Plato's cave and seen the true form of the perfect universtity, you can't stand behind US News. It's just an opinion, and one that's been demonstrably prone to manipulation and fraud.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9295547)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/shunning-college-rankings

That said, I believe the rankings fill a vital role in the higher education landscape. Without such rankings students would be at the total mercy of the college publicity machines. They would receive nothing but biased information of the kind that Nycfan regularly distributes here. Students would not have a clue as to how schools stacked up against one another. In my view, more information is always better than less. US News uses about 19 different criteria to evaluate schools. To my knowledge no ranking is more comprehensive. BUT students must take such information with a grain of salt, recognizing and giving greater priority to those bits of information more pertinent to their values and aspirations. It is for this very reason that I post numerous, credible rankings/ratings here. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and a lack of it can be devastating.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9296387)

People did just fine figuring out what school to go to before 1983.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9422574)

What we really need - and what I think will evolve fairly soon - is a rankings system which allows for personal configurations of a comprehensive statistical data base. If people could plug their own weighting formulas into a vast database of verified objective info, a personally useful ranking of schools would be generated for each individual. If US News would come up with a device for doing this (which wouldn't be difficult), 90% of my gripe with it would be aleved. But I suspect they would rather pander to the trashy side of the American mind and keep releasing supposedly significant rankings based on whatever whacked-out formula they chose this time around.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9609066)

Take a look:

!!!!!!!!!

http://www.collegeprowler.com/find/guides-by-ranking.aspx?section=Academics

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9614556)

I'm not against college prowler, but it has to be taken for what it is. It's basically about as worthwhile as Princeton Review - which is to say not very - but still an interesting index to have out there.

What I'm talking about is a database of credible objective info, like the one US News obtains each year, and the ability for viewers to customize their own weightings of categories that matter to them, and produce a ranking of schools accordingly.

If I'm a sports-loving fratboy partier type, who just wants to have a fun time in college and get a good job afterward, I might plug in: [football team ranking: 30%, retention rank: 25%, graduate emplyoment rank: 15%, per-capita endowment rank: 10%, SAT scores: 10%, selectivity:10%]

And this will produce a ranking of the best schools for that set of values, based on real objective statistics.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9619290)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9295586)

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=696405&mc=42&forum_id=1

Unlike the nycfan's of the world I have not cited ridiculous local rankings or foreign rankings which fail the basic smell test.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9294614)

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9641674)

By Marcella Bombardieri, Boston Globe Staff

Student satisfaction at Harvard College ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private colleges, according to an analysis of survey results that finds that Harvard students are disenchanted with the faculty and social life on campus.

An internal Harvard memo, obtained by the Globe, provides numerical data that appear to substantiate some long-held stereotypes of Harvard: that undergraduate students often feel neglected by professors, and that they don't have as much fun as peers on many other campuses.

The group of 31 colleges, known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, or COFHE, includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and small colleges like Amherst and Wellesley.

''Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools," according to the memo, dated Oct. 2004 and marked ''confidential." ''Harvard student satisfaction compares even less favorably to satisfaction at our closest peer institutions."

The 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, and student life factors such as sense of community and social life on campus.

The raw data used in the memo come from surveys of graduating seniors in 2002, but are the most recent comparison available and are still consulted by Harvard administrators. On a five-point scale, Harvard students' overall satisfaction comes out to 3.95, compared to an average of 4.16 for the other 30 COFHE schools. Although the difference appears small, Harvard officials say they take the ''satisfaction gap" very seriously.

Only four schools scored lower than Harvard, but the schools were not named. (COFHE data are supposed to be confidential.) The memo also notes that Harvard's ''satisfaction gap" has existed since at least 1994.

''I think we have to concede that we are letting our students down," said Lawrence Buell, an English professor and former dean of undergraduate education. ''Our standard is that Harvard shoots to be the very best. If it shoots to be the very best in terms of research productivity and the stature of its faculty, why should it not shoot to be the very best in terms of the quality of the education that it delivers?"

Harvard officials refused to comment on the survey, but noted that they are already working to address the issues underscored by the data. They also said their internal numbers have improved since 2002. President Lawrence H. Summers has also spoken repeatedly about the need for students to have more opportunity to get to know their professors.

In a report released last April as part of an ongoing review of Harvard's curriculum, the need for more interaction between students and faculty was mentioned repeatedly''Harvard College should be known not only as an institution in which students can sit in lecture halls to learn from faculty who make original contributions to knowledge, but also as a place where they may encounter, and challenge, these scholars directly in seminar and small class settings," the report said.

But right now, students can go through four years on campus with limited contact with professors. They often take large lecture classes, divided into sections headed by graduate student ''teaching fellows." Small classes are frequently taught by temporary instructors instead of regular, tenure-track professors. And in many cases, advisers are not professors, either, but graduate students, administrators, or full-time advisers.

''I've definitely had great professors, but most of the time you have to chase them down and show initiative if you want to get to know them," said Kathy Lee, a junior majoring in psychology. ''I've had a lot of trouble getting to know enough faculty to get the recommendations I need for medical school."

On the five-point scale, Harvard students gave an average score of 2.92 on faculty availability, compared to an average 3.39 for the other COFHE schools. Harvard students gave a 3.16 for quality of instruction, compared to a 3.31 for the other schools, and a 2.54 for quality of advising in their major, compared to 2.86 for the other schools.

Students gave Harvard a 2.62 for social life on campus, compared to a 2.89 for the other schools, and a 2.53 for sense of community, compared to 2.8.

Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby recently said that Harvard's ratio of students to tenured and tenure-track faculty is 11-to-1, compared to an 8-1 ratio at Princeton University. Harvard has already boosted the number of faculty by 10 percent in the last five years, from 610 to 672 professors, in part to improve the student-faculty ratio. Kirby's plan now is to expand the faculty to 750 by 2010, and possibly to 800 after that.

In the meantime, Harvard is trying to offer more intimate classroom settings. For example, four years ago it offered only about 30 small seminar classes for freshmen. This year there are 115, most taught by senior faculty, according to Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross.

Students' experiences also vary widely from department to department. Some of the most popular -- and thus overburdened -- majors, such as economics or government, have fairly low ratings on internal student surveys, while small majors like classics and philosophy get better ratings.

On the social front, students complain that Harvard lacks places where students can socialize and has so many rules that it is difficult to hold a party on-campus, where almost all undergraduates live.

The Harvard administration has also been working hard in the last few years to improve social life. The school has been experimenting with popular ''pub nights" on some Fridays, and has allowed campus parties to stay open an hour later, until 2 a.m. They have tried other novelty programs from dodge ball tournaments to speed dating, and doubled the amount of athletic equipment in the main gym used by undergraduates.

Many students are pessimistic that the curriculum review is going to change what some call ''a culture of mutual avoidance," where students and faculty often don't make an effort to meet. Professors and students alike also say there's a hurried and stressful atmosphere on campus that can get in the way of building mentor relationships. After all, Harvard has been trying to improve teaching and advising for years, long before the current administration.

Matt Glazer, president of the student government, said it's hard to have much confidence in the administration's commitment to fixing the problems.

''When the system that has dismal advising is giving recommendations on how to make advising better, the question is why aren't they doing that right now?" Glazer said.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=751636&forum_id=1#9656798)