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A proposal for improving doctoral program ranking strategy.
Has anyone proven that the doctoral ranking of a university CS dept is actually predictive of the quality of an individual student or graduate? For "top" programs the quality variance may be less, yet this means that rankings are a crutch for analysis and are poor predictors of student quality outside of the top 10. Is the Pareto principle is at work here, ie the top 20% of CS programs are producing 80% of the research? A simple examination of top CS conference proceedings says no.