Concentrated Influence™: AcademicInfluence.com Debuts Revolutionary Ranking Metric for Discovering Influential Colleges

FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Elite universities—those familiar and prestigious institutions whose names we all recognize—admit as few as four or five percent of applicants each year. Conversely, the more accessible Mega State University may offer superb academics in a specialty field, but students might find themselves clamoring for a single superstar professor's attention in a program with hundreds of other students. So, what should you do if you want a small college atmosphere with an elite university program?

Now, it's possible! AcademicInfluence.com debuts Concentrated Influence™, a revolutionary way for students to find the school that truly fits this need for a more intimate college atmosphere without sacrificing academic excellence.

How Concentrated Influence Improves College Ranking Metrics

Try AcademicInfluence.com's Custom College Rankings using the link below. Select the Search Filters for the preferred college criteria that meet your needs, then select the Metric option "Concentrated Influence":

AcademicInfluence.com Custom College Rankings

Colleges and universities that might otherwise be obscured behind the well-financed marketing and recruitment efforts of their larger competitors are actually spotlighted in the Custom College Rankings results.

"Concentrated Influence gives small colleges and universities a chance to shine," says Dr. Jed Macosko, academic director of AcademicInfluence.com and professor of physics at Wake Forest University.

"The innovative artificial intelligence behind our ranking technology allows us to cut through a list of heavyweight programs to feature those with equally brilliant faculty whose influence is concentrated on a smaller student cohort. Students who don't want to get lost amid huge classes, who prefer instruction from an actual professor rather than a T.A., and who still want the benefit of world-class scholarship can now discover those schools that might otherwise be overlooked in less discerning ranking lists."

AcademicInfluence.com's unique InfluenceRanking Engine maps billions of crowd-sourced data points in repositories such as Wikipedia and Crossref to calculate the scholarly impact of a college or university's professors, along with the influence of its alumni. Concentrated Influence then factors for the ratio of influential faculty and alumni in a selected department to the school's undergraduate student body population. This provides prospective students with a clear sense of where they might receive personal attention from top-notch professors, as well as which schools have produced influential graduates in a higher percentage.

"Not every student wants to attend the largest school, or even the most influential school, if it means fighting for a professor's attention," says Macosko. "They want to survey a college landscape that levels the playing field for both large and small schools. Concentrated Influence makes that possible. It gives the Davids of higher education a chance to triumph over the Goliaths."

Founded in October 2016, with funding assistance from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Influence Networks created the proprietary InfluenceRanking Engine machine-learning technology to achieve better ranking results. Its partner, AcadmicInfluence.com, now opens this technology's user-customizable search capabilities to students, researchers, and inquirers, so anyone can discover the most influential people and institutions.

AcademicInfluence.com is the preeminent technology-driven rankings site dedicated to students, researchers, and inquirers from high school through college and beyond, offering resources that connect learners to leaders. AcademicInfluence.com is a part of the EducationAccess group, a family of sites dedicated to lifelong learning and personal growth, including Influence Networks, InfluencePublishers.com (nonfiction publishing and publishers of Bright Notes), IntelligentEducation.com (instructional video library and easy instructional video creation with 3D elements), AlexandriaLibrary.com (free, online library and reader), and soon, Success Portraits (personalized strengths inventory for college and career).

Contact:

Jed Macosko, Ph.D.
Academic Director
AcademicInfluence.com
[email protected]    
(682) 302-4945

SOURCE AcademicInfluence.com