I was in an interesting battle this past recruiting season.  I am interested in hearing your opinion.

My school is a C- prestige, 10 miles from the recruit and spent $41,092: 111 HVs, 8 CVs, promised 10 minutes.

My opponent is a C+ prestige, ~120 miles from the recruit and spent $32,658: over 35 CVs, promised start and 15 minutes.


I focused on HVs because at this distance, HVs are at their least expensive versus CVs; so if HVs are ever to be advantageous compared to CVs, it would be in this situation.  Based on the scholarship emails, this was a really close battle.  So I find myself wondering if HVs are ever the way to go, or if the prestige differential was the real problem here.  (I did end up winning the recruit.)

prestige / extra 5 minutes promised / start promised, so with the information provided it should be a close battle. 

Posted by glen87 on 6/28/2010 1:13:00 PM (view original):
prestige / extra 5 minutes promised / start promised, so with the information provided it should be a close battle. 

I agree, and remember that the higher a prestige the more promises are worth, so the difference there is a little greater than just a start and 5 more minutes.

I would guess that the difference in 2/3 of a grade is what the battle was about.  Money is not at issue.

Assuming that one CV is worth 2.5 HV your effort was roughly the same as 52 CVs to his 35 CVs.  Lets also say that his start promise was about the same as a CV and that the minutes were a wash.  That would make the total 52 CVs (you) to 36 CVs.  My guess is that 2/3 of a letter grade is what made his 36 CVs roughly comparable to your 52.

I am actually a little surprised the C- team won, but I think C- vs. C+ prestige is worth something between 1.4 and 1.6x . 

agree with reinsel, I'm a little surprised you won the kid, and I think  the multiplier is closer to 1.6-1.7x.  Thanks for posting this, though, always good to see concrete examples.

The mulitplier is almost definitely between 1.4 and 1.6 and I think it is closer to 1.4.  1.7 is generally the multiplier for a full letter grade, in my experience at least.

hmm, interesting.  I thought it was somewhat general consensus that for a full letter grade the multiplier was 2x, so 2/3 of a grade = ~1.65x. 

I have always treated it as a compounding factor of 1.2x.  So 1/3 = 1.2, 2/3 = 1.44, 1 full grade = 1.73 etc. etc.

I think the multiplier is higher as the Prestige grades get higher. Meaning I'd expect a A+ vs. a B+ to have a larger gap than there is between a B and a C.

I also think there are different levels of prestige, a Hight B+ versus a low B+ etc...

Posted by Iguana1 on 6/29/2010 9:52:00 AM (view original):
I think the multiplier is higher as the Prestige grades get higher. Meaning I'd expect a A+ vs. a B+ to have a larger gap than there is between a B and a C.

I've always operated under the assumption that all grade differences are equal regardless of A to B, C+ to D+. I think though that there's no ceiling on A+ prestige so the difference could be much larger from A+ to B+.

And I've always also operated under the assumption that one full letter grade was 1.6-1.7x.

Edit to note - sully's point about the variation within grade is definitely true, my first few lines were about the multiplier from the midpoints of each grade.

If the C- team won this battle it would seem the multiplier is less than 1.4, because from my calculations a 1.4 multiplier would give the C+ team a small but noticeable lead. Has it ever been determined if the higher the prestige the bigger the edge? So for example a B+ school would have a bigger advantage over a B- school then a C+ would have over a C-.

Another factor in this recruiting battle is when did the efforts come? Early recruiting credits make a big difference. If the C- team got a lot of their effort in before the C+ team it would be possible that the C+ team had a 1.4 edge and still lost. I recently won a battle against an A- team when I was at B+ and they put in slightly more effort then me but almost all of my effort came in the first 20 hours of recruiting while his didn't start until after signings had already begun.

yep. we are also taking the assumption that 2.5HV=1CV. That may be slightly off as well. I think it is pretty obvious though based on 2.5HV/CV and 1.4 to 1.5 as the multiplier that we are very close in those assumptions as the numbers put both schools right on the guy. I could have seen this going either way based on the assumptions in recruiting values previously discussed.