With the comeback of all comebacks, Facebook researchers published a disconcerting discovery. Based on Google Trends, enrollment at Princeton University will be sliced in half by 2018. By 2021, the Ivy League school will have no students at all.
The social networking website could have just come out and said that the conclusion was based on bad research and is not true, but would you believe it? Probably not, especially when the narrative that Facebook is dead and buried is far more entertaining. Instead, Facebook does a better job discrediting the paper with a joke of a report that uses the “same robust methodology” as that used by the Princeton researchers.
“Based on our robust scientific analysis, future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth,” reads a note published by Facebook data scientists Mike Develin, Lada Adamic, and Sean Taylor.
Among other things, Develin looked at a steep decline in Princeton-related “likes” on Facebook as well as a drop in articles authored by Princeton professors retrieved by Google Scholar. If these trends persist, Develin “projects” that Princeton’s enrollment will be cut in half by 2018 and that no students will enroll in Princeton by 2021.
We will have to wait till 2021 to see which study is correct. But, what we actually want to see is that “Will the base of study ‘Google Trends’ be there to see that day?”. 🙂
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