<p>Some analysis by Berkeley into the USNWR rankings.
<a href=“http://opa.berkeley.edu/AnalysesReports/2014USNewsRelease.pdf[/url]”>http://opa.berkeley.edu/AnalysesReports/2014USNewsRelease.pdf</a></p>
<p>It shows Change in Financial-Related Indicators for Top 10 Private/Public from 2008 to 2014.
</p>
<p>What’s going on at Wisconsin? Governor Walker? :-/</p>
<p>Leave politics out of it please. It has little or nothing to do with that except as it MAY (but not necessarily) relate to budgets…and from what I can see, pretty much every state, NOTABLY the State of California has been hampered by a deficit and cut back on higher education. Thank you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Many if not most of the LAC’s ranked higher than HC [by USNWR], including WAS, Bowdoin, Middlebury, CMC, Pomona, Haverford, Davidson, Grinnell, Hamilton etc etc are still need-blind (and often full-need). So I would say HC is not really unique in that sense.</p>
<p>Michigan ended the Michigan Difference Campaign in 2008 after raising over 3.2 billion dollars to add to its endowment. Naturally, it’s alumni giving was going to drop precipitously after that. In the meantime, a new campaign is going to start in a couple of months. It will generate billions more for the university.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>rjk,</p>
<p>That’s a +36 change in Michigan’s alumni giving rank between 2008 and 2014, not -36. But US News just counts the percentage of alumni who give, not how much they give, so it’s entirely possible that the amount of money Michigan took in from alumni fell off after the last capital campaign, even as the percentage of alumni giving increased–due mainly, I imagine, to more intensive outreach to small-donor alums by the university’s development office in a non-capital campaign phase.</p>
<p>Of all the silly metrics US News uses, I’ve always thought alumni giving rate was the absolute silliest, because especially for a big school it’s going to be almost entirely a function of how effective the school’s bureaucracy is in tracking several hundred thousand alums and hounding them for small-dollar donations. What that says about educational quality, I’ll never know. But I guess I’m glad to see Michigan moving up the charts on that metric anyway.</p>
<p>What I found most interesting in the UC Berkeley analysis is that the raw US News scores of both the top privates and the top publics are increasing over time, while at the same time the differences among both top privates and top publics are narrowing over time, making the ordinal ranking even less meaningful year by year.</p>
<p>^^^hehe. I just woke up from a nap when I saw that number. I must have been seeing dashes. Please excuse the it’s instead of its as well. ;-)</p>