@blue95 Beside the error in calculating mid 50 SAT composite score, the main problem is the 2015 data is fro admission while the CDS are for enrolled freshmen. The data for 2015 they just posted on the web are not going to be the same on CDS.
“Beside the error in calculating mid 50 SAT composite score, the main problem is the 2015 data is fro admission while the CDS are for enrolled freshmen. The data for 2015 they just posted on the web are not going to be the same on CDS.”
I get the above, however, my comments were sincerely intentioned and I’ll reiterate: 1) Wikipedia is a great resource for putting the Michigan footprint out there and I’d like to see more alums support it with edits; therefore, if you see errors, I urge you to correct them directly in the Wiki; 2) likewise, if you think the university itself is in error in any of the supporting citations, I urge you to contact them to make corrections in that presenting errors on fundamental university documents which are public facing is not a recipe for building reputation. Either action on your part would be very, very useful.
“That’s interesting. What do you mean by “wealth indices”?”
A quick example: the university derives part of its ranking for the number of kids who graduate in 4yrs, 5yrs, 6yrs. Clearly, kids get off schedule when they run out of money and their progress toward graduation is impeded thereby. This has ZERO to do with student quality/achievement, and everything to do with family wealth. Running out of money means that the student is poor not that the student lacks capability/intelligence. It may also mean that the school is poor and doesn’t offer enough aid. A “good” school will be able to offer a lot of aid due to having “surplus” wealth. This wealth is a second order index of school quality and speaks to money management skills in the administration and/or alum donations but doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of instruction. There are other components of the USN&WR which function as quality metrics which are clearly wealth metrics. Schools also get ranked on student/teacher ratio…as Alexandre correctly notes, some schools simply don’t report the number properly…to that extent, I agree with him.
Where we (Alexandre and I) part company: if a school runs a thin budget and does not staff up courses or sections, the student/teacher ratio will suffer. At some level, the ratio says nothing about the students or their opportunity to learn/interact with the professor…at a grosser level, if properly reported, the ratio has meaning. I’m not worried about the second case, where there may be a real impact, but the first case where the ratio (really the difference in ratio between schools) is a matter of indifference imposes a false penalty and leads to spurious precision in the rankings. Rankings should ideally be done in cohorts, not as spurious numbers measured on the real line to 3 decimal points.
So, when you look at university rankings, are you looking at student and/or institutional wealth or are you looking at real differences in the quality of education offered? More wealth may be a driver of better outcomes (a relative assessment) but less wealth (to some lower limit) doesn’t mean/entail a bad (absolute) outcome.
“The problem lies in the way the data is reported by universities, and the overall methodology of each of those indices. Until the rankings properly audit data for accuracy and consistency, and until the methodology reflects the actual “quality” of those indices, the rankings will be flawed.”
I agree with the above, but not necessarily with your first statements: I believe that despite its wealth, Michigan, as indicated in my reply to Maya, is negatively affected by wealth measures. I think wealth effects are captured indirectly and distort the rankings.
I think you’re both right, up to a point. Michigan is one of the wealthiest universities in the nation as measured by endowment, research expenditures, total budget, or practically any other measure. But it is also a very large institution, so its per capita spending is lower than at elite privates, and it is punished for that in the US News rankings.
US News directly incorporates “wealth” into its rankings in two ways, both important to a school’s final ranking. First, “faculty resources” counts for 20% of a school’s total score. That in turn has several components: faculty salary and benefits (35%), percent of faculty with terminal degree (15%), percent of faculty that is full-time 95%), student-faculty ratio (5%), class size 1-19 students (30%), class size 50+ students (10%). Michigan’s faculty are highly compensated by national standards, but not as highly compensated as faculty at the elite privates. According to the AAUP, the average full professor at Michigan made $154,746 in 2013-14, placing it 4th among public universities but only 34th overall; in contrast, full professors at Prince made about $186K on average, $192-193K at Penn, Yale, and Columbia, $206K at Harvard, $209K at Chicago, and $210K at Stanford. These differences aren’t as great as they may seem once you consider cost-of-living (as US News does), but they’re still big enough to hurt Michigan’s US News ranking. Also note that within any university, faculty compensation usually tracks seniority, so a school with an older faculty will tend to have more highly-paid full professors and therefore higher average faculty compensation. In many fields, schools like Harvard and Yale are virtually academic “museums”: they collect the most accomplished, and often quite senior, faculty from other institutions through lateral hires, pushing up their average compensation levels, while schools doing more entry-level hiring will have lower average compensation in part because the average age of their faculty is younger. Michigan also gets hurt by student-faculty ratio (which most privates miscalculate by excluding grad students from the “student” figure) and by class sizes, where again Michigan compares favorably to most publics but lags behind the top privates. In my view US News’ metrics here are quite arbitrary and not that meaningful, especially since they are easily manipulated. (Want to reduce your percentage of large 50+ classes? Just combine 2 60-person lectures into one 120-person lecture, and you’ve cut your percentage of “large” classes in half. Want to increase your percentage of small classes? Just break up a few already-small classes into one-on-one tutorials and call each tutorial a “class.” Schools have done both.)
“Financial resources” counts for another 10% of the overall US News score, measured by “the average spending per full-time equivalent student on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services and institutional support.” As best I can tell, pretty much every dollar a university spends can fit into one of those categories, so this is basically just the total budget divided by total number of students. The consequence is that
US News rewards the schools with the highest costs per unit of production, and punishes schools with lower costs per unit of production. Larger schools, with many scale efficiencies, are always going to punished for those efficiencies. You’ve got to pay the President, Provost, General Counsel, etc., whether the school has 5,000 students or 50,000. It costs the same to build and maintain a 10-million volume library system whether those libraries serve 5,000 or 50,000 students. It costs the same to build and maintain a chemistry lab whether that lab is used 2 hours a day or 10. And so on. In most industries, the highest cost per unit of production is deemed inefficiency; in higher education, it’s deemed excellence. (Just imagine if we had rewarded auto manufacturers for having the highest cost per unit of production; the old “Detroit Three” would have beaten the pants off their lower-cost foreign competitors).
bclintonk: Excellent post. Thanks. I frequently wish a school like Michigan, which excels at surveys and research, would challenge USN&WR and go through their methodology with a fine tooth comb and reform it from top to bottom. The current approach is riddled with silliness, as you point out.
BTW: I looked at a cost of living calculator at one point (roughly 1 year ago) and $155,000 in Ann Arbor is (from memory) worth around $210,000 in Cambridge. To that extent, it isn’t clear to me that USNWR actually does “norm” any of these figures for the local cost of living. The calculations I did at the time suggested that UM has equilibrated faculty comp, on a cost of living basis, to be a tad higher than both Berkeley and Cambridge.
^ US News says it adjusts faculty salaries on the basis of “regional cost-of-living.” I’m not sure what that means. Cambridge is a particularly high-cost locale in a high-cost metropolitan area (Boston) in a high-cost state (Massachusetts) in a high-cost region (New England), but you’d make very different adjustments depending on which of those scales you use.
“Want to reduce your percentage of large 50+ classes? Just combine 2 60-person lectures into one 120-person lecture, and you’ve cut your percentage of “large” classes in half.”
Priceless
“Want to reduce your percentage of large 50+ classes? Just combine 2 60-person lectures into one 120-person lecture, and you’ve cut your percentage of “large” classes in half.”
Alternatively, take a lecture which has 200 students, split it into 20 sections taught by the same professor via a network of speakers, and instead of one class with 50 or more students, you have 20 classes with 20 or fewer students. It is very easy to cook the books if the university is not being audited.
“Want to reduce your percentage of large 50+ classes? Just combine 2 60-person lectures into one 120-person lecture, and you’ve cut your percentage of “large” classes in half.”
You only reduce one large class this way. Only if you pair up ALL 50+ size classes to combine can cut the percentage of large classes by half. The question is how many of them can be combined. If they can be combined, the school would likely have them combined already. LOL.
Oh, I don’t think so. Most schools still have a lot of flexibility to move things around, and the larger the curriculum, the more flexibility to tweak it to improve your US News score. Example: take an intro microeconomics lecture class that’s now offered twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring, and say that from now on it will be taught only once a year in the fall, in a lecture hall twice as big. That frees up some teaching time for the professor who is no longer teaching intro microeconomics, so she can now teach an upper-level seminar with enrollment capped at 19. Bingo, you’ve score at both ends of the scale. Take two intro-level philosophy courses, each regularly enrolling 60-70 students and either of which can serve as a prerequisite for more advanced courses, and cap enrollment in one of them at 49. Take an intro-level chemistry course with 10 lab sections and relabel the sections as separate courses which must be taken concurrently with the lecture course, for separately graded credit. Manipulate the curriculum department by department so there are fewer medium-sized intermediate-level courses enrolling 20-70 students, and more capped at 19 and a few uncapped so enrollment is likely to rise to 100 or more, given the scarcity of uncapped courses at that level… You just need to be creative, but there’s ample room for that if you want to play the US News game. None of the kinds of changes I’ve described clearly benefit students, and some arguably hurt students by constraining their curricular choices, though in US News’ twisted worldview all of these changes would count as improvements…
^ There are many reasons why classes cannot be combined. It could be scheduling, classroom size limit, equipment, etc. But if two classes can be combined, they will rather combine them instead of keeping smaller class size.
Back to an earlier Q, is the out of state acceptance and in state acceptance rate posted?
@whatamom For that, you will need to wait for the almanac update in a few months.
is that available from previous years?
Yes. You can access acceptance rates from previous years in Section C of the annual Common Data Sets.
2010: 52% acceptance rate
2011: 40% acceptance rate (year that Michigan joined the Common Application)
2012: 36% acceptance rate
2013: 33% acceptance rate
2014: 32% acceptance rate
2015: 27% acceptance rate (the common data set has not yet been released. This is just a guestimate)
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2010-2011_umaa.pdf
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2011-2012_umaa.pdf
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2012-2013_umaa.pdf
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2013-2014_umaa.pdf
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2014-2015_umaa.pdf
@alexander, @whatamom is looking for the instate vs. out of state acceptance rates.
Yes, just search for almanac at umich.
Here is the current one. Look at Chapter 2 and you will see the in state and OOS admission rate on p.11 from 2004 to 2014.
http://obp.umich.edu/michigan-almanac/
The University just released its final tally to the Ann Arbor News: 51,760 undergraduate applications, 13.577 offers of admission, for a 26.2% admit rate. Of those, 6,242 put down an enrollment deposit, for a tentative yield of 46%. But the University estimates that after “summer melt,” about 6,000 will actually enroll, which would make the final yield around 44%.
Assuming the in state and OOS yield rates to be both 1% higher than last year (due to the higher overall yield rate) and the same 58:42 ratio of enrolled freshmen. The admission rates would be estimated to be ~49% for in state (down from 51%) and ~21% for OOS (down from 27%).