<p>My following comment got deleted over there:</p>
<p>The QS rankings are considered in academia as the worst rankings among all international rankings, because QS gave over half of weight to the subjective reputation survey. The best is ARWU, which only uses objective data. ARWU has been used by Pac-12 and Big Ten for evaluating potential candidates to invite. The US News Global Rankings and THE rankings are about the same quality, because a small input is still subjective “reputation”.</p>
<p>Reputation is the output of a ranking table, and thus it should not be used as the next year’s input. Otherwise it would provide the opportunity for some schools to manipulate.</p>
<p>UVa’s biggest mistake had been: it followed the US News (national) rankings too seriously in the past years, and believed that rankings were golden standard.</p>
<p>Don’t you remember what C.D.Mote said ten years ago that UVa was ridiculously overrated? Unfortunately UVa didn’t have a president like Mote at that time.</p>
<p>Wcoast: </p>
<p>You dredged up an 11 year old comment from the former President of U. MD, which was made in their college newspaper. Maryland is one of the top two states for providing UVa students. I liked this response at the time to those comments:</p>
<p>"Va. Delegate David Albo expressed a lack of concern over the remarks. “That’s what I expect from a guy from Maryland. If I go to Burger King, I don’t expect them to say that McDonalds’ hamburgers are any good.”</p>
<p>If you read the linked CD article, it explains how these new Global Rankings are highly biased towards doctoral level technical research, and does not emphasize the humanities or social sciences. UVa is mainly recognized for the quality of its undergrad, business, medical and law programs, and does not claim to be MIT or CalTech. </p>
<p>This pretty much sums it up:</p>
<p>“This is about faculty productivity and prestige,” U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly said of the global ranking in a telephone interview Monday. “It is meaningful for certain things and not necessarily meaningful for other things. We get that. This is about big muscular research universities doing what research universities claim is their mission.”</p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p>For its global analysis, U.S. News drew on data from Thomson Reuters InCites on various aspects of university research. Among them: global and regional reputations, scholarly publications, citations and impact, international collaboration, and awards of doctoral degrees. Omitted from this formula are factors such as undergraduate admissions selectivity, graduation rates, alumni donations and some other measures typically included in the domestic ranking. </p>
<p>In other words - This is a subjective ranking of the global reputation and collected published works of faculty, and doctoral students. What have they produced as far as research and scholarly papers - Oh, yeah… as long as those are NOT in the fields of arts and humanities. OK - well, I guess that’s a data point.</p>
<p>But this means nothing with regards to UVa’s reputation or quality of undergraduate education - which, last I checked, is why my son (along with 15,000+ other undergraduates) was attending, and what the majority of people coming to CC are concerned with. I would never counsel anyone to select a school for undergraduate based on its faculty research and doctoral programs - apples and oranges.</p>
<p>Let’s also keep in mind that many universities that are well known for their technical and scientific masters and doctoral programs have much much larger programs in those fields than UVa. That means those larger universities have many more profs, doctoral students and research that people around the world would know.</p>