Are public universities hurt or helped by USNWR methodology?

Applying to College
21

<p>
[quote]
You are probably in a better position than me or most of us to know what are the rough levels of spending by colleges on their undergraduates vs their undergraduates.

[/quote]
I haven't done that kind of financial analysis. </p>

<p>If the two-to-one ratio is what you are going by, can you be more specific about which public universities you meant? I ask because Michigan, UCLA, and Virginia each have about twice as many undergrads as grad/prof students. Berkeley's ratio is a bit higher. This suggests total spending on programs would be about equal (the share going to grad students is about 50%), at least on these four campuses. That still may be an area of concern for students, but given those numbers it doesn’t seem “lion’s share” fits for those publics. Do you know what the ratio is for privates?</p>

<p>I don’t know if the rule of thumb was based on professional programs or not. Some of those programs do gobble up a lot of resources. However, it bears mentioning that those students also pay pretty high tuition--and do not typically attend on any stipend/assistantship arrangement. In other words, the programs may demand a lot of expenditure, but they also bring in a lot of revenue. It’s not clear to me, given those circumstances, how much they take away from the undergraduate program.</p>

<p>As for how they get expenditures. Wouldn't that have to be IPEDS data? I don't poke around there much, but it seems to be that's where it would come from if US News is looking for a reasonably consistent source.</p>

22

<p>other things to keep in mind about professional schools. at least at UVa, the law school and the business school (and i'm sure the med school as well) have their own endowments, and are completely privately funded. therefore the University doesn't give extra money to them, as they are essentially separate schools with the "university of virginia" tag above them. are these numbers included?--they arn't taking money away from ugrads.</p>

23

<p>They are all rolled into the overall UVa budget data so they would be included.</p>

24

<p>barrons,
Do you have any thoughts on relative spending levels for grad students relative to undergrads?</p>

25

<p>jags861,
If you go back to my post comparing how the methodology helps or hurts public schools, you will see that I did not include Financial Resources as favoring one or the other. I just don't know and am hoping that others can provide greater insight into just what the Financial Resources rankings mean.</p>

26

<p>I think Medical and Engineering educations are very expensive. Liberal arts and business just a little more than undergrad. You could probably pull the entire budgets for Medical School and Law out as they don't serve many if any undergrads. It would be lots of work. UVa and Michigan have detailed budgets with breakdowns by school on their websites. They do not break out grad and undergrad for common depts that offer both.</p>

<p><a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/greybk_aadet_fy07.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/greybk_aadet_fy07.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.virginia.edu/budget/2006-2007%20Budget%20Summary.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.virginia.edu/budget/2006-2007%20Budget%20Summary.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

27

<p>jags - try graduating from Cook College (Rutgers U) as a pre-vet animal science major in 4 years, no summer school, no AP credit, no transfer credit. You have no priority in classes that cap at 50 students until you are a senior. The pre-reqs and co-reqs change yearly - and you have to abide by every change. You cannot take more than 18 credits a semester, and you need 130 to graduate. You'll see that without slacking off you'll need more than 4 yrs to graduate.</p>

28

<p>Also relevant to this discussion about undergrads seeing the lion's share of expenditure going to grad students--some top privates have just as many grad students as they do undergrads. Or more.</p>

29

<p>Hawkette,</p>

<p>i guess i was responding to kyledavid's comments about financial resources. either way, it wasn't a knock, it was just an observation about why numbers arn't easily transfered from 1 school to another, let alone groups of schools to different groups of schools.</p>

<p>NJ_Mom,</p>

<p>I appreciate the fact that graduating from rutgers cook in some vet program might be difficult. what can I tell you. i'm not talking about a 2nd tier state university with enormous budgetary problems and a broken administration vs. top private schools. i'm talking about the cream of the crop when it comes to publics. at UVa, i've never had problems getting into classes. i've never had friends who have had problems getting into classes. in fact, at UVa, you're required to graduate in 8 semesters (albiet, not 8 consecutive) if you are in the college (the largest undergrad division at the school).</p>

<p>Besides that, I'm assuming most schools ranked around rutgers have similar problems. I'm just saying, most students who keep up with a regular course load should be able to graduate with no problem 4 years. I went to college with AP 11 credits, took no summer school, and I'll graduate 5 credits over what I need...in 4 years, taking 12 credits (the minimum) both semesters my 4th year.</p>

30

<p>hawkette: I hadn't seen your reply till just now, sorry.</p>

<p>"However, unlike my position on PA, I don’t think you’d support eliminating or separating out this measure, would you?"</p>

<p>I actually find PA to be downright nonsensical, even though it benefits certain publics like Berkeley quite a bit.</p>

<p>"I think that this clearly shows the 'holistic' approach at work for private school admissions."</p>

<p>Agreed. I was attempting to point out that some point to UPenn and the like and say, "Unlike Berkeley and UCLA, they actually admit students based on many things, not just rank," yet the same people are silent when you point out that Harvard has similar numbers.</p>

<p>"Finally, I am curious to know how you would tinker with the rankings methodology if it were up to you."</p>

<p>I agree with you, for the most part. I for one think that overall rankings are pointless and that tiers are more accurate. But if I had to tinker with rankings, I'd make it less endowment-oriented (you can practically rank schools on endowment and come out with a very similar ranking to US News') and, would make it focus more on other factors: undergrad experience, cost, and subjective scores like dorm quality -- as these are the factors that parents and students look at, and rankings are supposed to aid in this. Getting all those factors together to make an aggregate score would be the tricky part, something which I don't think any magazine will ever perfect.</p>

31

<p>kyledavid,
Good points. I would also like to think of some way to measure the overall college experience. I think that public universities do a wonderful job of providing a broad and balanced college experience. As great as it must be to go to a place like Columbia or Brown or Amherst, I think that the social life experiences at a U Virginia or UC Berkeley or many top publics would be bigger, broader, and likely better. I'm not sure how to measure this, but I think that this gets left out of the equation. Some private schools also do a good job with this, eg, schools like Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and in my view, probaby offer a broader "college experience" than their Ivy and top LAC peers. Do you or anyone else have any thoughts on this on how to broaden USNWR's methodology to capture some of the aspects of college life outside of the classroom?</p>

32

<p>The USnews rankings were created to assure that public universities would not crack the top ten. The orginators chose Harvard, Yale, and Princeton as the schools by which everything else would be measured. They looked at those schools and came up with the factors to consider by determining the factors those three were best in. It is no accident that those three are always in the top 5. In fact, back in the late 90s, USNews changed some of its factors and for one year Caltech became number one, and the USnews powers to be deemed that unacceptable and reversed the changes. HYP were good at smaller class sizes, test scores, alumni giving, student retention, student spending and others that publics often have a weakness with including because of reliance on state funding and state policies that require publics to take in as many in-state students as they possibly can. It was no accident that such things as cost of tuition, offering oppurtunity to as many as possible, and other things that state universities are good at, and HYP are not, were left out of the equation.</p>

33

<p>state universities do benefit in rankings of specific majors..such as those of engineering..cause those are based solely on (voluntary) peer assesment...</p>

34

<p>and PA is all based on graduate programs, which public schools tend to have good ones</p>

35

<p>I'm entering the discussion late, but I do have a point that I don't think anyone has addressed relating to faculty resources. I'm assuming the criteria set forth by OP is complete and correct. Perhaps that's not a good idea, but here goes.</p>

<p>If percentage of classes taught by graduate teaching assistants were included in the faculty resources mix - and I think it should be - public universities would not fair as well. As hawkette points out, "PA scores seem to have a high correlation with research activity. As public schools perform comparatively more research, they are beneficiaries of this favoring." This research activity takes away from PhD time in the undergraduate classroom and often times TA's end up taking their place. Student-faculty ratio may also be skewed by a large number of faculty members with little or no undergrad teaching load. Percentage of classes taught by TA's would help to correct the overstated student-faculty ratio at the research-oriented publics.</p>

<p>Another area that USNRW does not consider that would potentially hurt the publics is job placement within "n" months of graduation. (I include acceptance to grad school as job placement.) With student loan burdens becoming quite large, job placement has become an increasingly important factor. I don't see it reflected in USNWR's methodology. Many smaller private schools are quite well connected in the job market and have placement rates at or near 100%. In fact, many of the reasons cited in various CC threads for attending an elite LAC or taking on more loan to attend an elite LAC relate directly or indirectly to job placement. Public U's are hard pressed to show similar success in job placement.</p>

36

<p>jags861, in the very recent past UVa had many problems that are common to schools with state funding as mentioned in this faculty senate memo. It comes and goes at most publics and even the very top privates (Yale, Stanford) had cutbacks after the last major market crash,.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.virginia.edu/facultysenate/mjsbovoct0502.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.virginia.edu/facultysenate/mjsbovoct0502.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

37

<p>**** USNWR....smart kids don't base their choice of college on USNWR...we go a visit, and experience the college and then make our own decision. USNWR is screwing around with kids and make overachievers out of common kids who could do just as well at Univeristy A (ranked int he top 50) or University B (ranked otherwise). I'm getting to the point that i don't even discuss rankings with my friends who are about to go throught the college process. it's merely unimportant.</p>

38

<p>Well, I agree with bsb2007 that many high school students (and their parents)base their college choice decision without regard to USNWR, but to a large degree that is more because of they lack the knowledge that such a rating system exists than it is because of a preference to do the choice that way.</p>

<p>Most parents I talk to have no idea where their students should go to college--what the requirements are to get into certain colleges--or what the possible advantages of attending college A over college B might possibly be. They don't know how to apply for financial aid, or what the criteria for aid is. (Parents with good student often believe that all aid is need-based, while those with need often think all financial aid is merit-based).</p>

<p>The whole reason, in my view, why college confidential is so popular is that it helps fill this void. And--IMHO--USNWR is doing much the same thing.</p>

<p>There are roughly 1400 schools rated in USNW. While it may be possible for someone to look over all 1400 by going website to website--it simply is not practical. </p>

<p>Take my own son's search as an example: My son was interested in a business education, he wanted to go to a UC, but neither he nor I had absolutely any idea of the difficulty of getting in to these schools. And while I was aware that only two had undergraduate business schools, he was not. And he didn't realize that one of those only allowed students to apply during the sophomore year. He liked the Ivies--but didn't realize the difficulty of getting in there either. He had no clue what schools may be good for his dream of pre-law with a finance major.</p>

<p>By using CC and USNWR, he made a fairly reasoned choice of 7 schools to apply to where he had decent odds of acceptance. Without USNWR (and if he had not found CC), it would likely have been necessary to apply to at least 30 schools to have a chance of finding one or two that might have matched his wants--and even then we would be searching the other guides in unison to get an idea of whether he was likely to be accepted (something you still have to do, by the way). And even then, who could be sure of their level of academic qualification or how they are viewed by company recruiters? We really would have been going entirely by word-of-mouth of previous graduates of the schools or high school counselor recommendations.</p>

<p>Personally, I think USNWR takes a bad rap for providing a much needed service. </p>

<p>Yes, the ratings are flawed because they include alumni giving rates (which have nothing to do with college academics and will benefit unfairly the top private schools--one of these days, they will throw that out and then UC Berkeley and UVA, UCLA, and Michigan will all move up about 10-15 spots), but other than that, most of the information is highly coveted by the average parent--things such as graduation rates, likely costs, chance of financial aid, best programs offered, etc.--and is something that is not offered in many of the other college guides.</p>

<p>Oh, and after final acceptances are out--presuming you got into more than one school--you should still visit the colleges and choose the one that you think will be the best fit for you (providing you didn't have the chance to do this prior to sending the applications).</p>

39

<p>
[quote]
**** USNWR....smart kids don't base their choice of college on USNWR...we go a visit, and experience the college and then make our own decision. USNWR is screwing around with kids and make overachievers out of common kids who could do just as well at Univeristy A (ranked int he top 50) or University B (ranked otherwise). I'm getting to the point that i don't even discuss rankings with my friends who are about to go throught the college process. it's merely unimportant.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Are you saying there's no difference between a top 25 university and a top 50 university? </p>

<p>IMO, rankings do matter. There might not be much of a difference between to universities within 10 ranks of each other, but there's a reason why ivies are ivies, and the rest are not.</p>

40

<p>
[quote]

smart kids don't base their choice of college on USNWR...we go a visit

[/quote]

Indeed. Visits are essential. How do you decide which schools to visit?</p>