Are public universities hurt or helped by USNWR methodology?

Applying to College
61

<p>Lbp,
Re your comment about changes expected in college costs and the impact on publics and privates, I disagree with your conclusions. States today are generally under a tremendous amount of budgetary pressure and their ability/willingness to spend on college education is likely to be increasingly crimped over time. This trend has been ongoing for a decade or more and some public universities (U Virginia most prominently among them) are increasingly adopting a formula of a privately funded public university. While “rich” publics like U Virginia and U Texas and others will likely be able to pull this off, other state universities have lower endowments (and particularly so if measured on a per capita basis) and will be less able to make up the shortfalls in state funding. Privates have a long history of fundraising that many publics are only just beginning to develop. This difference is having, and will continue to have, an important financial impact on the state universities.</p>

<p>For states, part of the political response might be more requirements for colleges to meet political objectives rather than academic ones. For example, a state might withhold their funding unless a school (officially or unofficially) adopts an admissions policy that is politically responsive for the citizens of the state and not about building the best entering class of students possible. As a result, examples like hoedown posted above about the large number of sub-1000 SAT admits at UC Berkeley may become more common. This might be good social policy and might even be the right step for the university, but some (including me) will question if this dilutes the quality of the student body and ultimately the school. </p>

<p>The funding issues also have faculty implications. Private universities already have a financial advantage over most publics and if the money continues to get tighter and tighter around public universities, many of the top faculty might be even more inclined to vote with their feet and leave for greener (as $ greener) pastures. Should this come to pass, the Peer Assessment score of the public universities could be impacted and IMO this is the single biggest boost that publics get in the rankings. Ex-PA, nearly all of the top publics suffer with some like U Michigan, falling 10 or more ranking spots. </p>

<p>Bluebayou,
Your comments about the UC system and financial aid also dovetail into my thinking above. While the UC system is certainly to be applauded for its compassionate approach in providing these opportunities to lower income students, this will likely translate into an incoming class that is less scholastically accomplished based on the traditional measuring sticks. You may reject those measuring sticks (an increasingly heard argument among public school proponents and some academics and probably a worthwhile topic for another thread), but those are part of the current evaluation and ranking process. This also extends into the “diversity” arguments so often expressed about college admissions practices. </p>

<p>Re these low income students and their ability to make gifts as alumni, I think your comments are right on the money. The AG statistic as applied to the large majority of state universities is a drag on the USNWR rankings and schools, like UCs, with large numbers of Pell grantees are clearly disadvantaged.</p>

62

<p>UVA also has a large number of out-of-state undergrads, about 30%. Higher tuition for this sizable group help to make it more like a private institution. UVA's out-out-state undergrads population is roughly the same size as Princeton's total undergrads. Wm & Mary's proportion of out-of-state undergrads is about the same percentage as UVA, but W&M is a smaller school with a smaller endowment.</p>

63

<p>Can anyone suggest some new measures that should be included in the USNWR survey? Many CC posters posit that the overall college experience that state universities offer is often superior to smaller privates or LACs in terms of the breadth of academic opportunity, the variety of social options, the diversity of the student body and the spirit of the school fed by varsity sports. Can any of this be measured and should it?</p>

64

<p>I don't think any of these criteria should explicitly be included in general college rankings (like US News') because they measure life-style preferences rather than the academic quality of an institution (and colleges are academic institutions and should be treated as those).
A business school does not need to offer academic breadth, nor do historically black or women's colleges need diversity and students enrolling at them do accept (or even like) the lack of social options. And I certainly won't attend a LAC to study business or engineering.</p>

<p>Btw, some top-ranked LACs have cross-registration programs with other LACs and big research universities (e.g. Amherst-Smith-Mt Holyoke-Hampshire-UMass and Swarthmore-Haverford-Bryn Mawr-UPenn and [MIT-]Wellesley-Brandeis-Babson-Olin) which increase the course offerings and social options available to students.</p>

65

<p>" Privates have a long history of fundraising that many publics are only just beginning to develop. This difference is having, and will continue to have, an important financial impact on the state universities."</p>

<p>I think most early indications are that publics are becoming very good at fundraising and are just getting started. The Top 5 or so privates with large endowments are not in danger but the top publics have and more will surpass the more modest endowments of schools like NYU, Rochester, USC, Emory, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Case, Brown etc. The battle is yet to be really fought.</p>

66

<p>Barrons,
I don’t see the evidence that large endowments are the norm at Public Universities. They have a lot of catching up to do and combined with the general declines in state funding and taxpayer perspectives that they already support the schools thru their taxes, I don’t see this quickly reversing for a large number of publics. You may be right that state universities are learning quickly about fundraising, but I question your conclusion that they are going to be able to catch up to many of the top privates that you mention. </p>

<p>Consider the top publics (as measured by total endowment size) and then consider their per capita (undergrad and grad) amounts:</p>

<p>U Texas (size of $13.2 bn, $262,716)
U California ($5.7bn, 170,857)
U Michigan ($5.7bn, $141,331)
Texas A&M ($5.6bn, na)
U Virginia ($3.6bn, $150,331) </p>

<p>Now consider some of the top privates that you state will be surpassed by the publics:</p>

<p>In Better Shape than the Publics
Emory ($4.87bn, $394.717)
Northwestern ($5.14bn, $302,322)
Brown ($2.17bn, $266,663)
Vanderbilt ($2.95bn, $253,846)</p>

<p>In about the same position as the Publics
Case Western ($1.6bn, $166,656)
U Rochester ($1.49bn, $165,202)</p>

<p>Worse off than the Publics
USC ($3.07bn, $92,907)
NYU ($1.77bn, $43,423)</p>

<p>Like most of the Public Universities, USC and NYU have large graduate programs which lower their per capita numbers and these graduate programs cost a lot more money than undergraduates. I would agree that they need to get on the stick and raise their endowments. However, for the other institutions that you reference, particularly the first group of four schools (Emory, Northwestern, Brown, and Vanderbilt), I would conclude that they are well-positioned financially and can meet any challenges posed by the publics. </p>

<p>***The size numbers are now almost a year old as they are taken from the end of the last fiscal year (6/30/06). I suspect that all of the numbers are considerably higher than those shown above.</p>

67

<p>hawkette,</p>

<p>I don't know where you got those public school numbers from, but many of them are very wrong.</p>

<p>you wrote:</p>

<p>U Texas (size of $13.2 bn, $262,716)
U California ($5.7bn, 170,857)
U Michigan ($5.7bn, $141,331)
Texas A&M ($5.6bn, na)
U Virginia ($3.6bn, $150,331) </p>

<p>The UT endowment is system wide--for about 190,000 students. UT-Austin's share is about 5.5 billion--which is about $100,000/student</p>

<p>UC's endowment is also system wide, and is $7.3 billion--serving nearly 200,000 students. Berkeley's share is $2.2 billion and that makes about a $71,000/student endowment.</p>

<p>Texas A&M's endowment is also system wide. It serves nearly 100,000 students giving it a $55,000/student endowment. I couldn't find TAM's main campus slice of the pie.</p>

<p>UVa's endowment of $3.6 billion serves roughly 20,000 students--giving it a $180,000/student endowment.</p>

<p>As for the endowment numbers, the reason why most publics don't need endowments is because they receive public spending. Say a school receives on average a 10% return on the endowment, and spends half of that on the school, and pumps the other half back into the endowment. Say the school has a $1 billion endowment. That would mean the school gets $50 mil to spend from endowment funds. A public school which receives $50 mil from the state doesn't need a $1 billion endowment because it gets it from the state, privates do not have that option.</p>

<p>The current issue is that publics are receiving less and less support from the state. This is the reason why they are currently trying to build their endowments--to replace that loss. </p>

<p>Regardless, the endowment doesn't play as pivitol role that most people thing. Take UPenn for example. It has like a $5 billion endowment--and using the average numbers I figured, it gets $250 million to spend from the endowment. UPenn has a $4 billion operating budget--of which about 6% would come from the endowment. Not exactly the main source of income.</p>

68

<p>jags861,
The endowment numbers are dated from last summer. I got them from a link that I think barrons provided a few months ago (it was some source that tracks endowments nationally and listed a large number of schools). Markets are up a lot since then and a lot more cash has been raised as well. You may be right on the Texas and California per capita numbers, but I am quite sure that the info for U Virginia and U Michigan are accurately portrayed as of 6/30/06 (and this is the same measuring point for the privates as well). </p>

<p>I hear you on the state funding as a source of operating cash for the public universities and how this is under pressure and going lower. I agree that that is the problem that publics are trying to address with their increased fundraising efforts. Some are pretty far along with this and will be fine. Many others, however, are under $1bn in size and they have a real challenge ahead of them if they want to stay financially competitive with the top privates.</p>

69

<p>hawkette,</p>

<p>the problem is most publics arn't trying to be competitive with top privates--at least at the undergraduate level. only a handful (mostly uva, michigan, berkeley, w&m, ucla, and possibly unc and wisconsin) do anyway.</p>

70

<p>I havent read the previous posts but I guarantee you, state schools are generally helped by US News. State schools focus on funding, research and SAT averages, which fits right in with the US news criteria. The only reason schools like Berkeley don't get to be top 15 or even top 10 in US news rankings is that they have large classes and have low relative reputations, imo.
By the way, US News rankings should be ditched.
There's a new ranking done by harvard and wharton economics professors : "A Revealed Preference Ranking of Colleges". This ranks colleges by their simple appeal to college bound high performing seniors. In other words, it's a rank of choice, if one counterfactually gets into all schools. The research was done with 3,300 or so high school seniors over 690 high schools in the US. Adequately reliable, or at least telling of how erroneous US News is. </p>

<p>The top 20 or so are as follows:</p>

<p>Harvard
Yale
Stanford
Cal Tech
MIT
Princeton
Brown
Columbia
Amherst
Dartmouth
UPenn (except Wharton which fared like fifth)
Swarthmore
Wellseley
Notre Dame
Georgetown
Cornell
Rice
.... </p>

<p>Princeton is a good school but not a contender for Harvard, unlike US News.
Wellseley, Swarthmore, Notre Dame, UPenn and Georgetown and so forth were 10~15, which makes VERY much sense, unlike what US News says.
Duke falls to 19th, which makes sense..(not that it's a bad school)</p>

71

<p>Transfer, that study is actually a few years old, not "new" as you say. And revealed preference rankings are relatively innaccurate because they do take numerous things into account, such as ED vs. EA vs. SCEA. And even if they were accurate, people's opinions are completely non connected to objective reality.</p>

72

<p>It wasn't a simple opinion poll. Did it take different admissions criteria into account like ED and EA? I thought it controlled all confounds so that the most important factor was "how many times a given school "beat" the others in terms of admissions choice." Revealed Preference, by the way, is not just an opinion poll; it's an objective method of measuring consumer preference based on Bayesian statistics. </p>

<p>True, Princeton may not be sixth but more like third or fourth. That's only when tech schools are taken out of the picture. It's almost impossible to tell whether MIT is harder to get into than Princeton; I'd say, based on my experience and observing the results of friends from my high school, that MIT is a tiny bit harder, but it depends on what kind of student you are. </p>

<p>Even if this relatively new ranking had its downfalls, you wouldn't say that US News is too accurate either: Duke 4th, Penn 4th, CalTech 9th, Brown 15th, Georgetown 24th...this makes no sense at all, given the SAT scores, grades, general "name value" among high school seniors, difficulty of admissions, etc. Schools like Penn, Cornell or Duke, for example, pick more than 20% of its applicants, which is almost double that of Stanford or Caltech or Brown. Penn's average SAT score is about 40 points lower than Brown's, and almost 80 points lower than Caltech's.</p>

73

<p>
[quote]

Can anyone suggest some new measures that should be included in the USNWR survey? Many CC posters posit that the overall college experience that state universities offer is often superior to smaller privates or LACs in terms of the breadth of academic opportunity, the variety of social options, the diversity of the student body and the spirit of the school fed by varsity sports. Can any of this be measured and should it?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Concerning new measures, I think graduate placement numbers should be included and percentage of classes taught by TAs. However, what I really want, and would gladly pay USNWR money for, is the ability to assign my own weightings to the criteria and generate rankings that are more meaningful to me. One area of debate about the USNWR rankings is the weightings they assign, or the fact that they include some measures at all. That, in part, is what this thread is about. Providing a roll-you-own tool would allow USNWR's data would eliminate much of the debate. The debate would shift to how valid your weightings are. People, many CCers I suspect, would publish their weightings and explain why they are better the USNWR's or anyone else's.</p>

<p>I think it is important to distinguish between selection factors and ranking measures. Some, such as SAT scores, can be used for both, but most do not lend themselves to both. State or region of the country can be used for selection, but becomes extremely difficult to use as a ranking. Diversity is also hard to rank. Is 70% white better or worse than 65% white? Alumni giving can be, and is, used for ranking, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels the need to filter out schools with AG < 25%. Both selection factors and ranking measures should be employed to narrow the list. Collegboard and princtonreview provide tools for narrowing down the field by state, region, etc, but once a few dozen schools are selected, the rankings come in to play. They are far from perfect though but any whittling down of the field can be helpful. When a good working list has been developed, potential applicants start asking, "what's the best school for me that I can get in to?" There's really no way to come up with reach/match/safety schools without asking this question.</p>

74

<p>My point was that 10 years ago there were hardly any state schools with over $1 Billion endowment. They have grown at a much higher RATE than many of the privates. </p>

<p>Top 25 from 1995</p>

<p>Market value (in thousands)
1995 ---------------------------<br>
rank Institution June 30, 1994 June 30,1995</p>

<ol>
<li> Harvard U $6,201,220 $7,045,863</li>
<li> U of Texas System 4,549,214 5,043,333</li>
<li> Yale U 3,529,000 3,959,080</li>
<li> Princeton U 3,446,818 3,882,421</li>
<li> Stanford U(1) 2,750,774 3,088,291</li>
<li> Emory U 1,691,166 2,232,188</li>
<li> Texas A&M U System and Foundations 2,055,808 2,220,016</li>
<li> Columbia U 1,918,148 2,172,869</li>
<li> U of California 1,750,203 2,143,393</li>
<li> Massachusetts Inst of Technology 1,777,777 2,078,414</li>
<li> Washington U 1,737,957 2,060,963</li>
<li> U of Pennsylvania 1,464,455 1,675,740</li>
<li> Rice U 1,278,524 1,529,982</li>
<li> Cornell U 1,248,980 1,475,577</li>
<li> Northwestern U 1,275,412 1,437,000</li>
<li> U of Chicago 1,223,980 1,377,990</li>
<li> U of Michigan 1,005,198 1,321,432</li>
<li> U of Notre Dame 878,928 996,895</li>
<li> Dartmouth C 788,007 902,234</li>
<li> U of Southern California 791,355 883,798</li>
<li> Johns Hopkins U 740,864 838,220</li>
<li> U of Virginia 724,750 823,935</li>
<li> Duke U 699,003 782,093</li>
<li> New York U 692,461 741,062</li>
<li> U of Minnesota and Foundation 655,971 733,583</li>
</ol>

75

<p>
[quote]
It wasn't a simple opinion poll. Did it take different admissions criteria into account like ED and EA? I thought it controlled all confounds so that the most important factor was "how many times a given school "beat" the others in terms of admissions choice." Revealed Preference, by the way, is not just an opinion poll; it's an objective method of measuring consumer preference based on Bayesian statistics.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Very true, but comparing an ED school to an EA school is like comparing an apple to an oramge. Take Princeton, for example. Since the people that applied ED (the people for whom Princeton is their first choice by far) are barred from applying anywhere else RD (unlike those at other [EA] schools), there is no way they can be cross-admits so they are not included in the revealed preference ranking. Many of HYSM's EA admits, however, do apply RD to other schools (maybe for financial resons, maybe just out of curiosity)but end up going for their original first choice in the end. By doing that they boost their school's standing in the "battle for cross admits." That is why Princeton, and Brown for that matter, are at a disadvantage on your chart.</p>

<p>BTW, I agree that the US News rankings are total crap. How does a school jump five places in one year?</p>

76

<p>^^^ Brown has ED, doesn't it?</p>

77

<p>
[quote]
"it was some source that tracks endowment nationally"

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The two most uniform sources for endowment information are NACUBO and the Chronicle of Higher Education. You may not subscribe to their publications or read them daily, but they are good sources for this kind of reference material, and I would urge people to use them and know which they are citing when offering data to readers on this board.</p>

78

<p>hoedown,
It was NACUBO. I had never heard of it before coming to CC. I am not an academic professional so sorry for not being able to cite the source. I just couldn't remember the name.</p>

<p>Ernie,
The reason that schools can jump five spots in a year is that one of the following happens:
1. The rankings from the year before were off for some reason (like when Emory misreported their endowment numbers) and the newer rankings are more "accurate" as measured by the data and methodology
2. The methodology changed (usually the biggest impact)
3. Many of the key metrics at a school changed for the better or worse. This is more rare, but I would argue that schools change more often than is commonly recognized. </p>

<p>The Educational Establishment does all it can to perpetuate the status quo, but students are selecting from a broader range of schools than ever before and this raises the quality of the student body at some previously unprestigious universities. With so many more students applying to college (and so many more top students to go around), it should be expected that some schools can jump several spots. The fact, however, is that such moves don't happen very often and if you compare the current USNWR Top 20 to the Barrons 1969 Top 20, there is great similarity. To me, it is the lack of change in education that is odd and not that there are occasional notable changes in the rankings.</p>

79

<p>
[quote]
The Educational Establishment does all it can to perpetuate the status quo

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Statements like this always get me curious--who are these people?</p>

80

<p>
[quote]
1. The rankings from the year before were off for some reason (like when Emory misreported their endowment numbers) and the newer rankings are more "accurate" as measured by the data and methodology
2. The methodology changed (usually the biggest impact)
3. Many of the key metrics at a school changed for the better or worse. This is more rare, but I would argue that schools change more often than is commonly recognized.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>True, those things happen. But 5 spots in one year??? And a * completely different * ranking every year??? The things you mentioned can't count for all that. US News just does it to sell copies.</p>