While I’m a fanboy of UW, for it to move up, others would have to move down. Which Unis are ranked too high, in your estimation, JHS?
I think the USNWR methodology punishes public universities for educating a broader range of students than elite privates do. So I think pretty much all of the private universities are somewhat overrated. Some, of course, would still rank above Wisconsin even if the scoring system were more fair by my lights. But starting somewhere in the middle of the teens, I’m not so sure. I don’t know exactly what the situation is at Wisconsin today, but I sure as heck would have sent my kids to Wisconsin over Wake Forest, Rochester, Emory. I am also maybe a little skeptical about the high rankings of some of the UC campuses or William & Mary.
Some of the publics do an exceptional job educating the best and the brightest. And some do not- a kid studying a demanding major has the same bureaucracy or limited time/attention from faculty as the kid majoring in leisure studies or sports management, and does not have access to the resources that this same kid would have at a private institution.
That doesn’t make the private institution overrated- it means you should ignore the rankings if your kid isn’t going to be deterred by impacted majors or the difficulty enrolling in the classes that he/she needs in order to graduate on a timely basis.
That broad range of students includes the kids studying to become a phys ed teacher plus the kid studying mechanical or aerospace engineer. But if your kid is the aerospace engineer stuck in a small double with the phys ed major, don’t be surprised if the “intellectual engagement” in the dorm falls below your kids expectations.
261 "I don't know exactly what the situation is at Wisconsin today, but I sure as heck would have sent my kids to Wisconsin over Wake Forest, Rochester, Emory. I am also maybe a little skeptical about the high rankings of some of the UC campuses or William & Mary."
Depends upon the price. Lots of people would pick Wiscy at the IS price of $21k or the Minnesota price of $24k.
Some would pick Wiscy at the full OOS price of $40k. Some would pick Indiana or UM or UVA or UNC at their full OOS price. Some would pick a pricier private instead. Most would pick their own state flagship at the in-state price.
But clearly Wiscy is a great school. In fact, they are proposing to eliminate their in-state enrollment cap. At $40k, that’s a price/value proposition that a lot of people would pick.
So you can’t say Wiscy is in decline. It is bigger and better than ever most likely. But it consumes way more money than it did in the olden days, which is why it is financed differently than in the past.
A few weeks ago, the fellow at “publicunversityhonors.com” updated his analysis of US News rankings of undergraduate business and engineering departments and graduate biology, chemistry, computer science, earth sciences, economics, education, English, history, math, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology departments. The results are more in line with the views expressed by northwesty and JHS.
To make his list, a school had to have (US News 2016) ranked departments in at least 11 of these 15 disciplines. He notes, “Dartmouth, Caltech, Georgia Tech, Georgetown, Wake Forest, Tufts, and a few other outstanding universities are not listed below because they are too specialized or do not have at least 11 rated departments.” Here are the top 50 based on this methodology (the school’s average department ranking is in parenthesis):
1 Stanford (2.71)
2 UC Berkeley (3.47)
3 MIT (4.58)
4 Princeton (5.62)
5 Harvard (5.93)
6 Michigan (9.4)
7 Columbia (10.46)
8 Yale (11.38)
9 Chicago (12)
10 Cornell (12.07)
11 UCLA (12.21)
12 Wisconsin (12.4)
13 UT Austin (14.93)
14 Penn (18.27)
15 Northwestern (18.36)
16 Illinois (19.4)
17 Johns Hopkins (19.5)
18 Duke (20.85)
19 Washington (21.17 )
20 Minnesota (22.2)
21 North Carolina (22.57)
22 Ohio State (25.67)
23 Carnegie Mellon (26.55)
24 NYU (27.13)
25 Penn State (26.6)
26 UCSD (27.87)
27 Brown (27.92)
28 Maryland (28.47)
29 UC Davis (28.57)
30 Indiana (29.29)
31 Wash U (30.29)
32 Vanderbilt (32.07)
33 UC Irvine (33.53)
34 Virginia (33.6)
35 Rice (33.75)
36 Colorado (36.93)
37 UCSB (37.5)
38 USC (38)
39 Arizona (38.13)
40 Emory (40.45)
41 Purdue (41.13)
42 Texas A&M (42)
43 Michigan State (43.93)
44 Florida (44.47)
45 Pitt (45.13)
46 Rutgers (45.6)
47 Stony Brook SUNY (46.23)
48 Arizona State (46.67)
49 Iowa (48.13)
50 Massachusetts (49.83)
Binghamton SUNY must be 51.
Private schools that are not wealthy can have similar issues.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1556885-no-calc-101-for-you-p1.html
Note also that changing major across divisional boundaries at schools like CMU, Columbia, Cornell, and Penn requires some sort of admission process.
For at least some schools, physical education is essentially a biology major or a concentration within a biology major. Would that necessarily mean that the student in such a major would not be intellectually engaged, or less so than any other biology major?
Actually, his list goes up to 53:
51 Boston Univ (50.2)
52 Oregon (50.36)
53 Notre Dame (51.77)
So, maybe it’s 54. 
Re: post #265,
This ranking of universities is an interesting exercise, but the choice of disciplines seems a bit arbitrary, or perhaps even intentionally manipulated to make certain public institutions (Wisconsin?) look good. Many (or most?) elite privates don’t have undergrad business programs, which means they need to be “ranked” in 11 of the 14 hand-picked disciplines (rather than 11 of 15) in order to make the list. Also, many elite privates don’t have graduate programs in “education,” which means they need to be “ranked” in 11 of 13 to make the list. It becomes a kind of eye-of-the-needle test for private institutions. Also note that 7 of the 15 disciplines selected are STEM fields. I think STEM is important, but at most schools it represents nowhere near 50% of institutional effort, or student enrollment, or degrees awarded. So this list is going to be biased toward STEM-heavy institutions, and especially biased toward STEM-heavy institutions that also have strong undergrad business schools, strong graduate ed schools, and strong faculties in some core social science disciplines (econ, poli sci, psych, sociology). Sounds like a list tailor-made for Wisconsin to excel. Also, if you’re going to consider graduate program strength, why not also include law, medicine, and graduate business schools, the meat-and-potatoes of graduate-level education at most research institutions? Why include sociology but exclude anthropology? Why exclude such core (if not necessarily popular) humanities disciplines like classics and philosophy? Why education but not social work, journalism, public policy, nursing?
That said, I do think the list is not too far off from how I would rate the overall strength of the faculties of these institutions—not as teachers, necessarily, which is difficult to determine from the outside, but as researchers and scholars who produce work that is influential and advances knowledge in their fields, across a broad range of disciplines. I’d be more impressed with a list that included more disciplines, but I think Wisconsin would still come out looking pretty darned good. I’d guess Wisconsin would rank easily among the top 15 or 20 US universities on that sort of metric, and Michigan among the top 10 if not the top 5, with UC Berkeley very much in contention for the number one spot along with Stanford and Harvard.
I’m a big fan of Wisconsin, and especially of its faculty. What worries me, though, is that Wisconsin is no longer competitive in faculty salaries, and the gap appears to be growing. According to the AAUP, here are the 2013-14 average salaries for full professors at Wisconsin and its closest peer institutions among Midwestern public flagships:
Michigan $155K
Illinois $141K
Minnesota $129K
Ohio State $129K
Wisconsin $113K
In fact, Wisconsin ranks 13th out of 14 Big Ten universities in average full professor salaries, and 14th out of 15 among CIC institutions. Great faculty, yes, but in a way Wisconsin is living on the afterglow of past greatness. As its most senior “star” faculty move into retirement, it’s going to have difficulty recruiting and retaining the next generation of standout scholars as long as its salary structure remains uncompetitive. And that would be a loss for the people of the state of Wisconsin, and for the entire Upper Midwest, and for the nation.
The latest AAUP survey (2014-2015) has Wisconsin-Madison at $128K.
https://apir.wisc.edu/facultystaff/Faculty_Salary_Comparison_2014-15.pdf
The tables in the above memo provide 2014-15 average salary figures and percentage increases in average salaries for UW-Madison and the universities in it’s “official faculty salary peer group”. The “peer” group is important, as that helps drive salary negotiations.
Anyway! The average salary for a Full Prof has increased from $100K in 2005-06 to $128K in 2014-15. A rate a bit higher than the national average, so it’s been trending up, not flat or down.
In the case of Columbia, the requirement to submit a full transfer application to transfer from one division to another happened sometime after the late '90s or early '00s as before that, transferring from one division to another just required one year of being in good academic standing and submitting pro-forma administrative paperwork.
As getting admitted to Columbia SEAS was far easier in terms of overall GPA and SATs than the college provided one was a strong math student, plenty of strong math students like those attending NYC SHS or also magnets like TJSST used this factor to gain admission to SEAS and use it as an effective “backdoor” to transfer in and graduate from the “more prestigious” Columbia College up through the late '90s.
This was an open secret well-known to many Stuy and NYC SHS students in prior graduating classes, my graduating class, and for a few subsequent graduating classes who were strong in math but whose overall GPAs/SATs were very unlikely to get them admitted to the college or comparable elite Us.
The list in #265 really rubs one’s face in the extent to which USNWR rankings fundamentally depart from what I regard as the lodestar: faculty and research quality.
Be wary of average salary numbers! (Medians are better, but still not perfect.) They get skewed to some extent (not that much, but still enough) by the occasional “superstar” faculty hire, and universities with large, say, business or medicine schools end up looking like they pay way better than they do, at least from the POV of most of the faculty.
Add to that that colleges don’t generally report adjunct faculty compensation in these averages (they may make up more than half of the university-level teachers in the nation, but they’re not “real” faculty, you see), and you have numbers that make college teaching look quite a bit more lucrative than it actually is.
@bclintonk, actually, given the critieria, it’s a list tailor-made for Cal and UMich to excel in.
Yep. Average salaries at unis with top (and big) business, law, and medical schools can’t really be compared to averages at unis without those.
@PurpleTitan As is this one: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc1.html#TOP60 (much broader, but a little dated).
FYI: Medical schools are excluded from the AAUP data.
So true! Here’s an example, Lets say, via negotiations, a college increases it’s “Instructional Faculty” salaries, across the board, by 10%. However, in return, the college can now hire more adjunct faculty. All we would see is (in the AAUP data) an increase in salaries, we wouldn’t see the increase usage of adjunct faculty.
Yet the document you cite shows Wisconsin remains dead last in full professor salaries among the 12 schools in its “official” peer group (which includes the Midwestern public flagships I named as its “closest” peers due to their locations in Midwestern states with roughly comparable costs of living). While full professor salaries at Wisconsin have increased over the last decade, so have salaries at its peer institutions. Wisconsin isn’t closing that gap.
Finally, while it’s true that full professor salaries at Wisconsin are slightly higher than the national average for 4-year public universities, according to AAUP data they remain well below the national average for “very high research activity” universities—Wisconsin’s true peers and competitors.
“The list in #265 really rubs one’s face in the extent to which USNWR rankings fundamentally depart from what I regard as the lodestar: faculty and research quality.”
Everyone is entitled to his own lodestar. If you are hot for faculty research, go for it!
USNWR is focused on undergraduate programs. For them, the lodestar is prestige (however defined) and admissions selectivity. So their list looks different.
Playboy ranks on the quality of the party. So their list looks different too. By the way, Wiscy is #8 on that list!