<p>MD0058,</p>
<p>RE: your comment on UMD only ever becoming so selective because of the need to admit a certain amount of students from PG County. Isn’t that what Bowie St. is for?</p>
<p>Bowie State is an HBCU, so it does not have any such obligation. </p>
<p>Strictly speaking, neither does UMCP have a hard-wired requirement to admit a pre-set percentage from its immediate neighborhood. (It’s just that in order to nip criticism in the bud from those that matter, the flagship’s President is expected to show that he’s serving the community in ways that appeal to them - a tough task that, I’m told, Loh has far greater mastery over than Mote, Kirwan (as president), or Toll ever had. Loh will be cheered both by the masses and his masters in ways the other three I mentioned never were, though it’s largely on account of their persistence that UMCP bears little resemblance to what Maryland’s flagship university would otherwise have been.)</p>
<p>And finally, to keep afloat, UMCP has always admitted many out-of-state kids who pay full fare (some excellent, some mediocre, others …).</p>
<p>You are saying that UMCP needs OOS kids to stay afloat? And that a good percentage are either mediocre or worse? I think the middle 50% SAT, ACT and GPAs of at least the past few incoming freshman classes do not support your assertion. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the ARWU has ranked the school 38th best in the world, 29th nationally, and 13th among U.S. public research universities. The university placed 16th in the category of engineering/technology and computer science, In specific subjects, UMD ranks No. 15 in computer science, No. 19 in physics, and No. 24 in math, economics and business. Not too shabby, wouldn’t you agree?</p>
<p>My observation (and other faculty colleagues agree) has been that the undergraduate student population is bimodal; there’s the reasonably smart group (about half of a junior-level class in say a core math or applied math course) and there’s the second cluster (made up of those who are struggling). The size of the second cluster hasn’t shrunk appreciably in over two decades up to 2008. (Maybe, it has improved over the past five years - I couldn’t tell.) </p>
<p>The budget situation (or more precisely, the admin’s priorities re spending) makes it necessary to admit a visible percentage of kids, with average records, who will pay full tuition. (In every respect, UMCP is heaven compared with another USM university that I’ve seen - but shan’t name, for fear of being labeled blasphemous - from the inside for a bit.) </p>
<p>My point is: UMCP’s very good, and if my grandkids were applying for college today, I’d recommend UMCP over Johns Hopkins (that should tell what I think of its place among universities) but it could become so much better (as in the top 10 in math, physics, CS, EE, …, top 20 in the biosciences) a lot sooner than it seems it will.</p>
<p>But do you really think the undergraduate population drives the prestige and rankings? I was under the impression it had more to do with the faculty, their publications and their perceived influence within academic circles (read ability to get money). Related to this idea then is the ability to nab top talent among graduate school students. Undergraduate education has, and will always be, a necessary burden on the faculty, but never it’s primary focus, and simply a money making scheme for the administration at large. They could care less about the struggling students so long as they graduate or leave early enough to be back filled by high caliber transfers and the reasonably smart group gets into name brand programs for graduate school.</p>
<p>@da6onet You’re absolutely right, the graduate/research rankings that I referred to are driven by faculty research quality and the graduate student population, both of which are tightly intertwined. They can however be subtly driven in one direction or another by overall admin policy, e.g. how hard does a university make it for top faculty breadwinners (bread=grants) to pursue real research? UMCP has been pretty good in this respect (thanks to some excellent past presidents) and hence its reputation has risen steadily.</p>
<p>(“Undergraduate reputation” as perceived by the public, is itself a complex notion, that I’m ignoring here - it depends perhaps on entry SAT scores, time to graduation, placement etc.) </p>
<p>The overall research atmosphere does have a link, even if it’s just a weak link, to the undergraduate program. For example, do a significant chunk of the top undergraduates seriously ever consider continuing with graduate work at College Park, or is it a given that they head straight to MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley? I have sensed that if our upper-level courses were a bit more challenging, then we might have had a few more of our own undergrads work on PhDs right here. Instead, most of UMCP’s grad students were (and likely still are) from abroad. UMCP will really have arrived when it can happily hire more than just a few of its own PhDs (who have earned undergraduate degrees too right here) back into the faculty, as do Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT! Maybe in another 50 years …</p>
<p>But don’t most universities shy away from academic inbreeding? That is to say, don’t you want your students to earn their PhD at Maryland and then go research/teach elsewhere? Essentially growing the brand.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about the undergraduate to graduate path, since that can be a function of having the right mix of specialists/institutions doing something that interests the student more than the school name itself. I have a good friend who didn’t bother with applying to Stanford grad school because the top people in his desired area of research were at CalTech and MIT. That doesn’t diminish Stanford, or even UMD for that matter, in my opinion. Likewise I have an acquaintance that was an MIT undergrad who got his PhD at UIUC for the same reason.</p>
<p>Unless you’re making a statement about a lack of mentorship/fostering of top graduating seniors at UMD?</p>
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<p>MD0058,</p>
<p>Your comments on preferring that your grandchildren attend UMCP over Hopkins struck a chord. I admit I am biased since I have a freshman daughter at UMCP ( I am biased toward Hopkins too - strong family connection there). Given the two choices, and if there are no scholarship dollars in play, and you are an in-state student, UMCP is the greater value. My brother has an undergraduate degree in Physics from Hopkins and his doctorate in Astrophysics from UMCP. He was attracted to UMCP because of the academic reputation of its Physics department and while serving as a TA, he said he would put their best students up against Hopkins’ best in those particular classes. Overall, Hopkins had a higher quality math / science student body, but of course, it is a much smaller school with a world renowned reputation in the sciences.</p>
<p>I think that Loh only wants UMCP to continue to climb (and 38th in the world today is not too shabby). He happily accepted the Big 10’s money, but as an academic, I believe he was also attracted to the conference from a flagship, research university perspective.</p>
<p>@MD0058: There’s still a fear among faculty of incestuously re-creating their weaknesses in their young, so a lot of schools or at least faculty will encourage their best students to go away to grad school. In fact, only in exceptional cases would we hire one of own own PhDs, and only after they’ve proven themselves elsewhere. In my experience in the humanities, this is a fairly common taboo. As a consequence, I think you’re expecting too much if you’re judging the quality of UMD based on their ability to hold onto their best u/gs instead of sending them off. I cannot agree less that arrival is determined by a willingness to hire one’s own PhDs rather than an ability to get the MITs et al., to hire them. </p>
<p>@DavidHopkins: Four years ago, UMCP was 36th - it has fallen two places, since.</p>
<p>@jkeil911: I can’t speak to the situation in the humanities, but in the hard sciences I would point to UIUC as an example. They’re in the top 10 in many subfields (actually, so in UMCP in quite a few) and they’re confident enough to practice inbreeding. (One might argue that only those who went to grad school in Urbana would choose to live there for eternity …
.) Or Berkeley for that matter where a good percentage of the faculty are Berkeley PhDs, as was Dan Mote (BS, MS, and PhD all from Berkeley and a Engrg Prof there for over three decades!) It’s a two-way street, when a university is so good that its (very best) graduates can’t wait to return, and their alma mater likewise eagerly locks them in. Again, I concede it might be quite different in the humanities.</p>
<p>I saw this today…Maryland is #9 on the list of ‘smartest’ public colleges in the U.S…just ahead of UNC 
<a href=“http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/article/227936/umcp-9th-in-ranking-of-smartest-public-colleges-naval-academy-in-top-20”>http://baltimore.citybizlist.com/article/227936/umcp-9th-in-ranking-of-smartest-public-colleges-naval-academy-in-top-20</a></p>