Its logically flawed to act like quality of education can change and schools can improve but when there is evidence of that very thing happening (ie rankings changes) there is multiple rhetorics to the contrary. Rankings arent perfect obviously but they’re certainly better than opinions from the common folk.
Aprapos of nothing, I can never remember that Cornell and Columbia are Ivies when asked. I just had to look it up. LOL!
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So just to be clear, I don’t personally believe in ranking colleges at all.
But if we are going to be talking about college rankings, we need to be clear we are talking about the colleges. Grad programs and professional schools can all have different rankings than the college, but none of that matters if you don’t go to that grad program or professional school. What matters is whatever unit admits you and grants your degree.
Finally, I have very little desire to bash NYU so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on unfavorably comparing NYU as a college to Columbia as a college. Still, I’ll just note the last time I saw unlocked peer and counselor reputations, Columbia as a college had significantly higher scores than NYU as a college. That’s not a perfect measure, but that is the sort of thing I have in mind when referencing how at least a lot of people see these colleges in terms of peers. The point being US News can rank them by other factors if it likes, but such people will not necessarily be easily swayed to change their minds.
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Hmm.
I agree USC, like NYU in fact, has benefited from the “nationalization” trend, where more of the most competitive applicants are looking nationally and not just locally. Among other things, that has meant USC and NYU, and a lot of other colleges, have gotten a lot more selective in recent decades.
I am not sure that has actually harmed Oberlin and Wesleyan in the way you are suggesting.
This of course is part of the problem with rankings–they necessarily enforce a zero-sum logic on a situation that is not necessarily zero sum. Like, there is no natural limit to the number of good, very good, great, even better, or so on colleges in the United States. So, USC or NYU or so on can become “better” colleges in various way without that meaning some other colleges had to get “worse” in those ways.
In any event, USC and NYU are not on the same rankings list as Oberlin and Wesleyan (nor should they be). So I am not quite sure why you would think any of that was related in the first place.
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The older generation’s collective head would have exploded had they known Wesleyan would be the one better known for its film school than its football team.
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Wow, the outcomes at CBS are quite different than Stern. Last year, CBS had 155 grads going to MBB while Stern had 34.
2022-report.pdf (columbia.edu)
MBA Employment Report 2021-2022 (nyu.edu)
I’m a big advocate of Stern, as well as Columbia, but it’s still a tier below despite what the rankings say unless they measure outcomes vs. prior trajectory.
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In principle, this represents what statistics — if not rankings — do well. They recognize change before it can otherwise be readily perceived.
Let’s see where the dust settled.
Columbia moved up to #12 in USN ranking (despite not cooperating).
Across the other 3 most best known US college rankings (all of which were refreshed within the last month) it is either #5 or #6 in each. (Though none of the others – Forbes, Niche, WSJ – come close to USN’s public awareness.) Aggregated across all four rankings (which is methodologically meaningless but just for kicks), Columbia is #6 by median rank and #7 by average rank (closely ahead of and closely behind UPenn, respectively), either #4 or #5 among the Ivys. (Both aggregated metrics, FWIW, safety confirm HYPSM as the T5, with Princeton as #1 in 3 of the 4 rankings).
Since this topic was comparing NYC colleges above, NYU dropped to #35 (from #25). When applied to the same 4-rank aggregation, its median rank for national universities is also #35. (It drops further if Liberal Arts Colleges are included.). It ranks #45 in the 4-rank university averages.
NYC is the largest US college market by population with over 1 million students in the metro area and over 200 colleges.
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This aged like milk.
And also for NYU the internationalization trend.
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But the rankings DON’T measure the quality of the education. If they did, Missouri S&T would rank higher than many of the “greatly beloved private institutions which are overrated”. If they did, Lawrence, Beloit, Earlham-- would all jump higher than some of their more famous counterparts.
There are many “top 50” schools which have benefited from shrewd marketing and enrollment management- which has proven to be much cheaper and more effective than actually investing in the educational product and experience. It is cheaper to hand out small “merit awards” to make upper middle class (i.e. full payers) feel like their child is special, than it is to build labs, attract true leaders in their scholarly fields, invest in state of the art archival or artistic facilities.
People want to feel special. And colleges which have engineered quick increases in their ratings have figured this out. Who cares if your linguistics department is going to the dogs as long as US News gives you clickbait?
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So, the long arc here seems to be: Columbia got busted for fudging numbers or whatever it was and got punished in the rankings, then Columbia just said “we’re out of this game” entirely and got punished further in the rankings, and now with a change in methodology, Columbia’s moved back up significantly in the rankings despite not providing any voluntary data to US News. All the while the record application numbers didn’t dissipate. Which seems to justify their decisions after finding they’d corrupted themselves to compete in the rankings game.
Back to the original question, I think the latest rankings show that over the long run Columbia’s place in the cosmos is pretty inelastic. Which is probably due to (a) 250+ years of history as a world-leading academic institution, and (b) the fact that being a member of the Ivy League confers a significant, enduring reputational advantage by association with the others that trumps any ranking publicagion.
I think that explains the differing reactions between Columbia over the last couple of years (“The whole thing is bunk and unproductive and unscientific and below us, anyway”) and Vanderbilt yesterday (“We are aggrieved and need to publicly protest the specifics of methodology”). Vandy feels insecure because it actually stands to lose something in reputation and stature. Whereas everyone just knew Columbia was still on the same page as Princeton and Yale, Vanderbilt feels like dropping from 12 to 18 or whatever it was will actually impact peoples’ impression of them.
Where things could get interesting is if the Vanderbilts and WashU’s of the world also decided to take their ball home and quit playing along with schools like Columbia. That could bring down the whole, gross, house of cards that is the USNWR college ranking system.
There is something “right” about rounding out a baker’s dozen, numerically and psychologically, I suspect. No one begrudges Columbia’s stature as a world-class research organization.
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How much you wanna bet that USNews, knowing how similar UChicago and Columbia are, changed the ranking until the two juggernauts were tied?
Here we are trying to figure out why they changed the formula, when in the end it was probably to bring these two peers together. lol
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I don’t recall seeing a similar reaction from WUSTL (although I might have missed it).
Knowing WUSTL, their reaction was probably more along the lines of, “OK, should we adjust our current plans for how to use our top-10 endowment to continue to improve our standing?” And for the record, I see zero wrong with that.
Interestingly there is no real reason why Vanderbilt–barely behind WUSTL in endowment, and what’s a couple billion really worth these days anyway?–should have to think differently. So that does seem like a rather unfortunate and unnecessary reaction.
Not exactly the right sequence, even if the overall assessment that Columbia’s rep is fairly inelastic is correct.
Sequence was:
- Columbia gets outed (by its own professor) for “fudging” their data.
- USN pulls Columbia out of that year’s previously published ranking temporarily (so they had no rank for a few months) pending review and revised data from Columbia.
- Columbia announces they will not have had time to finish their “review” of their data by the submission deadline for the next year’s update of the ranking. They make no statement that this is permanent, just a timing issue.
- USN releases last year’s ranking without Columbia’s participation and drops them to #18.
- Columbia finally releases a public CDS which only they and Chicago had been avoiding among their top peers. Chicago’s solution to what they didn’t want to share is to release a CDS missing most of the data people dare about. Columbia’s solution is to release two separate CDS’s, one of which just covers GS as if it were a different university and one that excludes GS. It’s clear that the GS data is why they had previously been uncomfortable releasing one aggregated CDS. [Though it does not explain some of the data “fudging” decisions they made which were not specific to GS, like added an extra $1B a year to their student spending by including the entire budget of the hospital.]
- Columbia and USN enter discussions about their participation go-forward.
- USN announces they are making major changes to their methodology including dropping a couple categories where GS data inclusion hurts Columbia like class size and ratio of professors with terminal degrees.
- Columbia asks USN to fully exclude GS from the data entirely. USN refuses. Columbia announces that they are permanently dropping out, specifically citing that they believe its unfair to include GS and suggesting that USN is encouraging poor institutional priorities with its methodology.
- A few months later, this week’s annual update comes out and they land at #12.
So the key differences are:
- USN didn’t get “punished further” a second year – they only had one year where they dropped to #18, then up to #12.
- The methodology change was announced and known to Columbia before they decided decided to permanently end participation, not after (so arguably they were rewarded for it, not published). It was predictable that would likely help them in the rankings.
The above is fact, now here’s speculation…
I think as part of their negotiations its very likely that USN gave Columbia a pre-read on how their methodology changes – which were possibly at least partly motivated as a compromise to Columbia – would improve their ranking. So Columbia probably new they were going up but still wouldn’t re-crack the T10 because USN was still aggregating GS data. Columbia then decided that wasn’t good enough and dropped out. Perhaps they decided that it was a better look to officially condemn the ranking, like they are their peers did for law schools, rather than be seen as cooperating and still not be T10. This way it can still look like their lack of cooperation contributed to their rank. In reality, “participation” is meaningless optics anyway – they knew USN could get the data publicly.
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I kinda have to agree. People who think Columbia just happened to get paired up with Chicago or that “just like that” Wesleyan happened to get folded back into the T10 LACs, probably also believe in the tooth fairy. In both instances, USN is taking the pulse of public opinion.
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Sorry, wasn’t intending to bring WashU up in the context of Vanderbilt’s whiny press release, or intimate they’d publicly reacted similarly. I meant to tie the two schools together as “elite” schools that saw significant drops in their ranking under the new methodology, who could theoretically both react by opting out and cause larger ripple effects. Could have been clearer.
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Yes, God forbid Columbia is ever seen as “less than” it’s country cousin Cornell, which already ranks ahead of it in things like Engineering, CS, Business, Architecture, etc.
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