"How Northeastern Gamed the College Rankings"

Parents Forum
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<p>Both methods have issues, so I thought it would be interesting to combine the USNWR and Forbes ratings. I ordinal ranked the national universities for both, and combined the two rankings, and resorted them from low to high. Here is what I got for a top 20. I think the order makes more sense to me than either one individually.</p>

<p>1 Princeton<br>
2 Stanford<br>
3 Harvard
3 Yale<br>
5 MIT
6 Penn<br>
7 Columbia<br>
8 Chicago
8 Dartmouth<br>
10 Duke<br>
11 Brown<br>
12 Cal Tech<br>
13 Northwestern<br>
14 Notre Dame<br>
15 Cornell
16 Rice<br>
16 Georgetown<br>
18 Cal Berkeley<br>
19 Johns Hopkins<br>
20 Wash U. STL </p>

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<p>@Much2learn‌: That looks like a good ranking to me. </p>

<p>I look at alumni success rates (the “American Leaders”, PhD, and “prestigious student awards” sub-categories of Forbes + placement percentages in to elite pre-professional schools).
By those criteria, the top 13+Cornell are what I’d consider the definite Ivies/Ivy-equivalents. Rice, JHU, and Cal are in the gray area where you could include them or not. The 2 top Catholics are at the lower end of the Ivies in the pre-professional success categories, but trail in the academic success categories.</p>

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<p>I was wondering when this thread would devolve into a discussion of ultra elite schools as many threads on CC do. It took a bit longer that I expected.</p>

<p>Getting back to Northeastern, the only thing that the rise in rankings does is put the school on the radar of people who otherwise would not consider applying. This is especially true for students and parents from outside New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Once interest is generated, if Northeastern is not a potential match, they will move on. Those who enroll seem to be satisfied as NU had a 96% freshman retention rate last year. </p>

<p>While a lot has changed at NU in the past 20 years, the school is still fundamentally the same school it was back then (and even 40 years ago). Northeastern is not a traditional school. There is a strong emphasis on professional education for which they make no apologies. This emphasis is even stronger given the coop requirement. This does not sit well with some academics who value the “classic liberal arts education”. As @katiamom stated, NU is not a school for a student who wants to spend 4 years in the humanities contemplating theories and ideas.</p>

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<p>As I said above, Northeastern is not a traditional school. </p>

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<p>I know 5 graduates from NEU and all have done very well. They loved their experience and have been very successful in both their careers and acceptance at very good graduate and medical schools.</p>

<p>They may have gamed the system but my anecdotal experience tells me they appear to be delivering a solid product.</p>

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<p>If you read the article carefully, Northeastern “tricked” and “gamed” the system by:</p>

<p>Lowering class sizes
Hiring more faculty and star faculty (better faculty)
Investing in new buildings and facilities
Increasing retention
“working hard” to recruit more students
increasing diversity by bringing in more out of state and international students
Building better on-campus housing
Increasing selectivity to the point that the incoming class is at the Ivy League level
Creating new sources of revenue
Increasing alumni giving
More merit based scholarships to attract higher quality students</p>

<p>Each one of the above can be found in the article, but presented in a way that it is somehow a bad thing.</p>

<p>At the end of the article, the author recommends a new government ranking system that focusing on value for education. But it fails to mention that huge number of need and merit based students who pay nothing. I am not sure what NU’s stats are, but most top private colleges offer FREE tuition to about one third of their undergraduate students. In other words, the high costs are irrelevant to the best students and those who come from less privileged backgrounds. For them, NU is less expensive than a community college. Also, I believe that the need-based scholarships also provide free room and board and free books. Now THAT is value for education and it really undermines the whole idea that elite colleges are strictly for the wealthy.</p>

<p>Honestly, I doubt that anyone will really pay attention to the White House rankings. Since when does government do things better than private industry.</p>

<p>Finally, US News is not the only publication to rank NU highly. Princeton Review ranked NU No.1 in the country in career services and Business Week ranks NU No. 8 in the country in International Business.</p>

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<p>There is no national mandate that college graduates provide their employment status and income. Reporting is voluntary so any “outcome” based stats would be incomplete. Or is the White House proposing a new mandate?</p>

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<p>The White House would use…dah…dah…daaah…the IRS. Only the federal government has the ability to track actual income. I would love to see the data, but I’ll pass on a federal college ranking system.</p>

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<p>@Totoro66 Only about 15% of undergrads at NU receive Pell grants (in-line with many private NE LAC’s). The average net price for low income students is fairly high.</p>

<p><a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=NorthEastern&s=all&ct=2&ic=1&id=167358#netprc”>College Navigator - Northeastern University;

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<p>But what if the IRS has another server crash? Or is it only their email servers that are crash prone?</p>

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<p>What? You lack faith in the IRS?!?!?! I’m shocked! Shocked!!</p>

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<p>@totoro66:</p>

<p>USN loves spending, but it’s arguable whether better dorms and newer buildings actually improve the quality of the education.</p>

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<p>Research funding is increasing. New buildings for STEM departments likely does improve the quality of education and allows for more research in those areas. Building residence halls has created a residential campus. You cannot look at any one component in isolation. </p>

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<p>@Totoro66 - Unless things have changed recently, NU doesn’t promise to meet full need. They definitely leverage their financial aid – that is, they use the merit money to shape the class they want. NU was a safety/backup for my daughter – they offered about $10K in merit money and they were the only university among the ones that accepted her that send the offer from their office of “enrollment management.” At the time I figured they deserved a nod for their honesty. I don’t know whether they would have supplemented that with need-based aid because d. did not accept the spot and we never received a formal financial aid award – just what was essentially a scholarship offer. But even if NU met FAFSA EFC it would be tricky because of the fact that co-ops are generally paid (and often paid pretty well) – and FAFSA really penalizes dependent students who earn a lot of money. (In general, a college kid who takes off half the year to work full time is going to see a big hit on their FAFSA EFC – there is a double hit because FAFSA taxes them both on their earnings and on anything they’ve managed to save up from those earnings). </p>

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<p>Very interesting article on USC’s rise.
<a href=“Freshman admission rate the lowest in USC history - Daily Trojan”>http://dailytrojan.com/2014/08/15/freshman-admission-rate-the-lowest-in-usc-history/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Check out the dramatic graph showing the breathtaking, nearly doubling of applicants from 1996 to 97. Reading from the gragh, by increasing the dominator by ~10k students in one year, USC drove its admit rate down from ~75% to ~45% in just one year!!!</p>

<p>Another 10k increase in applicants around 2011 resulted in another dramatic admit rate plummet from ~25% to ~20%. Last cycle’s 5k rise in applicants drove the admit rate down to 17.8%!</p>

<p>Someone in marketing is really doing his/her job.</p>

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<p>@oldmom4896, I’ve shared this article from the New American Foundation (“Playing the Merit Aid Game at Public Universities”) on the Alabama forums before, because it was so helpful to me in understanding the hows and whys of Alabama’s approach to luring high-stats, out-of-state students with merit awards:</p>

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<p><a href=“http://higheredwatch.newamerica.net/blogposts/2013/playing_the_merit_aid_game_at_public_universities-83896”>http://higheredwatch.newamerica.net/blogposts/2013/playing_the_merit_aid_game_at_public_universities-83896&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Because UA was seeking to expand the TOTAL student body so dramatically, both with full-pay and academic-scholarship recipients, it seemed to me that high-stats, in-state students were not being rejected in favor of out-of-state students–something many state flagships cannot claim. Unfortunately, like most state flagships, UA doesn’t do a very good job helping its own state’s students of limited financial means. This seems to me to be an issue for the Alabama state legislature more so than UA, however.</p>

<p>In the end, and given my family’s financial situation and the very high price ($34,000+ a year) of our own state flagship (Penn State), we had no moral qualms accepting UA’s generous offer to my son, whose only “hook” in the admissions rat race, sadly, was his status as a “high-stats student.” I won’t apologize for finding a school that valued that, any more than I would apologize, under different circumstances, for finding a school that valued athletic prowess, family connections, status as a first generation college student, or the ability to pay full price–all of which I watched my son’s classmates do. </p>

<p>Love it or hate it, this is the state of higher ed admissions in the United States in the 21st century. </p>

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<p>Well, UA met that goal:</p>

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<p><a href=“Page Not Found | The University of Alabama”>Page Not Found | The University of Alabama;

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<p>Like NU, UA was looking for a strategy to increase it’s rankings (or you can say, to increase in the metrics that, as a by product, leads to a higher ranking). Increasing enrollment was a key part of that strategy.</p>

<p>Lets look at the impact of increased enrollment (and scholarship funding) on revenue at UA (who luckily makes the data available).</p>

<p><a href=“http://financialaccounting.ua.edu/fin-reports.html”>http://financialaccounting.ua.edu/fin-reports.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>For 2001-2002
Tuition and fees $93,570,615<br>
Less: scholarship allowances ($19,411,375)
Tuition and fees, net $74,159,240</p>

<p>State Appropriations: $120,776,240</p>

<p>For 2013 and 2012
Tuition and fees $ 514,370,549 (2013) and $ 454,187,595(2012)
Less: scholarship allowances (127,427,695) (for 2013) and (105,643,511) (for 2012)
Tuition and fees, net $386,942,854 (2013) and $348,544,084 (2012)</p>

<p>State educational appropriations $140,699,910 (2013) and $145,951,239 (2012)</p>

<p>UA increased scholarship funding from $19M a year to $127M, but they grew Tuition net revenue from $74M to $386M. Of course, yearly increases in the tuition rates also played a major role in increasing tuition revenue. </p>

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<p>@LucieTheLakie‌ If your child has 98 or 99 percentile stats to qualify for a full ride at Alabama, then they most certainly would qualify for nearly the same merit awards from privates around the country. I applaud 'Bama’s efforts to lure out-of-state students but I can’t help but think some families are being penny wise and pound foolish. If you have no intention of living in the south after college, I’m not sure why you’d send your child there. We have a household income of between $130,000-150,000 and my twin daughters are nearly full rides at one state school and a top tier private. When they were applying, almost all of the local privates were giving them 80% or so of COA.</p>

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<p>Does anyone know how many rejected students are accepting the semester abroad? “Mom and dad, I was rejected but they’ll let me go if you send me abroad for $30,000.” Have to give it up to Northeastern if they’re finding families that desperate to attend their overpriced school nobody outside of Boston has ever heard of.</p>

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<p>@ajm202 Care to name those schools that were so generous with your daughters? Was that merit or need based aid? </p>