<p>i agree and disagree with the significance of the rankings; agree that it is important for students/parents to use the ranking as a guiding tool for college search but disagree that nothing shouldn't or couldn't be done to improve or modify the current methodology/criteria that seem to be biased for and favor name brand schools. at the end of the day, (almost) everybody would consider the ranking to be a key factor to their final decision. the results of the cross-admits seem to more than confirm this with majority going to higher ranked schools when accepted to more than one.</p>
<p>I have no objection to people doing rankings. I do have concerns about the dominance of the USNews ranking, as well as particular gripes about its methodology. And where I get really concerned is when I see college bound kids (perhaps understandably) and their parents (who ought to know better) placing heavy or even exclusive reliance on the ordinal rankings when there are often really quite minute differences between schools, based on factors in the methodology that are often quite far removed from the quality of the education the kid will receive. </p>
<p>To my mind, the USN rankings may be useful if they call your attention to good schools that you otherwise might not be thinking about. They may also be useful as a rough way of grouping schools into broad bands or tiers. Everyone already knows HYPS are the creme de la creme; we don't need USNews to tell us that. But as among the four, does it really matter which is #1 and which is #4 this year? I don't think so. First of all, it may change next year, and is likely to change over the four years you're in school. Second, any minor differences based on things like which of the schools raised its faculty salaries the most this year, or which had a particularly strong year in alumni giving, don't really mean all that much to the typical undergraduate; and none of these things mean nearly as much as the "fit" for your kid. Beyond HYPS, there are at least a dozen, maybe a couple of dozen schools that are really high quality academic institutions, and again, the differences among them are for the most part quite minor. Within this group it matters more whether you want a bigger school or a smaller one; whether you want to be in a big city, a college town, or a rural area; and sometimes what you want to study. Not all schools offer engineering, for example, and some don't have strong programs in all aspects of engineering; some are stronger in the humanities, some in the sciences. Bottom line, "fit" both academically and with respect to a long list of intangibles is a whole lot more important than whether you're going with #9 or #15 on the US News list, because the factors that account for that difference are in most cases just trivial to the life and education of an undergraduate. </p>
<p>Sakky: I agree that exams have pedagogical value. It's just that the USNews "exam" is teaching college and university administrators to study for the wrong things. So, for example, it may at the margins create an incentive to try to persuade the aging deadwood on the faculty to remain in active status an extra couple or three years, both because their fatter salaries will help you more in the USNews rankings than a new junior tenure-track replacement's more modest salary, and because the old-timer may be carrying an outdated reputation for scholarly excellence that will help keep up your PA score more than the fresh-faced newcomer, even though the older faculty member is no longer as productive a scholar or as effective a teacher as in years past. It may create an incentive to skimp just a bit on need-based financial aid to free up funds for "merit" scholarships targeted to lure applicants just slightly above your 25th or 75th percentile SAT scores, since those are the only scores that affect your USNews ranking. To my mind, these are distortions, not improvements in academic quality. If US News had two or three widely viewed competitors that used different factors in their rankings---even something as simple as measuring the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile SAT scores, rather than the 25th and 75th---it would be much harder for administrators to "game" all the rankings at once, and you would cancel out some of these distortions.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Actually, it's not "sour grapes" at all, if you mean by that you think I'm grumpy about being on the losing side of this sort of US News data manipulation. I've been on faculties at both public and private schools and I've seen this sort of thing on both sides of the public-private divide; some are more successful at it than others.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Just as much as a previous comment about being astonished about people thinking there was a correlation between graduate schools and UG (or what it is the opposite?) I am dumbfounded by this one. Who is it exactly that is supposed to be on the "losing end" of the US News data mamipulation? Don't you mean the same schools that need a PA crutch to prop their lower statistical and selectivity indexes? </p>
<p>If not, here goes another lapsus linguae. Or something to that effect!</p>
<p>
[quote]
Not all schools offer engineering, for example, and some don't have strong programs in all aspects of engineering; some are stronger in the humanities, some in the sciences. Bottom line, "fit" both academically and with respect to a long list of intangibles is a whole lot more important than whether you're going with #9 or #15 on the US News list, because the factors that account for that difference are in most cases just trivial to the life and education of an undergraduate.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Bingo! </p>
<p>After all those years of witnessing asinine (albeit sometimes entertaining discussions about the impact of rankings, one has to wonder is the quality of the experience really matters. </p>
<p>Fwiw, the most annoying and moronic discussions regarding rankings are offered by a small army of "public schoools fanboys" who feel morally obliged to voice their unending discontent for the "lack of respect" they receive and utter their dismay about the most ridiculous of all indexes (the USNews PA) not helping theri sagging fortunes even more. </p>
<p>This said aside, does any of this really matter? Does it matter that the fans of Cal, Michigan, UW or other U.O.M on the one hand can cry about the pirr rankings of large research universities but, otoh rarely acknowledge that a superior education can be obtained at colleges that do NOT have a graduate division? </p>
<p>Who is there to say that one type of education is better for ... everyone. The reality is that the students approach (or least should approach) their choices with a number of tools in their hands and ... an open mind. While for some students a LAC is viewed as confining and close to garbage, the same could be said for a school where freshman classes with fewer than 300 students will feel quite cozy and where a Berlitz phrase book will be most helpful to decipher the accents of the latest indentured servant (aka TF, TA, or any other glorifyng name.) </p>
<p>All of us are indviduals who have very different ideas about our optimal education. We should make our choice and let other be happy about theirs. </p>
<p>It just so happens that this does not seem to be enough for some, and that it is extremely important to be listed in a particular order and that being a mid-20 ranked school does not seem enough. Ever enough! And even if it relates to the subject of THIS forum, and that is UNDERGRADUATE education!</p>
<p>So we get more knuckles beating the sand or the hollow chest!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, xiggi, I joined this discussion because I was looking for a small LAC in the Northeast that could give my D what she wanted in classics. Along the way I was surprised to encounter what struck me an an inordinate amount of "annoying and moronic," not to mention utterly gratuitous, bashing of the nation's most prestigious public research universities by a very large army of private school fanatics. </p>
<p>I've attended and taught at both public and private colleges and universities. They have differing strengths, and it's not all a one-way street. I'm discovering for my D, for example, that for a kid who's already done a lot in classics---she'll have had 6 years of Latin and 4 years of Greek by the time she matriculates---there are precious few LACs than can give her the depth and breadth of upper-level courses she'd need to major in the field, because most of what they offer she's already done. Most of them have only 2-3 classics faculty, and much of their teaching is devoted to intro and intermediate-level language courses. So D's choices are going to be highly constrained. We now know the few LACs that can offer her a lot of classics. After that, it's either a major research university---one of the Ivies, one of a handful of major private non-Ivies with a strong program (Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins), or one of the top publics (Berkeley, Michigan, North Carolina). That, or set aside her dream of studying classics, or defer it to grad school. But in that context, the constant CC mantra that "you can't get a good education at a public and private is always better" becomes hugely annoying and asinine, because for us there are only a little over a dozen schools in the country that are even plausibly capable of serving D's needs, and at least 3 of them are major publics. So for us the choice is not at all about public v. private. It's about the particulars of the school: the program, the location, large v. small, atmospherics.</p>
<p>
Moi? Looks right. Looks left. And smiles.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Sakky: I agree that exams have pedagogical value. It's just that the USNews "exam" is teaching college and university administrators to study for the wrong things. So, for example, it may at the margins create an incentive to try to persuade the aging deadwood on the faculty to remain in active status an extra couple or three years, both because their fatter salaries will help you more in the USNews rankings than a new junior tenure-track replacement's more modest salary, and because the old-timer may be carrying an outdated reputation for scholarly excellence that will help keep up your PA score more than the fresh-faced newcomer, even though the older faculty member is no longer as productive a scholar or as effective a teacher as in years past. It may create an incentive to skimp just a bit on need-based financial aid to free up funds for "merit" scholarships targeted to lure applicants just slightly above your 25th or 75th percentile SAT scores, since those are the only scores that affect your USNews ranking. To my mind, these are distortions, not improvements in academic quality.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Like I said, I have always agreed with you that there is significant gaming/deadweight loss in the current system. But what I am saying is that without USNews, the situation would be even worse, because colleges would then have no incentive to improve their undergrad programs at all. </p>
<p>So it's really a case of picking your poison. I personally prefer a world with the USNews rankings, even with all of the gaming it engenders, than a world where the rankings don't exist and consequently university administrators just sit on their rear ends and do nothing at all to improve the undergrad programs. </p>
<p>
[quote]
If US News had two or three widely viewed competitors that used different factors in their rankings---even something as simple as measuring the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile SAT scores, rather than the 25th and 75th---it would be much harder for administrators to "game" all the rankings at once, and you would cancel out some of these distortions.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but that's not USNews's fault. That's the fault of its competitors for not producing a competitive product.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Everyone already knows HYPS are the creme de la creme; we don't need USNews to tell us that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, to that, allow me to say this. I went to an East Coast high school. I distinctly remember how Stanford was relatively obscure. Everybody had heard of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But Stanford? A significant number of people - heck, even a few teachers - had never even heard of it, or if they had, had heard of it only within the context of college sports. Some other people did know that it was a good school, but they didn't know that it was that good (i.e. at the level of HYP). This wasn't some scrub high school we're talking about, this high school was actually pretty good relative to most public high schools, routinely sending a decent number of people to top-ranked universities. {For example, in my graduating year, around 10% of the graduating class went to top 25 ranked universities or LAC's). </p>
<p>I think that just speaks to the strong regional knowledge that the vast majority of Americans continue to hold. It was the USNews ranking that made people at my high school more aware of non-East-Coast schools like Stanford (and also schools like Berkeley and Caltech). Similarly, I have found that people who are not from the East will often times not know about Eastern schools. For example, I know a girl who graduated from MIT and went to work as a manager at Harley Davidson (in Milwaukee), and has found that many people there had never heard of MIT and thought it stood for the "Milwaukee Institute of Technology". </p>
<p>Hence, that points to another valuable feature of the USNews ranking in that it expands the parochial knowledge that many Americans continue to have regarding higher education. Sure, everybody here on CC knows what schools comprise HYPSM that are all highly competitive with each other. But most regular Americans don't know that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Here's an example. A school has 5,000 applicants for 1000 spots, and an expected yield of 50 percent.</p>
<p>The school can either:</p>
<p>1) Accept 2000 students and have 1000 enroll, with an acceptance rate of 40 percent.</p>
<p>2) Accept 1500 students and have 750 enroll. It can then take the final 250 off the waitlist, for a final acceptance rate of 35 percent.</p>
<p>Waitlist usage, combined with a high dependence on early decision and aggressive merit-based aid, can really alter the way a college looks. (<em>cough WashU cough</em>)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>wait..are they actually allowed to skew and cheat their acceptance statistics that way? I had some big doubts when some poster was saying how WashU is as selective as Stanford, as referenced by USNWR selectivity chart.</p>
<p>USnews should add a new subcategory for selectivity: number of students taken from the waitlist.... or some sort of formula for true acceptance rate. at this rate, if WUSTL gets up to a 4.5 on PA, it could possibly end up #1.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Actually, xiggi, I joined this discussion because I was looking for a small LAC in the Northeast that could give my D what she wanted in classics. Along the way I was surprised to encounter what struck me an an inordinate amount of "annoying and moronic," not to mention utterly gratuitous, bashing of the nation's most prestigious public research universities by a very large army of private school fanatics. </p>
<p>I've attended and taught at both public and private colleges and universities. They have differing strengths, and it's not all a one-way street. I'm discovering for my D, for example, that for a kid who's already done a lot in classics---she'll have had 6 years of Latin and 4 years of Greek by the time she matriculates---there are precious few LACs than can give her the depth and breadth of upper-level courses she'd need to major in the field, because most of what they offer she's already done. Most of them have only 2-3 classics faculty, and much of their teaching is devoted to intro and intermediate-level language courses. So D's choices are going to be highly constrained. We now know the few LACs that can offer her a lot of classics. After that, it's either a major research university---one of the Ivies, one of a handful of major private non-Ivies with a strong program (Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins), or one of the top publics (Berkeley, Michigan, North Carolina). That, or set aside her dream of studying classics, or defer it to grad school. But in that context, the constant CC mantra that "you can't get a good education at a public and private is always better" becomes hugely annoying and asinine, because for us there are only a little over a dozen schools in the country that are even plausibly capable of serving D's needs, and at least 3 of them are major publics. So for us the choice is not at all about public v. private. It's about the particulars of the school: the program, the location, large v. small, atmospherics.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>BClintonK, partly because you joined recently, I will try to answer a few of our points. </p>
<p>For starters, I really, really believe that your quest for schools that could match the very precise criteria for your daughter started in the absolute worst forum if you were sidetracked by discussions about rankings, and especially discussions about the handful of public schools getting the proverbial shaft in the first page of the USNews Report. </p>
<p>Secondly, I also believe that it is (unfortunately) easy to miss a great number of inside "jokes" among members who have been at it for ... a few years. One reality is that I could easily finish a few posts of Alexandre ot UCBGrad without missing a beat; and I am sure they could do the same. I do not think that a single discussion on CC (despite running in the hundreds of posts) will ever change much of the antagonists' position.</p>
<p>But that is mostly irrelevant as I do not think that anyone should select a 4-year colleges based on the ranking itself --despite that the underlying data could offer a few interesting glimpses.</p>
<p>Anyone who is keenly interested in finding that elusive perfect fit needs to dig a lot deeper than waht USNews has to offer AND go well beyond the superficial reputations of colleges, and even if the beyond the inaccurate or untimely reputation of faculty. As an example, questions about the "top" departments of Economics at LACs appear quite regularly in this forum, and I can guarantee that the majority of the answers are rarely espousing the current reality. It is not unusual to see a school listed among the "best" despite having a small and lackluster faculty that reflects the lack of attention and resources at that particular school. Yet that does not stop anyone to offer "sound advice" on the way to compose a list of a dozen schools. </p>
<p>As far as your quest for a great Classics' department, I believe that it will be require a very specific MOI, and I tend to agree that the programs offered by Honors colleges at large research universities might very well be close to ideal. Of course, it is no accident that the curriculum at most Honors Colleges have found their inspiration in the liberal arts ... colleges. If that emulation includes the financial necessity of delivering the education via untenured proxies remains an open ended question. </p>
<p>Personally, I have no idea if the "Classics" could be better covered at Columbia, at the University of Texas, at St John's, or at the lowly ranked University of Dallas! However, what I do know is that the Peer Assessment of Berkeley or Wisconsin has absolutely nothing to do with the correct answer to such question. </p>
<p>PS Take a look at the Parent's forum!</p>
<p>
[quote]
USnews should add a new subcategory for selectivity: number of students taken from the waitlist.... or some sort of formula for true acceptance rate. at this rate, if WUSTL gets up to a 4.5 on PA, it could possibly end up #1.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Why? Are you intimating that the "announced rate" of April is the one that ends up in the USNews Report? </p>
<p>It really does not matter if Duke announces a sub 20% rate in April 2008. By the time their statistics for the Class of 2012 become public via the CDS or via the USNews it would have become a distant memory. </p>
<p>By the way, WUSTL seems to err on the "other side" as they rarely announce much at all. For all their faults, Nanette Tarbouni and her assistants does not play the "press" games that others love to play. Surprising as this might be! And they probably WUSTL is not one the only school that would count postcards as completed applications. :)</p>
<p>
Of course not...but this ranking might help...;)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Classics
1 Harvard 4.79
2 Cal Berkeley 4.77
3 Michigan 4.54
4 Princeton 4.16
5 Yale 4.12
6 Brown 4.10
7 Chicago 4.00
8 Texas 3.92
9 UCLA 3.89
10 Columbia 3.86
11 North Carolina 3.81
12 Cornell 3.73
13 Penn 3.62
14 Bryn Mawr 3.48
15 Duke 3.37
16 Stanford 3.32
17 Illinois 3.02
18 Virginia 2.98
19 Wisconsin 2.92
20 Washington 2.89
21 Ohio State 2.60
22 Cal Santa Barbara 2.59
23 Johns Hopkins 2.52
24 Minnesota 2.43
25 NYU 2.33
26 Boston University 2.31
27 Cincinnati 2.10
28 Fordham 1.83
29 Catholic University 0.93
[/quote]
<p>Classics--not one of our stronger depts--just 19th. Sighs. Way down with UVa.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Of course not...but this ranking might help...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>UCB, if my intention were to base my "idea" on the NRC, I could have easily dusted-off that report. While this might be surprising to you, I DO know where to find the report ... again. </p>
<p>A few years ago, there was an interesting debate between the University of Texas and the University of Virginia about which one of those august universities deserved to be ranked just below the apple of your eye and Alexandre's. </p>
<p>In any case, thank you for thinking I might have forgotten about it.</p>
<p>PS You'll be thrilled in October 2008:</p>
<p>^ Haha! Xiggi, just prepping you for some new NRC rankings later this year. Hopefully "the apple of my eye" will do just as well as it did last time around...;)</p>
<p>Then Xiggi, I'm sure you'll remember the UVa report I posted last year--about their faculty's shortcomings.</p>
<p>And rest assured that I will be rooting for the "teams" of the usual CC suspects. As you know, I don't even have the smallest of bones in this fight. I am happy to see US graduate schools among the best in the world in every category. </p>
<p>My battlegrounds are a lot less lofty.</p>
<p>I sure do remember the WACG report, Barrons. The Texas "report" predates the Virginia one by a few years. I think I quoted it on CC when we were still on the old board.</p>
<p>It would be nice if they released that a bit earlier, so I'd have a little more time to look things over before I need to finalize which school's I'm going to apply to next year...</p>