@Alexandre I would certainly expect that. Michigan has nearly twice as many students as Penn.
Just to point out how inaccurate a comparison this is, Texas has nearly 38.5 times the student population that CMC does, yet they only received 1.2 times the number of Trumans. If Texas were having the same success rate as CMC they would have gotten over 730 Trumans, or 11 times what Stanford - the highest total on the list - received.
Yes, I’m purposely comparing LACs and research universities, which you’ve already acknowledged, but any large disparity in student population significantly skews the data.
urbanslaughter, you are assuming that smaller universities are intellectually identical to larger universities. They are not. Just because Michigan is twice or three times as larger as another private universities does not necessarily mean it has twice or three times as many students that are interested in, and will apply to, those scholarships. The larger the university, the more diverse the intellectual interests of the student body. The Fulbright foundation actually breaks the data down in those terms. Most years, Michigan has as many Fulbright applicants as Brown, Harvard, Northwestern etc… Michigan had a 23% success rate last year, which is extremely high.
You mentioned CMC (8 Fulbright recipients) and Texas (14 Fulbright recipients). While you are correct in saying that Texas is 38 times larger than CMC, it does not follow that Texas will have 38 times as many Fulbright applicants as CMC. In fact, last year, CMC had 21 Fulbright applicants, while Texas had 54. That’s last than 3 times as many applicants.
http://us.fulbrightonline.org/top-producing-institutions
Even in the case of universities that have produced fewer winners, their success rate is typically not much better than 23%…if at all.
^But isn’t that part of the point of such rankings-looking at how many of one’s classmates would be the types who would apply for things like Fulbrights, PhD’s or MBA’s?
To illustrate my point, which university would you expect to be more intellectually challenging-one where 100 students apply to MD programs and 95 are admitted or where only two apply and both are admitted (assuming student bodies of the same size and general mix)?
^ or where 1 out of every 10 apply vs 1 out of every 300, to make the per-capita point that makes comparisons with small student bodies possible.
Sue, I don’t think you quite appreciate the point of intellectual diversity. It does not diminish a university’s intellectual vitality, but rather, can very well add to it. Students with similar interests will move in similar circles, take similar classes and focus in similar majors. But at a larger university, you will have far more academic programs, majors and circles, adding to the overall intellectual dynamism of the institution. Cornell has close to 15,000 undergraduate students. Georgetown has 7,500. However, Georgetown had 100 Fulbright applicants last year, while Cornell had only 50. Does that make Georgetown more intellectual than Cornell? Or is it simply that Cornell has more intellectual diversity than Georgetown?
@Alexandre, If we were only talking about one type of award/measure, say the number of students getting a doctorate in mathematics or the number of Fulbright teaching fellows, then yes, you would have a point. That’s why any one of these measures is much weaker than the aggregate. A school with greater academic diversity might actually have an advantage in these measures in that they would have students competing on may different fronts instead of just a few.
It seems to me this is similar to the “big school with honors college vs. smaller elite school” debate I often see on CC, i.e., is it better to be at a small school where most of the class has extremely high stats or is it just as good to be at a large state school where the average is lower but the students in the honors college, a number larger than the population of the small school, is an intellectual match for the small school kids?
You could say the large school has greater intellectual diversity or you could say the smaller school has greater academic focus. I do think academic mentorship matters, which is why I think the percentages of kids applying to and winning prestigious awards and fellowships matter.
Sue22, are you suggesting that professors at Cal, Michigan, UNC, UVa, William and Mary, UIUC, Texas-Austin, Wisconsin-Madison, UCLA etc…are less exacting, classes and curricula at those schools less rigorous, or the classroom less intellectually charged than at private universities?
At any rate, I lay out a comparison of four elite public universities (Cal, Michigan, UNC and UVa) to four elite universities (Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and Penn) in PhD production, fellowship awards, graduate school matriculation etc. If the private universities have any sort of edge, even when you factor in differences in size, it is negligible. UVa and UNC don’t really have a size advantage over Cornell or Penn.
I am not sure your low opinion of public universities is justified.
PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS WHO EARN PHD:
Cornell 9%
Columbia 8.1%
Berkeley 7.9%
Penn 6.5%
Northwestern 6.4%
Michigan 5.8%
UVa 5.4%
UNC 4.4%
FULBRIGHT (since 2005)
Michigan 389
Northwestern 261
Berkeley 243
Columbia 243
Penn 187
Cornell 178
UNC 161
UVa 131
RHODES
UVa 51
UNC 44
Cornell 30
Columbia 27
Michigan 26
Berkeley 24
Penn 20
Northwestern 16
MARSHALL
Cornell 33
Berkeley 30
Columbia 28
Northwestern 21
Michigan 18
UNC 16
Penn 14
UVa 8
TRUMAN
UNC 31
UVa 31
Columbia 27
Cornell 25
Michigan 25
Penn 24
Berkeley 14
Northwestern 14
CHURCHILL
Cornell 25
UNC 16
Michigan 14
Northwestern 11
Berkeley 9
Penn 7
UVa 4
Columbia 2
GOLDWATER
I am still crunching the numbers, but in the case of the Goldwater, since most universities produce between 2-4 annually, and a cap of 4 is enforced on all institutions, the variations between those 8 universities is rather narrow.
^Alexandre, it’s awesome you’re putting together the metrics…=). But why not limit to the more recent years? Since 2000 (which is probably still too far): Columbia has 8 rhodes winners since 2000, Michigan has 2. For Churchill, Michigan is definitely ahead of the game versus Columbia. But is it close for the others for recent years?
blah2008, with scholarships such as Rhodes or Truman or Churchill, I think looking at the entire history is more telling given how few are given out each year. Besides, why penalize an institution with a rich tradition for having had a few dry years?
That being said, Columbia has graduated roughly 17,000 undergraduate students since 2000. Michigan has graduated 55,000 in the same period. To be honest, I am not sure how 2, 8 or 12 students winning awards in that span of time can be considered a telling statistic. That is why I really consider the Fulbright a better metric. At least there is critical mass required to pass judgement.
With respect to the numbers in post 87, can we pull in a few more universities, and also consistently use rates rather than raw numbers to compare both doctorates and awards?
If you looked at the top 10 universities, or top 50, by percentage of students who earn PhDs, you would not find that half of them are public universities. It would be more like none in the top 10 and maybe 3 or 4 near the bottom of the top 50. Example: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/, see table 4.
Berkeley (#43), CO Mines (#47), and William and Mary (#50) are the only public research universities in the top 50 (by “institution yield ratio”, for STEM PhDs only, for 2002-11 only ).
Now maybe we should only be comparing only schools of similar size (undergraduate enrollment size?) or schools that exceed some output threshold. Alumni from 9 research universities listed in that NSF table earned >1000 STEM doctorates from 2002-11. Here’s the rank by “institutional yield ratio”:
MIT 16%
Princeton 10.1%
Harvard 10%
Stanford 8%
Brown 8%
Yale 7.8%
Cornell 7.7%
Duke 7.1%
Berkeley 5.9%
With the possible exception of Cornell, the top 8 are all more selective than Berkeley. If we wanted to compare only research universities of similar selectivity, maybe Alexandre’s list in #87 is a good comparison. But have a look at Washington Monthly’s “Bachelor’s to PhD Rank” (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings-2015/national-universities-research.php). There, the highest-ranking public university (Berkeley again) is 17th and Michigan is 28th (very close to their USNWR rankings). UCLA is 32nd, Wisconsin 33rd. T30 schools include the Ivies, Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, and JHU … but also Rochester (13th), CMU (15th), Case Western (16th), and Brandeis (18th).
Do award and scholarship distributions tell a very different story than the PhD rates?
To compare, I think again we’d want to use rates not absolute numbers, for an aggregated critical mass of awards/scholarship data representing a similar time period. Isn’t that what PurpleTitan already has done for us?
While not exactly small I absolutely consider places like UVA and Berkeley elite. Where did I ever say that I had a low opinion of public universities? I do feel justified in saying that the average classroom experience at a place like Montana State University, with SAT scores in the neighborhood of 150 lower points, is likely to be less intellectually charged than Harvard.
I do think if you wanted to test your intellectual diversity argument it would be useful to include a few of the elite LACs. It would be interesting to compare the top few elite private U’s, the top public U’s and the top LAC’s. Tiny Pitzer has more Fulbright awards than UVa even in absolute numbers.
I like the work you did on awards at various institutions but I don’t understand why you’ve excluded certain schools from your list. For instance, Harvard, Yale and Princeton each blow away every school on your list in the number of Rhodes Scholars they’ve produced. To list UVA and UNC first seems disingenuous to me when Harvard has more Rhodes Scholars than all of the schools on your list combined. It feels like you’ve cherry picked your schools to arrive at the numbers you were looking for.
http://www.rhodesscholar.org/assets/uploads/Rhodes%20Scholarships_Number%20of%20Winners%20by%20Institution_10_15_14.pdf
What I was looking at was the CC favorite debate about whether a student will get the same experience at University of Alabama, with its plethora of NMS winners in its honors college, as at Harvard. U of A probably has more top scorers in absolute numbers than Harvard, but at Harvard you’ll find them in much greater concentration.
I don’t understand what is meant by “intellectual diversity”. Does it refer to abilities (average-smart-brilliant)? Does a class mostly populated by brilliant students create an Ivory Tower environment that is less than ideal w.r.t. to some learning objectives? If that’s the claim, how would we test it?
Does it refer to diversity of opinions? Of interests? Of academic programs? Many “elite” private universities (and nearly all LACs) have a strong focus on the liberal arts. They deliberately exclude pre-professional training in agriculture, architecture, nursing, and sometimes in business and engineering. So they’ll have an advantage in outcome metrics focused on achievement in the arts & sciences over large schools that cover many of those pre-professional fields.
If Ivy League colleges are elitist, narrowly focused Ivory Towers, then for better or worse, “Ivy equivalents” share similar characteristics (including high concentrations of high-stats students). If you think another kind of college has desirable characteristics, then identify another set of indicators that they out-perform. Then rank according to those indicators. Like this:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings-2015/national-universities-rank.php
(UCSD #1, Michigan #13, Duke #31, Yale #44, Chicago #55, Dartmouth $64. )
If you think this ranking better reflects your interests, needs, or values, then you have a basis to confidently choose Texas-El Paso over Rice, Vanderbilt, or Duke. You shouldn’t care too much about identifying “Ivy equivalents”.
Working from k21769’s ideas, here’s a hypothetical ranking system I could really get behind:
Rank colleges by various measures (SAT scores, endowment, college town, etc.), then create something like the CC Supermatch feature which lets students decide the weight to put on those variables.
A low-income first gen student who cared primarily about being able to make a good living out of college could weight heavily for things like graduation rate, financial aid, social mobility, and average salaries while giving less weight to athletics, the town, or PhD production. A wealthy intellectual might want to emphasize SAT scores and Ph.D production but not weather or financial aid. A gay athletic recruit might care about the percentage of kids playing sports (likely better support at schools with high participation), athletic scholarships, LGBTQ environment and percentage of kids living on campus but decide they like big lectures so don’t care about the percentage of classes with more than 50 students.
Most students would want good rankings on the school’s academic reputation or graduation rate, but who says students should give all measures the same weight as some magazine does? For instance, some will care about the percentage of students who do community service; some won’t give a hoot.
The biggest problem with a ranking like this is that it wouldn’t sell magazines (or the virtual equivalent). Rankers want headlines. “Harvard edged out by Stanford this year!” is much more exciting than, “Well, on some measures Stanford is better, on some Harvard wins.”
@tk21769, I think that it’s wrong to say that lacking a pre-professional focus is a feature common to Ivies/equivalents considering that roughly half of the 16 RU’s I deem Ivies/equivalents (Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Georgetown, MIT, Rice, Caltech, and arguably Stanford) have a big chunk and possibly even a majority of their undergrads in pre-professional majors. And all except UChicago have undergraduate engineering schools/majors. Penn and Georgetown have a nursing major. Cornell and Rice have an architecture major. Cornell also has an Ag school.
And all 16 besides Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth offer some business/management/finance major/minor/certificate to undergrads. And Dartmouth allows undergrads to take business classes taught by Tuck professors.
This is a fascinating discussion.
Different types of schools have different strengths and (relative) weaknesses. There are general well-known pros and cons for private U’s, public U’s, and LACs, and students should choose among them based partly on those pros and cons as they relate to individual fit.
But just about any school can turn out high-quality, highly motivated and high-achieving students. Where they are clustered most (by % of total student pop; analysis is better than bare numbers, IMO) tells us where the students are most driven, and able, to achieve such awards. It does not necessarily, of course, inform us quite as directly regarding the quality of teaching or academics. It can be hard to discern how much of scholarly success is attributable to the abilities and drive of the student vs. the academic environment.
Some teachers can inspire a love of learning. Certainly they may help to nurture the type of academic zeal necessary to win such an award. And maybe those teachers do reside (relatively) more often at the schools that are high up on most of these awards lists. Certainly that could mean that those schools foster learning a little bit better than schools with relatively fewer of such profs. Still, we can’t really know to what degree the academic environment played a role in the award. We know for certain that the quality and drive of the student plays a large one.
The impact of great teaching (and learning environment…) would probably be most obvious if a low-stat kid went on to win one of the illustrious awards mentioned in this thread. That would elicit thoughts like, “Whoa, that school brought that out of her?” Even then, maybe other circumstances/changes were in cahoots to help bring about the change that led to the award. It’s just really hard to know for certain without digging deep – sitting down with the kids to find out what produced the award. And who has time to do that?
So we make lists based on the awards. In this case, the lists show a nice mix of schools, which is good. To me it means there are talented/driven kids and quality faculty at a great many schools – not exactly a new thought, but a refreshing one nonetheless. Maybe we can be satisfied with defining the factors involved in winning an award thus: that it takes at least some intelligence, some drive/inspiration, some level of academic quality – maybe even some luck – to produce one of these awards. And the relative amounts of those factors will necessarily differ individually, requiring some (further) digging.
I, personally, am fine with stating what this thread has made apparent (to me, at least), and leaving it at that:
- The quality of post-secondary students and educators is spread more broadly than some perhaps have been conditioned to believe.
That’s a good thing, I think, especially for those forced to make a difficult college choice: you can get a good education, and be inspired to achieve, and be taught by excellent teachers, at so very many schools.
Taking something that is subjective (“best” college/university) and assigning objective numbers to various aspects of it does not then make the determination objective. Vary which factors you consider and/or relative weight given to each and you get different results. Does that make one better than the other? If so, on what basis?
Yep, to add to @prezbucky’s point:
The academic strength of undergraduates in the US goes deep and the academic strength of the faculty goes extremely deep.
As a comparison, because the very top is full of smaller privates and tiny LACs in the US and the US is a big country, if you add up all the undergraduate places in all those 30 colleges that I deem Ivy-equivalents, that number still is a smaller percentage of the population than Oxbridge+LSE+Imperial offer in the UK, UTokyo+Keio+Waseda offer in Japan, and the Grandes Ecoles offer in France.
And because the elite privates here admit holistically, there is a ton of talent spread out all over (compare with the UK where by almost any alumni achievement measure, Oxbridge are far ahead of any other UK uni besides LSE).
Faculty talent is spread even further down in this country. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the US has at least half of the entire world’s top academic talent. The US has the vast majority of the top 15 spots in the ARWU research rankings, the clear majority of the top 50, and a little over half the top 100 in the world.
A run-of-the-mill state flagship will likely feature greater faculty talent than the top university in most of the other countries in the world.
@saillakeerie, definitely, they could vary.
Feel free to make your own.
Rankings, almost by definition, are subjective as they are dependent on how and what you weigh.