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<p>Apparently the informed and well educated chancellor at Berkeley rated all the UC campuses better than Mich. These people are obviously more informed, and less biased than I am. Hmmph :(</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings[/url]”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings</a></p>
<p>sefago, it is not strange that the PA has not changed much over the years. Universities do not change much over the short term, especially relative to other universities. It takes decades for a school to truly change, and generally speaking, all universities improve at an approximately equal rate. It is very hard for a university to drop or leapfrog significantly.</p>
<p>That said, it is important to keep in mind that the PA is an opinion rating. University presidents may be clueless, but they will have an opinion on peer schools anyway. Some will value that opinion while others will not.</p>
<p>Ranking universities is a messy business. There are very few metrics that can be used consistantly that are telling and the remaining varriables are either impossible to measure, difficult to weigh or interpret and easily manipulated or altered.</p>
<p>I think an important aspect of the PA should be transparency. The ratings should be made public to yield the best possible result.</p>
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<p>Well from general observation. I noticed he previously liked the PA score. I dont know if he still likes it now though. Infact he used to tier schools based on the PA score. Apparently its a great way to judge a school. However other objective factors and the overall USNEWS ranking are bad. </p>
<p>Now personally, I dont have anything against the USNEWS. Its methodology- even for the PA score is not that bad. However, what I dislike is taking one standard out of teh USNEWS formula.</p>
<p>THe problem is that, as I said earlier, adding more criteria improves the “credibility” (Does such a thing exist?) of a ranking. This is because one criteria which might seem biased towards one school could be evened out by another set of criteria which favor another type of school. </p>
<p>-Nobody can fault the fact that having small classes is more condusive than larger classes for learning
<p>Infact, I just checked the methodology of the USNEWS and the agree with my rationale.</p>
<p>[Methodology:</a> Undergraduate Ranking Criteria and Weights - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/08/17/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights-2011.html]Methodology:”>http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/08/17/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights-2011.html)</p>
<p>Graduation rate: Obviously engineering schools and more rigorous shools are affected by this- but in general the more support you get from the school, the more likely you graduate on time. Figuring out you major, and what classes to pick could be done individually. But most times most people need the guidance of their college Deans.</p>
<p>Expenditures/student: Having a research hospital is good. You students in the biomedical sciences, physics, chemistry and biology will benefit from it either directly or indirectly. Large engineering schools are favored by this too. Large research universities would be heavily favored over Undergraduate focussed schools since they would have high research fundings. Nevertheless undergraduates do benefit from the research going on in a school sometimes.<br>
I could go on and on rationalizing the choice of USNEWS for their choice of variables.</p>
<p>For electrical & computer engineering I personally would pick Illinois, based on my outdated recollection of the quality of Illinois’s programs in this area and the successful and impressive grads I’ve met over the course of my career. But I would probably catch myself up first. And I don’t know about this budget cuts stuff, that’s another thing.</p>
<p>As for this other stuff, I think Michigan’s reputation is as good or better than most. If you do well there you will have great opportunities, from what I can tell. Some private universities may have more homogeneous aggregate student bodies than some publics, that does not mean you, as an individual with your own particular set of capabilities, will have worse outcomes from one university vs. the other. Certainly Michigan grads attain some of the highest future destinations. Not all of them. Not all of them are good enough. Same for these other schools. The proportion that are good enough may be a bit different, doesn’t mean you are any better than you are, either way, or will get further.</p>