<p>xiggi, for what it’s worth, I can assure you that my “prestigiosity” ratings aren’t corrupt. Nobody has offered me a dime, at least so far.</p>
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You should be getting large sums of oil soon to put King Abdullah University for Science and Technology at 1001 mH.</p>
<p>Haha! …</p>
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I have integrity and I agree with the peer assessment results for the most part. I seriously doubt 2,000 responders are throwing darts and know more about Lady Gaga than the schools they are supposed to rank.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>First of all you assume that the 2,000 people who sign the PA surveys actually read them. </p>
<p>Obviously, we know that a few do and know what they do to the surveys, as the stories of whimsical filings at Wisconsin, Clemson, Miami came to light. So much for the integrity component, fwiw! </p>
<p>In the meantime, I’ll stick to my version of secretaries and flunkies grabbing last year edition as a guideline to fill the current edition. Oops, I should call them administrative assistants! </p>
<p>And, yes, I do believe they know more about Lady Gaga than about the majority of the schools they offer an opinion on. After all, they probably saw Lady Gaga on TV, heard about her, and know what she stands for. That is more than could be said about the schools listed on the survey.</p>
<p>But, to each his own. I think the PA are a complete joke, and that most of the support for that survey comes from people who enjoy an overly generous score. You think the PA is great, and all I have to look at is Harvey Mudd vs Smith and a few similar schools to think the PA is an abject exercise in cronyism.</p>
<p>With the exception of religious schools, a university’s peer assessment score seems closely linked to its place on the ranking, though I would still think that research output, the general way for one university to know another, plays a significant role. Which seems odd, since this is an undergrad ranking, and research output should be a grad school concern.</p>
<p>“Obviously, we know that a few do and know what they do to the surveys, as the stories of whimsical filings at Wisconsin, Clemson, Miami came to light. So much for the integrity component, fwiw!”</p>
<p>What about all of the whimsical objective numbers that USNWR uses to rate these schools? Who is investigating the accuracy of those, particularly at the private level?</p>
<p>Their #1 college, Williams College, is actually very underrated imo.</p>
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Most liberal arts colleges are, so it’s good that they’re getting some attention.</p>
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Yes, the fact checking at US News leaves a bit to be desired.</p>
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<p>Some schools do indeed report whimsical numbers, and under the benevolent eye of Morse and his crew. It should be a good question to ask Morse about his motivation to allow Middlebury and Cal to obfuscate a sizeable part of their admitted classes, or to allow Columbia to report hard-to-believe selectivity numbers. However, most of the hard data can be compared to official reports. The same cannot be said about the PA reports. </p>
<p>In addition, it takes a lot of whimsical numbers to end up with meaningful changes, and nothing could compare to the compounded impact of years of PA manipulations or plain ignorance.</p>
<p>NYU ranked at 200?? This guy completely shafts public schools, although I do think his high ranking of the military academies is correct. That’s basically the only thing he got right</p>
<p>Yes, all rankings are flawed, and lord knows US News has a long way to go. But at least they’re attempting to be serious in their ranking methodology, whereas this</p>
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<p>is sinfully stupid. Every single one of those criteria has blaring problems. “Who’s Who” is widely considered to be a joke; Payscale is inaccurate because it’s self-reported data; RateMyProfessors is useless to most top colleges, which use their own internal evaluation systems; and so on.</p>
<p>Some rankings can be more flawed - and therefore more wrong - than others if the criteria they use are very seriously statistically… stupid.</p>
<p>“I’m not really sure what’s the purpose of this website. If you want to take a math class, even though it’s not on the core, no one’s going to stop you. If your son or daughter doesn’t want to take a math class, then that’s their problem.”</p>
<p>What They Will Learn has a very strong point. It’s about comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges. What is your degree worth? A degree from a school with a strong curriculum requirement means that the students graduated from that institution have a well-rounded education. It shouldn’t just be the name of the school on the diploma, but what have you learned? For example, if an institution allows their students to take basket weaving in placed of math, but they can still graduate with a college degree, so is the value of a degree from college A the same as college B?</p>
<p>xiggi, I have agreed with you in the past about the PA for LACs. LACs are harder to distinguish academically, IMO, because they aren’t engaged as visibly in research. Rightly and wrongly, research is the biggest component of prestige in an academic’s eye…and I believe academics are mostly filling out the surveys. </p>
<p>Other USNWR ratings measure incoming student body achievement. The PA is a quasi measure of faculty achievement. There are more objective ways to measure faculty quality but until USNWR incorporates those measures I will support the PA for research universities.</p>
<p>It seems to me that over time, these ratings may serve to actually make the higher rated schools more selective, if they convince more and more high achieving students to apply and matriculate there. And once you attract those good students, you can probably attract better faculty, and the whole thing goes around and around.</p>
<p>Interesting ranking-Williams, Amherst, Princeton are in top 4, ND at 18 seems right and Holy Cross is ranked 27 ahead of Rice28, Dartmouth30, Colgate37, Bowdoin38, and TUFTS39. Holy Cross also was ranked 12 among all schools in this year’s Payscale salary.</p>
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<p>It’s definitely a chicken-or-the-egg situation, but I’ve always taken the view that it’s the faculty that come first, and the students follow. What brings in faculty is high salaries and nice facilities, and once you have those, you’ll get a stronger faculty who do higher-quality research. This research is largely what determines prestige (and why LACs aren’t well-known to the public), both in the general public and in academia. That prestige brings in more students, allowing the university to be more selective, which then feeds into the prestige and brings in more faculty and students, etc.</p>
<p>But IMO rankings don’t influence these things, but rather are more reflections of the status quo.</p>
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<p>UCB, you’re illustrating the basic problem with the PA, Every attempt to justify its validity introduces new concepts. Some day it is a bit of that; other days is a bit of this. In past discussions, it went as far as describing it as the perception of the perception of academic distinction, or a similar non-sensical explanation. </p>
<p>Fwiw, yours is pretty good. The unfortunate part is that it almost at the antipode of the description provided by USNews to the schools. There is NO mention of academic research. There is NO mention of graduate “prestige.” </p>
<p>Despite the best efforts of some to bury this, we know that there are plenty of professors who concentrate on research and bringing the bacon home in the form of grant money. Research is paramount, and teaching UGs is viewed as either a nuisance or an afterhought. We all have heard the phrase “Publish or perish.” At least, a lot more often than … “Teach or perish.” </p>
<p>The bottom line is simple. The PA is whatever people want it to be. It is obvious that the responders do NOT follow the instructions and fill the surveys according to whatever criteria fit their mood, and, in turn, are misrepresented by USNews as a measure of UNDERGRADUATE programs.</p>
<p>I believe it would be better for USNews to be more honest about what they pretend to measure with this PA. If what they want to reward is graduate school prestige and research prowess, just say so. It would be better than being so dishonest about this boondoggle.</p>
<p>Xiggi, I don’t think USNews is being dishonest. They asked for collective opinion on academic programs…according to academics. Academics will rate programs on qualities important to them. </p>
<p>I don’t know how you can say survey results of nearly 2000 respondents is dishonest. Unless you truly believe a majority of respondents are dishonest.</p>
<p>I feel if you ask an academic, you’re going to get an academic answer.</p>
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<p>I think I would learn more than Brown (which has an F according to that site) as opposed to Tennessee State University, 30 minutes from my home (which got an A). Is it possible to get an incredibly easy education at Brown? Yes. But I seriously doubt that the TSU grad is more educated simply because he or she was REQUIRED to take math or science classes. There are a lot of good answers as to why one may rather go to TSU than Brown, but a core curriculum is hardly one of them.</p>