New rankings - US News & World Report

<p>The new rankings are out and not much has changed. Still, it is always fun noting the minor shifts, so here they are:</p>

<p>The overall ranking of the university has dropped one spot to #29, down from #28 last year. This is hardly a surprise. Michigan has fluctuated between #28 and #29 for the last 5-6 years. </p>

<p>The University's Peer Assessment rating also dropped a fraction of a point to 4.4 (tied with Brown, Duke and Penn), down from 4.5 last year. Again, this is not a surprise as Michigan has fluctuated from 4.4 to 4.5 for the last decade or so.</p>

<p>The CoE ranking remained steady at #7, tied with Carnegie Mellon. However, there was some movement in the specialities. For example, the College improved to #2 (from #3 a year ago) in Aerospace Engineering. It also improved to #5 (from #6 a year ago) in Electrical Engineering. In Mechanical Engineering, the College dropped to #3 (from #2 last year). </p>

<p>Ross dropped from #2 to #4 overall. Again, that is not surprising. The gap between Haas, Ross and Sloan is insignificant. Ross "killed it" in the specialities. As usual, Ross was #1 in General Management. Very surprising (and suspicious), however, was the #1 ranking Ross received for Finance. Ross was also #1 in Marketing. </p>

<p>Would’ve thought $200 mill sealed the deal for #2 @ Ross. </p>

<p>Interesting. I was looking up the rank to response to a thread yesterday and it was still with the old ranking. Now the new one is up.</p>

<p>Alexandre - why do you find the move to #1 for Ross Finance suspicious? It’s a phenomenal program.</p>

<p>Wayneandgarth, Ross is indeed awesome in Finance, but I think from a purely academic point of view, Wharton and Stern have more robust departments (larger, more distinguished faculty and deeper curriculum), and from a placement point of view, Wharton is more heavily recruited. As such, I think Ross should be ranked #2 or #3 in Finance at the undergraduate level. </p>

<p><a href=“Opinion | Becoming a Real Person - The New York Times”>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/david-brooks-becoming-a-real-person.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>ForeverAlone, it will take a couple of years before we feel the full effect of Ross’ gift (which was $100 million because the other $100 million was earmarked for the athletics department).</p>

<p>Several thoughts: 1) these rankings are kind of silly in that they conflate comparisons between schools which are inherently incomparable due to size, funding, mission…; does it really make sense to compare tiny schools like Brown and Northwestern to much larger schools like Cornell, Berkeley and Michigan?; 2) there is/was a degree of spurious precision in that institutions which were separated only in the n-th decimal place were considered different when they are essentially at the same ranking level; 3) UM’s ranking in the mid-80s was in/near the top ten in, roughly, 1985, and dropped 15+ places the next year due to a change in methodology which I’ve never seen adequately explained; 4) if you look at the rankings, they now contain ties (removing some of the aforementioned spurious precision), but ties do not appear to cascade, so we see MIT ranked at 7 (after: 1,2,3,4,4,4 rankings for the “better” schools); in my cosmology, the other schools would be as ranked (i.e., roughly comparable), and MIT would be ranked 5th.</p>

<p>Cascading ties, I think, is quite reasonable in that if the distinctions above a given ranking are not determinable, the whole cohort should take the same ranking and the next school should pick up the next integer. Without that process, Michigan’s ranking is 29th. Were the suggested process used, given the roughly (I didn’t count exactly) 10 ties in schools further up the list, Michigan would rank #19. Not as high as we might like, but perhaps a bit closer to reality. That is the case for Michigan but I wonder how large the impact is for schools which are further down the list (let’s say below #150)? What does such an ordinal ranking tell us about departments or things like citation strength? UM’s department are typically ranked in the top 10 nationally, but for those departments out of the top 10, they frequently rank around #7 or so after ties are removed (but around 13th before tie removal). What is the impact of not cascading ties at that level of granularity on the overall ranking of each school, not just UM?</p>

<p>I don’t have the figures in hand, but I see UVA typically ranked above UM, yet I’m fairly certain that UM has a far larger research budget, greater citation strength and more faculty awards, a larger library, and students who are just as well qualified and who succeed to the same degree as UVA graduates. Many of these measures can’t be meaningfully “normalized” by size. For example, UM has a larger library, but is it meaningful to divide by student headcount? So what, precisely, is embedded in the methodology to lead to the disparity in rankings?</p>

<p>So, rankings make for controversy, and are fun to debate, but it is not clear to me how one can meaningfully use such a synoptic measure. I think the proliferation of alternative rankings is a clear play for economic advantage by the publlishing entities, but would argue that measures of outputs (as used in alternative rankings) can be used rather than purely inputs. Further, that measures such as net ROI and social utility can/should play a role in the creation of such new rankings. Beyond the fun factor, my take is that this dominant ranking service does more harm than good and lends credence to a theory that there is some sort of magical determinism due to those who follow the rankings.</p>

<p>Alexandre, your wish is USNWR’s command:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2014/09/09/correction-to-best-undergraduate-business-specialty-rankings”>http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2014/09/09/correction-to-best-undergraduate-business-specialty-rankings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Ha! You have to admit UCB, I was spot on! ;)</p>

<p>blue85, I agree 100% with your post above. I have always maintained that rankings make little sense. Rating universities individually based on meaningful criteria makes sense, but ranking universities the way the USNWR does makes little sense. In addition to your very valid points, most rankings do not audit data for accuracy or consistency. How can a university with an endowment of $9 billion have 40 universities ranked ahead of it in the Financial Resources rank? LOL! Or the Faculty Resources rank that insists that it is ok for many universities to completely omit thousands of graduate students from their student to faculty ratios, giving them a decided advantage over universities that actually include graduate students in their calculation. I guess honesty does not pay! I have said it all along, from a purely quantitative measure, Michigan should be ranked much higher. But that brings us back to the original point, how can we rank universities when they are so vastly different? The answer, as you point out above, is clear; we cannot! Universities should be rated individually and given an overall rating score. If one wishes to compare colleges and universities to each other based on those ratings, so be it. </p>

<p>Alexandre: thanks for the reply. I think Malcolm Gladwell gets a lot of things wrong, but he has a pretty good batting average. Here is his take on rankings: <a href=“The Trouble with College Rankings | The New Yorker”>The Trouble with College Rankings | The New Yorker;

<p>If you like/agree-with reputational rankings or peer opinion: “Bastedo, incidentally, says that reputation ratings can sometimes work very well. It makes sense, for example, to ask professors within a field to rate others in their field: they read one another’s work, attend the same conferences, and hire one another’s graduate students, so they have real knowledge on which to base an opinion. Reputation scores can work for one-dimensional rankings, created by people with specialized knowledge.”</p>

<p>and further on: ““If you look at the top twenty schools every year, forever, they are all wealthy private universities,” Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, told me. “Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are—Berkeley, U.C.L.A., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, U.N.C.—do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top tier of institutions? It doesn’t really make sense, until you drill down into the rankings, and what do you find? What I find more than anything else is a measure of wealth: institutional wealth, how big is your endowment, what percentage of alumni are donating each year, what are your faculty salaries, how much are you spending per student.”</p>

<p>Can someone explain to me where Michigan’s student selectivity is in relation to its overall ranking? I think the school has higher student stats than schools like UCLA but still ends up lower overall. What is the major discrepancy here?</p>

<p>UCLA received over 100,000 applications this year and UCB had just over 90,000. Michigan had ‘only’ about 50,000 apply.</p>

<p>“UCLA received over 100,000 applications this year and UCB had just over 90,000. Michigan had ‘only’ about 50,000 apply.”</p>

<p>Keep in mind the fact that California’s population is 4 times the size of Michigan’s population. At a comparable run rate, Michigan would have receive 200,000 applications or stated against a Michigan basis, UCLA and UCB would be at roughly the 25,000 level or 1/2 of the Michigan application volume. </p>

<p>I guess a better comparison would be the number of oos applicants.</p>

<p>“Keep in mind the fact that California’s population is 4 times the size of Michigan’s population.”</p>

<p>…and also California has a common application for its UC system which makes it very easy to apply to multiple campuses with a simple mark of a pen. </p>

<p>Acceptance Rate is only 1.25% of the overall ranking point (10% of 12.5%). SAT/ACT composite and Top 10% ranking have higher weight.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/09/08/how-us-news-calculated-the-2015-best-colleges-rankings?page=3”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/09/08/how-us-news-calculated-the-2015-best-colleges-rankings?page=3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

</p>

<p>Still location wise, Berkley and UCLA draws applicants because they are both in one of the most ideal places(in terms of weather, community, stuff to do) to live in and careerwise.
Both have great weather. UCLA obviously has LA. Berkley is only an hour away from the San Francisco. </p>

<p>UMich has cold weather and Detroit. </p>

<p>All three are academically peers. Berkley > UMich >= UCLA</p>

<p>It has nicer weather in California, but the living expense is much higher too. Certainly, there are many factors that would affect the number of applicants and admission rates, much more than the reputation or academic strength. There is no perfect ranking system as one may put different weight on different factors, and there is no absolute right or wrong doing one way or the other. Ranking is just a reference, and there are many more rankings available than USNWR.</p>