New rankings - US News & World Report

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Michigan
121

<p>GoBlue81: does USN&WR really adjust for salaries?</p>

<p><a href=“Cost of living: How far will my salary go in another city? - CNNMoney”>http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>$50,000 in Ann Arbor is $63,443 in Los Angeles. Stated differently, it is approximately 25% more expensive to live in LA. (mostly due to housing…no surprise) Note that this same differential exists in comparisons like Paycheck (services which attempt to measure outcomes for students) as well as in rankings for graduate schools. Such comparisons almost never take into account what the compensation buys in the zip codes in which the graduates land. A coastal school placing kids into coastal firms puts them at the heart of the action in the better firms but also really distorts compensation comparisons. Since quality of life/future-career cannot be measured with a meaningful measure, you’d think that such services would be honest enough to equilibrate the data, but they generally do not:</p>

<p>$63,443
Price difference in Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA
• Groceries 10% more
• Housing 75% more
• Utilities 4% more
• Transportation 6% more
• Health Care11% more</p>

122

<p>“I believe reading somewhere that they use around 5% per year”</p>

<p>Your figure is close, they spend something like 4.5% of a smoothed average of, I believe, 7 years of value.</p>

123

<p>^ Good to know that my memory still serves. ;)</p>

124

<p>I wish this thread were in the “College Search and Selection” section here on CC. Perhaps it would influence more posters/readers to rethink their over inflated opinions of the quality and accuracy of The USNWR ranking system.</p>

125

<p>

That’s my question too as the math doesn’t add up. US News states clearly in their methodology that “Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits … adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living…” They lied if they didn’t use it in the calculations.</p>

<p>I’m now convinced there are no verification and data integrity checks built into the US News data entry system. If we dig deeper, we will expose more inaccuracies, ambiguity, and gross negligence in the US News data and analysis.</p>

126

<p>I have been saying it for years GoBlue. In order to create a ranking that appears viable, the USNWR takes minute differences, most of which are hard to calculate or validate in the first place, and blows them way out of proportion. There is very little difference between the top universities in the US, but if the ranking were flat at the top, nobody would buy the magazine!</p>

127

<p>

True. But in this case, US News data analysis is downright wrong! Let’s do the math, again comparing the faculty resources data for Michigan (#68) and UCLA (#32):</p>

<p>Faculty resources are based on six factors –

  1. %Classes < 20 (30%)
  2. %Classes > 50 (10%)
  3. Student/faculty ratio (5%)
    4<em>. %faculty with highest degree (15%)
    5</em>. %faculty who are full time (5%)
  4. Faculty salary (35%) adjusted for region and cost-of-living indexes</p>

<ol>
<li>UCLA (50%) > Michigan (47%)</li>
<li>Michigan (18%) > UCLA (22%)</li>
<li>Michigan (15:1) > UCLA (17:1)</li>
<li>UCLA (98%) > Michigan (90%)</li>
<li>Michigan (93%) > UCLA (90%)</li>
<li>UCLA 2-9% higher than Michigan (NOT adjusting for region and cost-of-living)</li>
</ol>

<p>On a 100 point scale for Faculty Resources:</p>

<ol>
<li>UCLA > Michigan by: 30 x 0.03 = 0.90 point</li>
<li><p>UCLA < Michigan by: 10 x 0.04 = 0.40 point</p></li>
<li><p>Assuming a reasonable range of Student/Faculty Ratio of 5:1 to 25:1 –
every ratio unit is equivalent to 5%. Thus:
UCLA < Michigan by: 5 x 0.10 = 0.50 point</p></li>
</ol>

<p>So UCLA and Michigan is basically even summing the first three factors.</p>

<ol>
<li>UCLA > Michigan by: 15 x 0.08 = 1.20 point</li>
<li>UCLA < Michigan by: 5 x 0.03 = 0.15 point</li>
</ol>

<p>So UCLA is ahead of Michigan by a mere 1.05 point on a 100 point scale. Even US News can’t split 1.05% into 36 ranking places (#32 vs. #68)!</p>

<p>And that’s assuming Michigan’s faculty salary is even with UCLA after adjusting for cost-of-living differences. According to one source, the RPP (Regional Price Parities) Index of Ann Arbor and UCLA are 102.4 and 114.2 respectively. Thus Michigan’s faculty salary is slightly higher than UCLA’s after the cost-of-living adjustment.</p>

<p>That means Michigan may even be ahead of UCLA, given US News Faculty Resources formula!</p>

<p>I’m more and more sure that if we dig deeper, we will find more inaccuracies, ambiguity, and gross negligence in the US News data and analysis. </p>

<p>Note: I’m only using UCLA for comparison for convenience, as I don’t have faculty salary data for non-peer universities.</p>

128

<p>If you’re looking for faculty salary data, Chronicle publishes a survey (I think annually) on average faculty salary data. I believe this is the most up to date one:</p>

<p><a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/2013-14-AAUP-Faculty-Salary/145679/#id=table”>http://chronicle.com/article/2013-14-AAUP-Faculty-Salary/145679/#id=table&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

129

<p>Faculty resources are yet another useless metric that USNWR gives way too much importance. </p>