At least for the T50+ (perhaps more), I doubt this will change applications or admissions meaningfully.
Sadly, what may happen over the next few years is some schools may put less emphasis on some of the criteria that got deprioritized in the ranking, like small class size. I doubt this changes for the truly endowment flush schools, but for the rest that have to be thoughtful about deployment of their limited resources, how does the head of the school justify to their trustees investing in class size when they get zero credit for it?
And the dropping of the terminal degrees metric will make the already despicable trends of colleges relying more and more on “adjunct professors” who they bring in for a couple years then never tenure even more popular. I say this not because many aren’t great teachers but because its unfair to them that there are fewer and fewer tenured opportunities. And the constant shuffle undermines teaching.
I totally agree. All you mentioned will be fine as is and Tulane will figure out what to do to get ranking back. Tulane is the only one that can suffer in the short term from students who may look the other way.
This may have been asked but I didn’t see scanning through. Are the actual numbers published in terms of the score for each score? It would be interesting to see how many “points” separate say 50 from 85 or 75 from 150. In P&Q, i think they show the underlying score for the rankings regardless of any belief in the methodology.
Also, how much does cost of attendance factor in…or do the rankings assume the costs are the same?
Has anyone considered that US News may have had all state schools pick from a hat with numbers ranging from 0-25. Whatever number was selected was the number of unworthy spots that a state school was able to jump undeservedly in the ratings.
If anyone wants to know how I feel about the whole thing, that sums it up.
Much more equanimity and poise in the delivery than Vanderbilt, to be sure, but the content isn’t much better. They’ve gone backward on Pell-eligible students since 2011, and at some point you have to conclude that the lack of progress coupled with denial means it just isn’t a priority of theirs.
Read Kelchen. It’s where I read most of my info. He’s a Top Higher Ed prof. It’s not anecdata. Robert Kelchen is a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
“I talked with the Des Moines Register about the challenges that most of the state’s small private colleges are facing amid enrollment declines. The typical strategy is to try to start new academic programs and sports teams, but will that pay off?”
“I wrote a @chronicle essay on the growing divide between the small group of colleges bursting at the seams with students (mostly flagship public universities and super-wealthy private colleges) and everyone else. https://chronicle.com/article/the-haves-and-have-nots-of-higher-education”
I don’t need to; I read the University of Chicago’s own data about where University of Chicago students go after they graduate. I think they’re in a good position to know.
39% is a fairly healthy amount of students from a school of of Chicago’s caliber to stay in the Midwest - and I don’t mean to disparage that section of the country in saying so.
Not about Chicago which is a weird school in many regards.
It’s about the other non top small privates(and regional publics)losing students while Flagships thrive because they have what students want.
Oh, that discussion is dead. And just from the title in the link, it would appear consistent with that passage I copied from that piece on the higher ed conference.
In any event, we’re going in circles. I’m not sure you appreciated or understood what I was trying to say, and frankly, it doesn’t matter at this point.
Over the years US News seemed to reward private colleges at the expense of public colleges that offered a similar or even better college education and it rewarded colleges for simply being private universities - even less recognized ones.
Along time ago I used to recall top public universities such as UC Berkeley, U.Michigan for example in the top 20. It seems that US News is going back to their old formula of ranking colleges based on their research status and not favoring less well known colleges simply because they are private IMHO. I don’t think this is simply a change in ranking based on DEI or if it was it happened to correlate 1-1 with top public research universities moving up the list.
