Resources per student is also gameable/corruptible/difficult to tease out undergrad vs grad. Columbia included its hospital system in the resources number it provided to USNWR until their whistleblower pointed it out.
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I wish ALL the colleges would stop cooperating with USNWR!
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A lot of top colleges that are well ranked that have large socioeconomic stratification have been well known to wealthy families far longer than any of the college rankings, so while that may be of interest to them I doubt its the only reason they gravitate toward them.
I’ve had a couple points of references to the intersection of extreme wealth at private colleges. My oldest attended a highly selective LAC in a suburban area. He said that wealthy students for the most part were self-conscious not to be conspicuous about it, to the point that it wasn’t even clear who came from wealth. About the only obvious clue was the large number of Canada Goose jackets that were worn in the winter.
More recently I have been fascinated by the discussions in the parent group I belong to for another top college. As an example, someone asked if they should offer their kid spending money for food, local transportation and entertainment (the college is in a major city). We hadn’t done this at all with our older kids at suburban LACs but here some of the answers were totally bonkers. It was routine for parents to say they offer $300-400/month in spending money on top of tuition, meal plans, housing, transportation to/from school, etc. But one parent mentioned that they pay for their student to have a private apartment, access to a credit card and an allowance of $5,000 a month to use for things other than housing and meals! Meanwhile, other parents were complaining about how their kids get asked to go out to dinner or activities with peers and places are casually selected by the wealthier kids that are way out of their ability to pay (yet, awkwardly, the wealthy kids rarely think to cover the less fortunate they dragged there).
I don’t think the wealthy really care who else is at the school one way or the other. It doesn’t impact their bubble.
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Holy schnikies… must have been quite a change to the formula, as UChicago and some other privates really dropped, while some of the old school public powerhouses rose back to where they probably should have been in the first place – TX, Wisconsin and Illinois are now low-mid 30s and Washington is up to 40.
There are, as always, some head-scratchers. Did Wake Forest really fall 20 spots on merit?
As always, in the next couple years we’ll see which schools change to fit the new formula and rise back up the rankings, and which schools disregard it.
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Faculty to student ratio seems problematic to me. How is faculty being defined? Does it include professors who rarely teach and mostly conduct research? TAs?
My student wanted a school with smaller classes. Many of the schools that moved up are known for very large class sizes. Faculty/student ratio therefore seems a poor predicator of the actual size of the classes.
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If USNWR required applications to include a supplemental essay, Northeastern would really be screwed.
In a classic, tables have been turned, USNWR would be gaming Northeastern.
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100%.
I also think that, in a way not dissimilar to the sometimes vast differences between schools on the ‘main’ list, that the list of LACs is really mixing some incongruous apples and oranges. Like, I know the service academies have to live “somewhere” in rankings, but, it’s tough to imagine a metric ton of cross shopping between, say, West Point and Swarthmore. Barnard also strikes me as a LAC outlier because of its relationship to Columbia. Not to mention being in NYC.
On the larger issues surrounding these rankings, I hope this latest effort continues USNWR’s inexorably march toward irrelevance.
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I will note that UChicago is now ranked lower than they were the year I graduated from high school, back when they refused to play the rankings games and had an admit rate close to 50%.
Related to that, does anyone else get the impression that many of the schools notorious for “gaming the rankings” took big tumbles this year?
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Where do you find the scores? I’m not seeing those, just the overall rankings.
Per USNWR:
Student-faculty ratio is the ratio of undergraduate students to instructional faculty.
So non-teaching faculty and TAs wouldn’t count.
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As a brief follow up, that NYT chart linked above has a change from 2011 column for Pell Grant percentage.
Nationally, the average is down 2% (again, this is actually a shrinking pool in both total terms and relative terms).
But WUSTL in particular was +10%, one of the highest few total (#11 overall), and the very top of the decent-sized universities list.
However, you can see the competition too. Among the highest endowment per student/normal-sized universities, Princeton was +7, Yale +8, Harvard +4, MIT +2, Stanford +4, Dartmouth +4, Rice +1, Penn +3, Columbia +3, Vanderbilt +5, Hopkins +8, and Northwestern +5. Among such universities with $1M+/student, the only negatives were Duke -1, Emory -4, Chicago -1, and Brown -3, with ND at 0.
None are as high as WUSTL at +10, but again the national baseline is -2. So these other colleges also mostly increased the relative size of their slice of the pie (only excepting Emory and Brown), which naturally means it was harder for WUSTL to increase the relative size of its slice of the pie.
But it did do that, and indeed did it the most among all such universities. So its policies are working, but just at a certain pace.
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But would include research faculty if they teach at least one class or however the school defines instructional. Again, there seems to be a notable movement upwards in schools with large class sizes so the ratio doesn’t seem to be a good substitute for class size.
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U of Chicago is the college that baffles me the most. They have an earned reputation for attracting smart students and for academic rigor that goes back further than the rankings. Yet they play games with admission stats that would make Northeastern blush. Why? It’s beneath them. Makes them look desperate when they have no need to be.
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As another poster pointed out, this is virtually inevitable when there is a big methodology change.
But we’ll see how it looks in a few years.
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As someone with family in academia even this is a not so precise measure. A weirdly high number of profs teach 1 section of 1 class in 1 semester. In an entire academic year. That person then counts in the ratio the same as another who teaches 4 sections total across 2 classes in all 2 (or 3) semesters in the year.
Exactly. It’s not. It’s different from the class size metric, but better? Eh.
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Agreed - this is where societal perceptions need to override.
The flip side is - will these top kids start applying to schools like NJIT and FIU - who crushed the WSJ rankings.
I keep going back to - Nick Saban didn’t forget how to coach because their teams stumbled.
These schools are the same as they were yesterday - and I imagine that’ll likely resonate with kids today - as long as their alumni stay proud and successful.
But there are always kids who never heard of any school, get ahold of the rankings, and over time it could hurt.
Of course, over time, these schools will likely figure out a way to move back up to where they feel is their righteous place.
To me, and I look at Bama and they fell again and yet attract smart kids galore. U Tulsa with 25% NMF/SF at 195 - not sure where they were last year.
SMU falling from 72 to 89 - and historically was perceived as a top notch program til - I dunno - the last 10-20 years - but what does the ACC think now? Does it still fit in.
Crazy - that a magazine can at least have me asking these questions. I’m not sure if society is.
I wish they had kept class size, but randomly changed the cutoffs each year to foil gaming. One year the class size cutoffs could be 20/50/100, maybe the next year 19/60/99, then 24/48/105 etc.
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Why arbitrarily stop at #25 LAC’s? Holy Cross #27 (up in rank from #33). Macalester #27, Colorado College #29, Berea, Bryn Mawr, Bucknell and Lafayette all #30 are all SLAC worth mentioning as top LAC’s.
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So for context, I think this paper I have linked before is useful:
That’s from 2004, and includes LACs, but Chicago was down at #27 in this revealed preference rankings, #20 if you exclude LACs.
None of that implies Chicago has a “bad” college. But it does imply it had a real problem winning cross-admit battles. And it is easy to understand why–it has a very distinctive brand image that appeals to a few college applicants, but likely turns off even more.
So I find it very understandable why Chicago might feel the need to do things to try to change that.
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I actually think UChicago is now ranked too low, based on overall academic strength (my top variable…). But – that is really hard to quantify.
Though I think it is fitting that UChicago and Columbia are tied – the two are so alike.
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