but how does one know that? That’s “perception” based on history or other things that have crossed your mind.
I’ll just say this - both are well reputed and nothing should change that from yesterday to today.
And some colleges (e.g. Northeastern) did game it rather aggressively. Class sizes was measured in buckets of number of classes of size 1-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50+. So ranking gamers would do stuff like have lab and discussion sections listed as separate classes (instead of associated sections of a large lecture) and cap them at exactly 19 (or sometimes 29) students.
How Northeastern University Gamed the College Rankings says that “Point by point, senior staff members tackled different criteria, always with an eye to U.S. News’s methodology. Freeland added faculty, for instance, to reduce class size. “We did play other kinds of games,” he says. “You get credit for the number of classes you have under 20 [students], so we lowered our caps on a lot of our classes to 19 just to make sure.” From 1996 to the 2003 edition (released in 2002), Northeastern rose 20 spots.”
If you go to a college’s online class schedule and see many classes capped at 19, 29, 39, and 49 students, that hints at class size rank gaming. However, now that USNWR is no longer using that as a ranking criterion, it may be interesting to see what the class size caps at such colleges are changed to.
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I’m fine with that. There is some logic to including the academies, but if somebody thought it made sense to rank w/o them, I wouldn’t argue.
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I think there are many differences - from size to campus life to geography to majors offered - but perception wise, I agree.
Someone noted above - how do you truly compare Texas A&M with Rochester?
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Not just the view of cynical people. You may want to read Selingo’s “Who gets in and why?” book. He explores the origin of these rankings, and this has been the directive given to the USNWR staff. There have also been some articles over the years that show how factors have been tweaked to keep the top 10-15 stable.
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I haven’t looked at the Williams Families FB page today, but I’m pretty confident that there will be at least one post crowing about today’s USNWR rankings with lots of comments with parents patting themselves on the back about having kids at the top school in the country. It always makes me think of the song “Miracle” from Matilda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxxFRh2whHM
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So as a general answer, revealed preference studies tend to work best when the people in question are making real, meaningful choices. Hypothetical choices can introduce a lot of noise. So their survey asked a sample of high-numbers high schools where they applied (in January 2000), and then where they were admitted and matriculating (in May 2000). They also collected all sorts of other information including as to costs and aid, legacy status, college distance, and so on, to implement various controls.
But you could absolutely do a bigger, better version of this, and indeed the technology for doing such a thing has improved a lot since 2000. As a matter of fact, there is a 2013 version of this paper–but it is paywalled, and I have personally never seen it.
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Wake, for example, is a school that values small class size, has a high percentage of professors with the highest level of terminal degrees, values personal relationships between students and professors and is not very diverse and not producing significant levels of research. The things they are were removed as criteria, and the things they aren’t were added. Hopefully people still apply because of what they are, or decide what they aren’t is important ( diversity) in the same way one should have always done.
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(me too)
…probably less contrived, more arbitrary limits like 25, 50, 75, 100, etc.
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Wake sounds to me more like a LAC, or at least a hybrid LAC/U – as it has, or seems to have, more in common with Davidson than UNC-CH.
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Yeah, how many people would ever view those as substitutes? Doesn’t mean one or the other is better, but talk about apples and oranges! Or really an apple and 30 pizzas . . . .
And if someone DID view those as substitutes, just because they had a similar ranking, that would strike me as a really unfortunate attitude.
The trick is most people understand that in cases like this.
But the truth is it is happening too in the T5, T10, T20, or whatever other US News-based ranking category people come up with. Those are all lumping together apples and pizza and so on.
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Instructional faculty, unfortunately, is a loosely defined term that can be easily gamed. Does an adjunct having a day job teaching one evening class per semester, count? If so, just replace a full-time instructor with four adjuncts each getting paid $6-8k per course and you quadruple the headcount. Or get postdocs and research scientists to moonlight as part-time instructors for some extra dough. It doesn’t seem too difficult to artificially inflate the number of instructional faculty a unit has.
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Note that Common Data Set section I-3, which is presumably where USNWR got the class size information from, uses size brackets of 2-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-99, 100+.
When not gaming the rankings, colleges will have other motivations to set class size caps, such as what it believes is the largest size for teaching a particular class (e.g. smaller for beginning foreign language than for a physics for poets lecture), available instructors, and available facilities (e.g. if the room or lab can only hold 24 students, the class in the room or lab is capped at 24).
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Yes, but as with the T-14 for law schools, it seems HYPSM Duke (in various order) have been at the very top since the first US News ranking in the 1980s. At least with these schools, it suggests robustness. No matter what you throw at them, they come out on top. For the others, they appear to be more sensitive to the various parameters…
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The USNews rankings benefitted Northeastern quite a bit in the past. They have moved beyond that in a big way.
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Right – reasons that make sense.
Of course, money is an object for the vast majority of college students (i.e. those whose parents are in the bottom 95% or so of financial means, or who are independent non-traditional students).
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When you have an enormous endowment and are not subject to the vagaries of state legislatures that is not at all surprising.
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I separate public and private universities, so in my head I keep three rankings: LACs, public universities, and private universities.
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