<p>2001: 6
2000: 7
1999: 6
1998: 7
1997: 13
1996: 11
1995: 12
1994: 16
1993: 14
1992: 13
1991: 13</p>
<p>Hopefully Cornell takes that road as well...</p>
<p>Hi dsmo: Congratulations on your acceptance to both schools. You are in an enviable position because you have two great choices. I just checked on some of your past posts, and it looks like you decided on Michigan. Academically you wouldnt have made a bad decision at either program, and financially you made the right decision. Youll love Michigan and you will have many wonderful opportunities upon graduation. Congratulations again.</p>
<p>Another reason to take the rankings with a grain of salt. Rankings drop between 99 and 2000 is at least partially attributable to an arbitrary change in definition, with no attempt by US News to produce a "cross-walk" between these years that would show an accurate change figure. </p>
<p>FWIW, class size is another of those blunt instruments that you need to consider carefully. Some schools with relatively small average class sizes trumpet this as an unequivocal good. However, there's often a good reason some classes are large, namely, the professor is dynamite, and students are eager to take his or her class. All one has to do is visit Walter LaFeber's packed Saturday morning lectures to get the idea. Sometimes sitting at the feet of someone like LaFeber, Ted Lowi, or Jim Maas for a few months along with several hundred other students can be an educational experience of a lifetime, compared to taking a similar course with a lesser light at a school with smaller average class sizes. I don't think Cornell students would accept the alternative of downsizing these classes to improve the university's US News ranking, if the result would be locking most of them out of the class. </p>
<p>There are schools that game the rankings better than Cornell does. I'm pleased the university has done the right thing in these cases in putting education ahead of rankings considerations.</p>
<p>I agree with Ninian about class size. When using rankings to evaluate a college, people who look at class size often don't consider how often students get closed out of popular classes. So while it may enhance a school's rankings to have smaller classes, on a practical level, sometimes it is better if the great professors are available to more of the student population (i.e. bigger classes).</p>
<p>NPR's Day to Day has done their version:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cornell University is a prestigious Ivy League institution with rigorous admission standards -- even so, some students would like a little more prestige and even higher standards. There's evidence that by switching logos and doing a little re-branding, the school might just be reaching those goals. Mike Pesca reports.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>and the New York Times corrected their characterization of Cornell's Contract Colleges:</p>
<p>
[quote]
An article on April 22 about student efforts to improve Cornell University's image referred imprecisely to the administration of the university's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Like three other colleges on campus, it is overseen by both Cornell and the State University of New York, not just by the state.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>can't read the nytimes article can u post it?</p>
<p>It's just a correction they added to the original article, which I assume you've read already since you posted on the first page of this thread :P</p>
<p>All that's been added was what Wharf Rat quoted.</p>