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How do presidents and provosts of colleges and universities determine the pecking order with regards to PA though? I might not be able to question the qualifications of these people but I can definitely question their methodology. It's so subjective and not based on objective data.
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<p>What they know most about is faculty, and that's why PA tracks the NRC rankings of faculty quality so closely. Look, it's a highly competitive market for top faculty; in fact, it's a highly competitive market for quality faculty at every level, from top to bottom, and from entry-level to senior faculty. Presidents and provosts know who they're competing against, who they're consistently losing to, who they're consistently beating, who's taking rising young academic stars away from them, tho they're stealing rising young stars from, which faculties the best people in the business most want to be on, department by department. They track very closely how their own Chem E department stacks up against others in the field, whether it's a source of strength or a problem area for the school, who their closest competitors are, which Chem E departments are the envy of the entire field, and which are not strong enough to be a real threat. They know whether they've got shortcomings in their Philosophy Department, what those shortcoming are, how many additional hires it would take to correct them, where they'd go to look for the people they'd need to improve in that field---assuming it's a sufficient priority relative to all the competing demands on scarce university resources. If you're the provost at Michigan State, you know you're not likely to lure a top young philosopher away from Princeton, or from Michigan or UCLA; it would be just too crazy a career move for a scholar with professional ambitions, so you don't even try. But you do know that if there's a rising figure at Wayne State, you might have a good chance at landing her because it's a step up the career ladder for her to go to Michigan State. But you also know that for someone at Penn State it's basically a wash in terms of professional prestige, so you're only going to get that person if they have personal or family reasons to be in Michigan, or if you can make a financial offer that Penn State can't match---though of course, that will have ripple effects on your entire faculty pay structure, and you may not want to go there. That's half of it right there. Same as people in any industry judge excellence in professional and managerial personnel. "Subjective"? Well, it's a complex judgment about complex real-world facts that can't be neatly reduced to simple hard metrics, but top managers in all fields make these kinds of judgments all the time and we don't think twice about it.</p>
<p>They also know--because this stuff is all public, unlike most other industries--which faculties, and which particular members of those faculties, are the most productive scholars, and which are the most influential in their respective disciplines as measured by word-of-mouth reputation, observable impact on other scholarship, citation counts, and especially in the sciences and some engineering disciplines, ability to attract major research grants. Is this "subjective"? Not really; not any more so than any real-world calculation about complex facts, like who makes a good product and whose is junk, or who's a good manager and who's ineffective. </p>
<p>I've said this before: they know a lot less about the teaching side because it's not out there in the same visible and public way. But they do know some things, and they generally are in a better position than anyone else to know what's to be known. They know which parts of their own institution get the most student complaints, and sometimes which particular faculty members are problems, and which regularly win teaching awards. They know a lot of the same things about people they're trying to recruit, or considering recruiting, and over time that has a cumulative effect on their evaluations of their competitors' faculties. They certainly know objective data like student-faculty ratios, not only for their own institution but for their competitors, which in a certain sense is the entire industry. They also keep a pretty close watch on who they're losing prospective students to, and to the extent the information is available to them, why. So again, the provost at Michigan State knows her institution is really not very competitive against Michigan for highly qualified OOS students, but it can count on a getting a respectable fraction, though smaller than Michigan's, of the top in-state candidates. But on the other hand, other things equal Michigan State is going to be more attractive to more highly qualified students than the "directional Michigans" (Eastern, Western, Northern, Central) or Wayne State. "Subjective"? Again, not really, though here I'd say there's an important market segmentation that goes on. Most publics really are competing for students primarily in an in-state market, and they'll know the most about where they stand vis-a-vis other schools in that market. The top privates are competing in a national market. Below the top 50 or so, most privates really are primarily regional schools; state boundaries don't matter as much as for publics, but they'll draw students primarily from their own state and neighboring states. A few top publics---Michigan, Virginia, William & Mary, North Carolina ,etc, less so the UCs because they're statutorily constrained on OOS enrollment---have a foot in both worlds, competing in their own in-state market where they tend to be dominant, but also competing with the top privates in the national market. What does any of this have to do with teaching? Well, teaching is a major factor in those student decisions, especially at the top of the heap. The provost at Michigan knows his school regularly loses students to places like Duke and Amherst, not because their faculties are better on a scholarly level (though both have a lot of good people on their faculties that the provost at Michigan would like to hire if he could, but he wouldn't trade his own faculty for theirs); the Michigan provost knows he loses students to Duke and Amherst because of their lower student-faculty ratios and their reputations for teaching excellence, so he's going to give them a stronger PA score than, say, Syracuse (not to knock Syracuse in particular).</p>
<p>Finally, while they probably don't know the finances of many other schools nearly as well as their own, they do have a pretty good idea of comparative financial strength. They know who can outbid them for faculty and who generally can't. They know who's providing extra perks to students and who's being forced to cut back. They know who's providing the biggest and best library resources and research labs, something that matters to students but especially to faculty. They keep an eye on how generous the financial aid packages are at the schools they're competing with. And even though most publics are competing for students primarily in an in-state market, they do a lot of benchmarking by keeping an eye at out-of-state institutions: what are the latest trends and innovations, how are they working, are they moving the needle on faculty recruitment and retention, student recruitment, etc. Again, complex facts, not easily reducible to simple metrics, but a matter of expert professional judgment of a kind we see in all competitive fields, not just in higher education.</p>