<p>Nope I don't have the longer list. </p>
<p>This comes from Kansas State, which is delighted to place itself in that company. If you contact them, they might provide the longer list they must have. It would be easy to check, if one wanted to invest the time.</p>
<p>How are they "manipulating" things if they are not colluding or conspiring? </p>
<p>Can you amplify what you meant when you said
[quote]
Further down the ranks, I suspect there is some manipulation going on and we'd find out how some highly regarded schools are getting some surprisingly low scores.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Who is doing the manipulating? And how?</p>
<p>Alexandre wanted a ranking that put Michigan substantially below Penn, Northwestern, Columbia and Cornell. Here we go</p>
<p>4 Columbia
11 Penn
20 Cornell
21 Northwestern
30 Notre Dame
60 Boston College
61 Michigan</p>
<p>America, what a country. Everyone entitled to an opinion.</p>
<p>K State, who woulda thunk? Good for them. It's actually pretty impressive.</p>
<p>Afan, I am not sure one has to agree with the rankings but vote differently for strategic reasons to demonstrate bias. One can vote a certain way out of a committed belief that is biased. Example: white landlords denying blacks housing but not believing that the blacks deserved equal and fair access to housing. May not be a great example but one does not have to believe one way and act another to show bias.</p>
<p>Good point. Hawkette was suggesting collusion and coordinated efforts to create rankings that deviated from what H, at least, deemed obviously correct assessments. If you are suggesting that the PA may be influenced by uninformed assessments from people with little knowledge of the colleges they rate, I agree. However, I do not see any reason to take H's rankings as any more reliable.</p>
<p>Reducing all of college experience to one number is just silly. There is no best college. Therefore, there is no #4 or #61 either.</p>
<p>Hawkette, you pay me a high compliment that I absolutely do not deserve. By profession I am a clinical psychologist who eschewed all computer and Internet activities until my son started applying to colleges and I chanced on this site. Since then I have become addicted to this. Stopped at the 5th volume of Gibbon, gave up on Montaigne's essays to be fascinated by hawkette and denzera and xiggi!!! I know little of all this and all of you are helping me think about these issues. My guess is all the undergrad emphasis is window dressing. Fancy gyms and better food, etc ! Research is what these schools are about. No eminent prof will go to a univ. that is not tops in research. Many profs at MIT and Harvard buy homes with easy access to Logan airport since they are always traveling and consulting. Yes, they make a pretense of teaching undergrads but for a good undergrad education LACs are the answer. Even my son would not take my advice and go to Brown. He chose Columbia for the ranking! At the end of the day, undergrad educ is about the old fashioned Indian guru or italian master tradesman mentoring the journeyman. Lots of face time with the master craftsman is needed. I did not answer your query about allocation of resources but I do not know the answer. Please humor me: where do you folks get the time to post here so often and so copiously?</p>
<p>When my son was choosing colleges to apply to to study engineering I spoke with engineering profs at Cornell, UMichigan, Caltech, MIT, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Berkeley etc etc. Two profs in each school, some 20 schools in all. What struck me was their complete ignorance about their peer institutions. A few made vague noises about having good grad students from peer institutions but most were clueless and often referred to USNews. I won't trust academics to rate even their own fields. I asked mechanical, electrical, CS and aeronautical engineers to rate and rank and recommend and they were, with few exceptions , clueless. Someone at Princeton said Harvey Mudd must be good because someone from his dept is becoming chair at HMC; another recommended Harvard because he had heard they were expanding the engineering school, etc. They had no idea of undergrad teaching quality, curriculum, etc etc. Peer Assessment is junk incl NRC. I know of NRC, it is an arm of the National Academy. I am disillusioned by American undergrad education. I would recommend a kid to go to the school with kids with SAT ranges higher than his since most learning is going to come from other students since the teachers are busy publishing.</p>
<p>^^^ don't be afraid to use paragraphs.</p>
<p>The subjective assessment was only a small part of the previous NRC rankings, and will be an even smaller part of the new one.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Bias is hard to prove and I understand that. Bias might also be the wrong expression as I don't think that the voters are colluding or conspiring. But my suspicion is that their perspectives are relatively lockstep and a bit of groupthink exists in academia which I consider unhealthy and out of touch.
[/quote]
So what you come back to is that the PA accurately assesses the opinion of the people it says it does; they're just wrong, because they subconsciously favor one or more groups. That's probably true. There probably is a subconscious bias (and bias is the right word) in favor of/against certain categories of schools: northeast over south, research oriented over less so; against big football schools, etc. </p>
<p>So? There's no way a poll of subjective opinions is going to be anything more than a snapshot of what those opinions are at a particular point in time. Add in more poll participants? You dilute the effects of the previous biases -- and add new ones. Accept it for what it is. I doubt that there's an effective way to make it significantly better.</p>
<p>afan, I asked for a rating of universities according to academe or industry. The Consusgroup rankings don't reflect the opinion of either. Besides, the Consus rankings are weird. Six (6) UCs are ranked among the top 25 (I can understand 2, perhaps even 3, but 6 is a little bit excesive. And check out #48 on your link! Yeah, I will have some of what they are smoking.</p>
<p>But I am glad you provided us with the Consusgroup link. Check out their "Composite Published Rankings". That ranking is probably more indicative of what academe thinks.</p>
<p>I would be very curious to see how industry would rate universites. I'd be willing to bet not too differently.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I chanced on this site. Since then I have become addicted to i!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But please remember that what you read here are merely opinions. Some of what's written here is fueled by enthusiasm and a love for debate, rather than in-depth knowledge of higher education or a careful reading of, say, the rankings methodology. It's good reading, and some of it is, as you say, very thought-provoking. But it's not all well-founded.</p>
<p>I'd just caution you from putting too much stock in the opinion of any one of us here. Similarly, as I don't think you can drawn sweeping conclusions about higher education from the group of strangely ill-informed professors you had the misfortune to meet at the colleges you visited. </p>
<p>I confess I share your preference for what LACs have to offer undergrads, but I think it's untrue that eminent professors at research Universities care nothing for undergrads, or that academics know nothing of their peers, that students should count on learning little or nothing from their professors, etc. I just don't think these statements are accurate.</p>
<p>hoedown, I agree that there are profs at research univs who are interested in teaching, etc. But since they are not rewarded for it I offer that LAC instructors are more reliable teachers. Also, although the profs I spoke with are a sampling, my notes indicate 23 conversations and most were largely ignorant of their peers. Tentatively, this goes along with what many have complained about, incl univ presidents, re PA of USNews.</p>
<p>Ramaswami, you are correct that professors at LACs are there primarily, if not entirely, because they love teaching. </p>
<p>To continue in this same vein: at research universities, <em>science</em> professors do not have to embrace teaching as their counterparts at LACs, only because grant money helps support the research and therefore those particular professors can have a lighter teaching load. However, research universities, despite their name, also offer majors in the non-quantitative disciplines. A school ranked highly must be strong in most, if not all, departments, so that means that a top-ranked research university should be as good at teaching, say, English, as engineering. The English profs have much heavier teaching loads, lower salaries, and probably have to love teaching to survive. </p>
<p>Even in the sciences, research universities have professors who love to teach. (Contrary to popular belief, all professors have to teach, if only one course a semester, although these courses do not have to be available to undergraduates.) Attending a research unversity is not necessarily worse or better than going to an LAC. It all depends on the type of learning environment that benefits the individual student.</p>
<p>Of course, the USNWR rankings are artificial. They do convey, within groups of ten, accurate assessments of the kind of student they admit. When I first came to CC, I couldn't understand why people argued endlessly about them. Now I have a slightly better idea: people love their universities. It seems like both a slight to them and to their school to be ranked below one that they didn't like at all. To many people on CC, NYU is as good a school as JHU, so why isn't it ranked higher? Others want Berkeley ranked as high as the top Ivies. I wish more people would realize that there's no reason to be competitive with the USNWR rankings. They are what they are.</p>
<p>
[quote]
my notes indicate 23 conversations and most were largely ignorant of their peers.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Have you considered an alternative explanation for their behavior? </p>
<p>In my experience, some faculty feel very awkward talking about "competitors" when talking with prospective students. Perhaps some of them were feigning ignorance because they felt they'd be doing their own campus a disservice if they promoted their peers. I think such caution is unwarranted, but I've seen in before. </p>
<p>IME, faculty generally DO know about their peer departments; they certainly have ample opportunity to find out. They know because they see who publishes and presents. They know because they see where research funding flows. They know because of where their undergrads apply and attend grad school. They know because of where their colleagues get hired away to, and where their own department goes to do hiring (both established faculty and new PhDs). They know because of where their most desired prospective students at the grad and undergrad level elect to go instead.</p>
<p>Good points Hoedown. I would add two more reasons why "they know". They know because most professors work on research projects with faculty members of other universities. They also know from how well their graduate students' undergraduate educations prepared them for graduate school.</p>
<p>Agreed, Alexandre and Hoedown. A professor who <em>really</em> does not know much about peer institutions is probably not a researcher himself.</p>
<p>I'm going to delve into more treacherous territory by saying that engineers who don't know much about peer institutions are probably the types who are geared solely toward industry and not research. If they are not familiar with the intellectual community of their field, then they are not reading about the latest advances.</p>
<p>That said, many study engineering soley for the practical application -- getting a job right out of college. If they do that, then it matters little that their professors aren't actively doing cutting edge research. However, getting that PhD will be much tougher coming from a program that is not respected by the larger community for original design and research. That's where PA comes into play.</p>
<p>Yes, I did look at a lot of alternate explanations incl the demand characteristics of the situation, ie a cold call from me etc. I am a clinical psychologist by profession and am aware of these nuances. Let me be a bit less vehement: many of my interlocutors had grad students from peer institutions, had their own undergrads go elsewhere, had studied at peer institutions themselves decades ago, had collaborated with profs at peer institutions etc. But their knowledge of the quality of undergrad education at the peer institutions was not up to the level to answer detailed USNews questionnaires.</p>
<p>Momwaitingfornew,
Re USNWR rankings, you state "they are what they are." My response is "are they what they could be and are they helpful in their current form to prospective students in making judgments on various schools?" </p>
<p>I'm not crazed enough to think that we can create some perfect model that will accurately capture all the nuances/strengths/weaknesses or this or that college and result in a ranking that will finely differentiate College #11 from College #13, but the point on this thread (now on page 11 and 165+ posts) has been the Peer Assessment ranks. From my reading of this thread, the consensus (with a couple of notable exceptions) is that PA does more to obfuscate and undermine the rankings than it does to provide clarity and accuracy.</p>
<p>To kluge, re the biases that I have previously alluded to, I think you make a good point about the current opinions and how the introduction of new "graders" would introduce new biases. As my daddy used to say, "opinions are like a-------, we all have one." My frustration is that the present sample of opinions, in many cases, is limited to only one (protected) group and
1) may not be reflective of what is important to most undergraduates (teaching in the classroom);
2) may be woefully uninformed (ramaswami's anecdote proves nothing on its own, but it does much to reinforce the misgivings that many of us have about the lack of informed opinion in the Peer Assessment grading); and
3) says nothing about the student outcomes and the possible role that faculty had in fostering that outcome (good or bad)</p>
<p>Given the above, I believe that the introduction of new perspectives (students, alumni, and employers) would provide a more well-rounded view of the faculty at a college. Admittedly, each of these would come with their own biases, but I would reason that their inclusion would make for a more accurate picture than the current monopolistic approach. </p>
<p>afan,
I would like to withdraw any prior suggestions of collusion or coordinated efforts among academics. Such a suggestion implies a lack of honor amongst these academics that I cannot substantiate and which I really don't believe. I do, however, maintain that their common frame of reference contains many of the predispositions that I referenced and which serve the interests of the educational status quo. I challenge their conclusions, but more than that, I challenge the nature of the survey and the different (and possibly uninformed) standards that they apply in making their judgments. The results create scoring differences that often make no sense and IMO certainly are not reflective of what the undergraduate student experiences, not to mention a disconnect from the quality and preparedness of the postgraduate product that emerges.</p>