<p>Thanks snook, that’s what I mean about doing homework. Anybody want to argue with his statistics?? Penn is overall a wonderful university and its #5 ranking is very justified. While it may be a bit early to ask this question, I wonder, has the university peaked as far as USNWR rankings or could there be a higher ranking in store in the next few years? It will be interesting to see. If Penn were to attain a higher ranking, who’s spot would they overtake of the top 4 schools? I can just picture the Yalies now bringing a lawsuit against USNWR.</p>
<p>…and I doubt that most English majors care that they’ll make only ~$40,000 on average their first year after graduating. It’s wrong to measure most majors by earning power because a lot of people don’t major in anthropology, English, sociology, etc…to make a lot of money.</p>
<p>Regarding moving higher, within the last few years Penn has been as high as #4 in USNWR, behind HYP. Going higher than 4 would be hard to conceive but I would guess that Princeton is the most vulnerable since it is is the smallest of the Big 3.</p>
<p>I realize people who choose to be English majors are self-selecting and not motivated by $, but at this point what % of the population of applicants fits (and can afford to be) in this category? Last yr. Wharton got 7,000 apps for 600 spots - what is the ratio of apps to seats in the fuzziest of the fuzzy liberal arts majors? It’s not that these spots are UNdesirable in the market (all Ivy seats are highly sought after), it’s just that the Wharton seats are MORE desired by more people. It’s not rocket science to figure out that a lot of people (not all) prefer making more $ over making less $. I don’t know why people are so sensitive about admitting what is a fairly obvious situation. This was not always so - in the past the Wharton undergrad program was more of a feeder for big accounting firms and was not a particularly high prestige degree - think of say Lehigh’s B-school today - a Penn English degree is more prestigious than a Lehigh business degree. Now the desire of Wall St. to throw big $ at Wh. undergrads has changed the balance of prestige.</p>
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<p>Well, P’ton’s main focus is on undergrads and they can afford to pump a lot of resources into it (they don’t have to worry about med, law, or business schools). So I wouldn’t really call it “vulnerable”</p>
<p>The single degree option at Wharton recieved approximately 5250 applications. This number includes dual-degree applicants that selected Wharton as their back-up choice. Dual-degree applicants that indicated SEAS/CAS/NURS as their back-up choice were included in the pools for those schools. Dual-degree applicants that do NOT indicate a back-up choice (a very, very small number) are included in the applicant pool of the SEAS/CAS/NURS component of their degree.
475 students were admitted into Wharton, leading to the acceptance rate of roughly 9%.
CAS recieved approximately 14000 applicants (up 7% from last year), SEAS recieved around 3500 and NURS recieved approx. 300 or so leading to the total of around 22600.</p>
<p>Percy, the idea was not to undermine the importance of Wharton–those who know about the school, know that it is the best in it’s field at the undergraduate level. People tend to undermine the strengths of Penn’s other schools so I thought I would highlight some of them. Penn is at the top in business; but it is also at the top in Architecture, Anthro, Psych, Linguistics, Bioengineering, Nanotech, Medicine etc. and considering the fact these departments are competing directly their counterparts at Harvard, Yale, MIT etc. and have managed to rise to such prominence is no small feat especially considering Penn’s financial endowment relative to its peers and the rough patch it went through in the 70s and 80s.
I don’t know how comfortably Wharton would be nestled at the top if it were competing directly with undergraduate business depts at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton. And since you argue so much about the relative ‘prestige’ of an undergraduate business degree as opposed to a standard liberal arts degree, consider the fact that NO other undergraduate school ranked in the top 20 (with the exception of MIT, which is a tech school) thought it worthwile to start an undergrad business school. And the reasons being:
- you don’t need to ‘study’ business to ‘practise’ it. Many successful businessmen (Steven Wynn for eg. graduated from Wharton majoring in English and Cult. Anthro–at that time Wharton housed the social science components at Penn as well) do not have business degrees. The skills you learn from most liberal arts subjects will prepare you well to work in any field. Most liberal arts grads from the top 20 schools place very well into business fields upon graduation–you can look up any of their career placement werbsites.
- you can always get an MBA if you feel you need further specialized knowledge in business, and many liberal arts grads do this.
- It’s rare and often difficult, for business grads to enter other fields such as medicine, engineering etc. while the reverse track is very simple, and often done. </p>
<p>I’m not arguing against the value of a business degree, just that it’s not necessarily more valuable or in ‘higher demand’ than a liberal arts degree and that these factors depend upon the interests of the student.
Your argument is flawed because you are judging the value or worth of an English grad in a business field. Obviously someone who has majored in business is more likely to get a job, and be better paid in a business field (although this is not always the case either as the demand for Engineering kids in i-banking etc. has soared recently). If I were to use your argument in reverse I could say that that an English major is more likely (again not necessary, but more LIKELY) to get a better job in say journalism than is a Finance major; and therefore, English is more ‘prestigious’ and in ‘demand’ in the journalism field than is Finance. Clearly, we’re getting silly.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily true… WashU has an undergrad business school (though nowhere near as good as Wharton), Cornell has an undergrad business program (AEM), Kellogg has a certificate program (well that’s stretching it), Rice offers a minor in business (stretching it a little less), Emory has a very good undergrad business school, and Notre Dame has an undergrad business school. Going slightly out of the top 20 we have most of the schools ranked 20-30 with undergrad business schools.</p>
<p>Snooker, </p>
<p>Appreciate your well thought out reply, though I don’t agree 100%. I’m not sure that playing up Wh. is the same as undermining the other programs. Regarding the stats, once you back out Wharton, everyone else has 18% admit rate - double that of Wh., which I would say is a very significant difference. 9% is in league with HYP, 18% is more in line with say Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell. If Wh. were to disappear tomorrow, that’s where Penn would be now - among the “lesser Ivies” instead of scraping up against the Big 3. Not that that’s a bad place to be - it’s still very good to be a top 15 school, but I feel Penn’s #4 rank is due in no small measure to Wharton.</p>
<p>But that 18% is not broken down between the “hard” majors (the sciences, mostly) and the “soft” majors (English, most of the social sciences, the “studies” depts., etc.) I think that you’d find even more of a spread if you did.</p>
<p>As I said before, undergrad b-schools were not thought of until recently as enhancing prestige (and for the most part, except for Wharton and a few others, are STILL not thought of as especially presitigious). Also interesting that at one time the social sciences were housed at Wharton because THEY were not thought of as “respectable” enough for the College either - I didn’t know that piece of history.</p>
<p>It’s useless to speculate on counterfactual history such as whether Wh. would be #1 if HYPS had undergrad B-schools. HYP and S were too snooty to start undergrad B-schools and that tells you something in itself. The fact that Penn has had one for well over a century is part of its DNA and why it is such a great place in a way that pure stats don’t show. H and Y started as divinity schools and have always had their head in the clouds to some extent. Penn in many ways reflects Franklin’s values. He loved things that had practical value here on this earth - things that would get him ahead personally and would improve the well being of the entire society - libraries, insurance co’s, postal service, etc. If you look at Penn’s greatest strengths, you’ll see they are still mostly areas that have real world application. Some of them, such as the computer, have revolutionized the world.</p>
<p>While it’s true that you don’t have to study entrepreneurship in order to practice it in the same sense as medicine, you do need a formal education in order to be an accountant or to do advanced corporate finance. it was recognized a long time ago (when Wharton was founded as the first B-school) that business, like any other field, would benefit from having people who were systematically educated in that area instead of just picking it up on the street.</p>
<p>I-banks are in need of warm bodies, especially warm bodies who are bright, intelligent presentable young people so it’s no surprise that they recruit from other majors and other top schools - 600 Wh. undergrads/ year are not enough to supply all of Wall St. and the rest of the world. People who are highly intelligent (as most Ivy grads are) can be trained to do almost anything but it’s certainly an advantage to come in knowing something in advance so that the employer doesn’t have to train you from zero.</p>
<p>Of course anyone can get an MBA later , but that in effect means that you have spent $200k on a degree that is worthless without spending another 2 years and another $100k. How happy would you be with a car that cost $200k if you had to spend another $100k before you could drive it?</p>
<p>I was not judging the value of the English degree in the business field or vice versa - I was comparing the starting salaries (and potential earning power - some areas such as engineering have high starting salaries but a flat growth curve) of Wh. grads (in ANY job available to them) vs. English majors (in ANY job available to them). I think you would find that Wh. grads do substantially better. Journalism (and BTW, being an English major doesn’t qualify you to be a journalist - there are J-schools for that) pays substantially less than business. As someone pointed out, English majors are not motivated by $ to begin with - that’s not what they are looking for (and they sure don’t find it).</p>
<p>The self-reported USNWR stats can be heavily manipulated. USNWR is perhaps accurate to within about 10 spots in terms of an overall ranking, but that’s about it. Also, the overall “raw score” is more important than the numerical “ranking” – if you look at the raw score, HYP are basically tied at the top and then there’s a big gap with many schools in the 88/100, 89/100, 90/100 range, which I would consider basically tied. Many of USNWR’s specific statistical categories, particularly those having to do with faculty resources, are completely flawed in almost every imaginable way, as I’ve explained in detail on other threads here.</p>
<p>“If Wh. were to disappear tomorrow, that’s where Penn would be now - among the “lesser Ivies” instead of scraping up against the Big 3. Not that that’s a bad place to be - it’s still very good to be a top 15 school, but I feel Penn’s #4 rank is due in no small measure to Wharton.”</p>
<p>Where’s your evidence of this, besides difference in admit rates?? Admit rate is 1.5% of a school’s USNWR total score.</p>
<p>Penn has a long way to go Wharton or not:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=4601094&postcount=90[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=4601094&postcount=90</a></p>
<p>i’d have to agree that van pelt isn’t as great as the libraries of other schools.</p>
<p>also, what’s with so many non-penn affiliated people using the libraries?</p>
<p>Yeah really imagine letting all the other people in to use Penn’s resources.</p>
<p>It’s a very good library in the grand scheme of things, but as you can see from the figures above relative to the other 7 Ivies it ranks dead last by every available measure. </p>
<p>Library resources per student are actually a good indicator of many other measures of resources per student, such as advising per student, fellowships per student, etc. They are also closely correlated with endowment per student. That’s one reason why any ranking claiming to indicate educational quality, that shows Penn above the other 7 Ivies, is highly questionable.</p>
<p>the actual number of books/magazines/expenditure in total would seem to be a better measure. just because UF has many times more students than Princeton, should its library holdings increase by that same factor?</p>
<p>What fatthermit said - total # of books is a better measure than # of books/ student. Penn is comparable to Cornell in # of books/student because they are the 2 Ivies w. the largest enrollments.</p>
<p>Anyway, a building full of chopped up dead trees is an increasingly obsolete measure of quality. </p>
<p>The USNWR scores take into account MANY different factors and not just one area and this is what gives them such meaning and popular importance. They are like democracy - the worst possible system, except for all the others. If you pick out some isolated stat - # of books/ student, admit rate, in the ridiculous Newsweek HS “ratings” the # of AP courses/ student, # of roadkill armadillos/ student (Texas A&M), you can alway come up with some stat that will cast your favorite school in a good light and Penn (or some other school) in a bad light. But USWNR has come up with a method that doesn’t depend on one single factor but rather presents an overall measure of quality - not a perfect one but one that is pretty decent. You can say that the USNWR ratings might be off by as much as 5 (or if you are not a fan, say 10) places but beyond that it really gets tough to quibble. A rating system that is accurate to within 10 places out of the many thousands of US colleges is not so bad - if you are thinking about applying to any particular school, you should be screening the ten schools above and below it in the rankings anyway.</p>
<p>Back in the day, most of the world used the Barron’s guide to measure a university’s strength, so to me, the USNWR rankings, while somewhat reliable, are not 100 percent fool-proof. Currently they are the “bible” for college rankings, but just like ESPN is the top source for sports news, one can only take in 50 percent of their opinions before you realize they are biased and horribly racists. There are 50 or more great colleges that, personally, I would feel great about attending (James Madison, CMU, UNC-Chapel Hill, Boston U.,etc).</p>
<p>Yes, for the millionth time, school choice is about “fit” , not about ratings. A school may be highly rated but a horrible fit for your personally.</p>