<p>Well, actually, the analogy - even if valid - doesn’t quite hold. The better analogy would be that those teaching college should have a *master’s *degree, but not necessarily a PhD. And indeed, many schools do employ lecturers or even tenure-track faculty who hold only master’s degrees. </p>
<p>But more to the point, it may be sufficient for the teachers of a particular program to only hold the terminal degree that corresponds to the program. For example, most law school professors hold only J.D’s, most medical school professors hold only M.D.'s, and while the term ‘doctor’ is embedded in the titles of those degrees, they certainly are not the equivalent of a PhD in the sense of needing to have produced original research as a requirement of their degree. Hence, it would seem that undergraduate programs might well be staffed with only those people who happen to hold bachelor’s degrees in those disciplines. And indeed, Mike Clancy is a tenured and award-winning computer science lecturer at Berkeley who holds only a bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>Uh, please read what I actually said. I never said that they don’t do any research, what I said is that they do little research relative to many state university research powerhouses. </p>
<p>Yet who has more prestige? Perhaps one could argue that only Berkeley - amongst all of the state universities - has more prestige than does Brown or Dartmouth. They therefore seem to be living proof that you don’t really need a large research organization in order to be highly prestigious. A relatively small one could suffice.</p>
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<p>According to the THES rankings,Brown (#55) and especially Dartmouth (#99) are absolutely walloped by such luminaries as…the University of Washington (#23) , UCSB (#29), and Illinois (#33). Yet there doesn’t exactly seem to be a mass yearning from students at Dartmouth and Brown wishing to transfer to the University of Washington. Heck, if anything, I suspect that plenty of UW students wish they could be doing to Dartmouth or Brown.</p>
<p>And that might indeed succeed if higher education was truly a free market. It is not. Public universities, by their very definition, receive large taxpayer-funded tuition subsidy grants that private universities do not receive; many in-state students choose to attend their state university precisely to take advantage of this grant. All (nonprofit) universities, whether private or public, receive tax exemptions that for-profit universities do not have. </p>
<p>Hence, the educational landscape is heavily weighted against for-private universities having a fair chance to succeed.</p>
<p>“Yet who has more prestige? Perhaps one could argue that only Berkeley - amongst all of the state universities - has more prestige than does Brown or Dartmouth. They therefore seem to be living proof that you don’t really need a large research organization in order to be highly prestigious. A relatively small one could suffice.”</p>
<p>Depending on the field of study, a degree from UW may be viewed as more prestigious than a degree from Brown or Dartmouth. In many areas of biomedical research, UW is much more prestigious than Brown or Dartmouth due to what it is able to accomplish as a result of being a large research organization. Unless you are just swayed by the Ivy League or USNWR rankings, prestige depends entirely on the factors you are using to evaluate a university. </p>
<p>“According to the THES rankings,Brown (#55) and especially Dartmouth (#99) are absolutely walloped by such luminaries as…the University of Washington (#23) , UCSB (#29), and Illinois (#33). Yet there doesn’t exactly seem to be a mass yearning from students at Dartmouth and Brown wishing to transfer to the University of Washington. Heck, if anything, I suspect that plenty of UW students wish they could be doing to Dartmouth or Brown.”</p>
<p>Nor do any of these schools seem to have trouble filling their available slots, so what is your point? There may indeed be some students (and I assume you are referring to undergrads) who decide to attend UW or UIUC on the basis of the THES rankings. When I went to college, back in the dark ages, I wanted a university that was a research powerhouse and reviewed rankings on research productivity, etc. when making my decision. In the end, I turned down an Ivy and a higher ranked university to attend my alma mater, and never regretted it.</p>
<p>Uh, my point is that I think we can all realize that certain schools - on an overall undergraduate basis - are more prestigious than others. Is this really a controversial point? The cross-admit battles between Brown or Dartmouth vs. UW is almost certainly in the favor of the former. Why do Brown and Dartmouth enjoy far higher student yield rates? Why do they have far higher average student statistics: such that the best students from around the nation seem to strongly prefer to attend Brown or Dartmouth rather than UW? Why don’t the nation’s top finance and consulting firms - which tend to offer the highest postgraduation pay - congregate around UW rather than the Ivy League? </p>
<p>Nor does it have anything to do with students being swayed by the rankings per se. Surely even during the days before the USNews or other rankings even existed, Brown and Dartmouth were considered to be more prestigious schools than UW. Again, why? </p>
<p>Surely you would not disagree that Brown and Dartmouth - whether deservedly or not - hold more overall undergraduate prestige than US does. So if you don’t disagree with this notion, then I have to ask, what is your point? </p>
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<p>And let me stop you right there, because I think you just inadvertently concede the crux of the matter. Let’s face it: the overwhelming majority of undergraduates are not interested in careers in biomedical research, or any other type of research for that matter. In fact, the vast majority of undergraduates will not pursuing their major of study as a professional career anyway. How many poli-sci majors actually become professional political scientists? How many history majors actually become professional historians? How many sociology majors actually become sociologists? Hence, if you’re not going to be pursuing your major as a professional career choice anyway, then frankly, who cares about the ‘strength’ of the particular major that you chose? What matters is the overall brand and networking/recruiting opportunities at your school.</p>
<p>I agree with your last paragraph, not every one is going to do research. But a lot of the brand name/prestige comes from having famous professors, even if they don’t teach as much. It might be sad, but true. Prestige of the school sometimes it’s not warranted for an undergraduate, but many people chose based on prestige.</p>
A small in number but very active and successful one? Sure! I never doubted that. Please recall that THES does rank Dartmouth and Brown higher than Illinois in terms of research impact, though Illinois certainly has the larger research volume.</p>
<p>And faculty at Illinois actually spend more time in the classroom than faculty at Dartmouth. According to the Common Data Sets, Dartmouth has 530 full-time equivalent faculty teach 524 courses. (The average professor at Dartmouth teaches less than one course per year?!?) At Illinois, 1,965 full-time equivalent faculty taught 3,693 courses in 2010-2011. </p>
<p>I guess we could turn Illinois into a Dartmouth-style “teaching” institution, but that would raise the cost of instruction by quite a bit as they would have to hire 1,700 additional faculty to maintain the current course offerings.</p>
<p>Well, actually, I suspect that what is really happening is that Illinois employs plenty of non-full-time-equivalent - that is to say, plenty of adjunct professors/lecturers, who assume a disproportionate amount of the teaching load, therefore relieving much of the true faculty to do research.</p>
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<p>Actually, the issue seems to be how THES actually measures “research impact”, which is calculated by a relative normalized scale of citations per faculty member. In other words, to conjure up some numbers, if School X has 100 cited faculty, and School Y has 100 cited faculty and 1 uncited faculty member for any myriad of reasons (for example, perhaps he’s a new assistant professor and therefore hasn’t published anything yet), then X has higher citations per faculty and therefore more “research impact” than Y according to THES. But why? Y still has the same number of cited faculty that school X does. Why should Y be punished just because they have one extra guy who isn’t cited? Is the implication that Y should simply fire that guy so that they can improve their impact score? </p>
<p>We also seem to be left at an impasse that - if Dartmouth and Brown faculty have such higher “research impact” than does Illinois - then why does Illinois have a better “peer review” score? Are those peers that THES surveyed suffering from delusions about the quality of about Illinois’s research vis-a-vis Dartmouth and Brown? Heck, Dartmouth’s peer reputational ranking is shockingly low according to THES. Why is that, and why is Dartmouth able to maintain its status as an elite brand anyway? </p>
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<p>Yet that is why I keep coming back to Dartmouth and Brown, which are indisputably prestigious schools, but don’t exactly have the large-scale research apparatus that some large state universities have. UCSD, as an example, is a major research powerhouse. But how many high school seniors are truly hankering to go to UCSD over Dartmouth or Brown?</p>
<p>Whoever said that you needed to be a large research institution to get the full prestige benefit? Harvard & Co are all very small compared to the “research powerhouse” state universities who they are competing with. I personally said that I find it more rewarding to learn from professors who wrote the textbook than professors who merely read it - but when I am sitting in class, it really doesn’t matter to me if there are 10 or 100 more professors in the department.</p>
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Then your intuition is off. Dartmouth reported 143 part-time faculty, Illinois exactly 1.</p>
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Because prestige is not solely a function of research? Because UCSD is in the shadow of Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford and USC? </p>
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That’s an artifact of the methodology. The “peer review” survey did not actually ask faculty to review each institution separately. Rather, professors were asked to nominate “the best” universities in their specialty, up to a maximum of 10. Dartmouth is bound to fare poorly in this rating because:
it is small, so it cannot cover as many specialties as bigger research universities.
it does not have nearly as much international prestige as Harvard, Stanford or MIT.</p>