<p>The NRC is not reliable or clear. I personally like the fact that Michigan is ranked #9 overall, between Chicago and Caltech, but the methodology is inclear is seriously questionable.</p>
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<p>Yes, but the range of disciplines included above is pretty broad. One could quibble about whether engineering is over-represented (which “hurts” Chicago) or under-represented (which probably “hurts” MIT and some large state universities). But overall, it seems pretty well balanced yet comprehensive.</p>
<p>Still, I’d like to see an answer to UMTYMP student’s question. How exactly did PtonGrad derive these ranks?</p>
<p>^ of course it’s broad, but the difference of even 1-2 rankings would put some schools ahead of others (notice that the differences among the top 5 alone are pretty close). It’s also questionable how “top 5” or “top 10” is derived - as I suggested above, does that include those that have an upper-range in the top 5? Does it count if either the S or the R-rank makes the top 5?</p>
<p>I think the most accurate ranking I saw excluded just the agricultural disciplines (which most universities don’t have and which most do not consider to be useful since research funding in that area is non-competitive; it was actually the reason that U Nebraska was removed from the AAU). The person had averaged the ranges to come up with a single ranking for each, and separated tallies by S-rank or R-rank. I’ll post it if I can find it (it’s from one of the early discussions after the new NRC rankings were released).</p>
<p>It was extremely similar to the 1995 NRC tallies, which goes to show that universities change very slowly.</p>
<p>I rarely post outside the Princeton thread but a friend alerted me to the quibbling here and I should respond. </p>
<p>First, Warblersrule would have done the critics here (and me) a favor by linking to my original post regarding this, rather than extracting text from it. Here is that thread which includes the details of the analysis:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1006939-princeton-2010-national-research-council-nrc-rankings-news-item.html?highlight=national+research+council[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1006939-princeton-2010-national-research-council-nrc-rankings-news-item.html?highlight=national+research+council</a></p>
<p>The analysis is actually very straightforward and not biased in Princetons favor. Furthermore, the National Research Council rankings (despite the criticisms) are still widely referenced and are believed to be the most detailed and fairest assessment of academic strength available anywhere. The process of doing the analysis is exhaustive which is why it is done only once every ten years.</p>
<p>First, the analysis I presented focuses only on those fields that are at the core of the arts and sciences and that are studied at every major university in the country. It leaves out specialized fields that are either pre-professional (e.g. Communications or Public Affairs) or are related to medical schools which do not exist at every university (including Princeton, MIT, Caltech and others) and that are outside the core arts and sciences. In other words, the analysis attempts to compare apples to apples in the time-honored core departments of universities. </p>
<p>Next, it uses another websites tool to transform range rankings into ordinal rankings and yes, it includes both the R and the S rankings. While the NRC reported its results as ranges it is still meaningful to say that one department with a quality range of 1 to 5 should be seen as of higher quality than the same department at another school where the assessed range was from 1 to 10 or 1 to 20. At a minimum, there is a higher confidence level associated with the assessment of the first department and, regardless, any bias that exists from taking the average of the midpoints of the R and S score ranges would be randomly distributed across all schools, not favoring any single school or department. </p>
<p>I suppose the one area where my contribution to the analysis might be faulted would be in my decision to score zero points for a department that is outside the top twenty in the country. Still, a line had to be drawn somewhere to make the analysis manageable and, again, this bias would be distributed pretty evenly and would not affect those schools that were at the top of the rankings.</p>
<p>The result of all this is that we can get a pretty good reading of the research strength and reputation of the leading schools across all of the core arts and sciences. In that scoring, Harvard clearly comes out on top and Princeton takes second. Princeton is one of the worlds leading research institutions in these core areas. This is also, by the way, the impression that many others have had of the results of this new National Research Council decennial ranking. What was surprising to me is that a number of prominent universities in the U.S. were not highly ranked by the NRC perhaps suggesting that past accomplishments still affect current reputations even if those previous strengths have faded. Stanford did extremely well, which is not a surprise. What is surprising, is how touchy some of the Stanford critics here seem to be about these results.</p>
<p>I invite anyone else to run these numbers themselves and then defend their methodology. Sure, if you include pre-professional programs and the medical fields, you will get different results, but it would be difficult to defend a methodology that relied on a comparison of academic departments that arent found at all major universities.</p>
<p>The numbers are what they are and the methodology (at least on my part) is transparent. When I first posted this analysis in the Princeton forum, I invited others to offer their own analyses. If you can point out ways in which this was rigged to favor Princeton, I would be happy to hear them and respond. I think you will find, however, that even if you fiddle with the selection of departments or use just one of the ranking methodologies (either just R or just S) you will not alter the results significantly.</p>
<p>^ none of us Stanford supporters are “touchy” about your results. Rather, we and others see that people like PtonGrad2000 are more than willing to be “shady” with the way they aggregate these statistics. And your reply just confirmed many of the suspicions I enumerated above. Your manipulation of the data on phds.org is questionable, and you offer no reason for exclusion of certain disciplines (like earth sciences, communication, linguistics, theater/drama, etc.). I’m willing to bet that if Princeton did well in these disciplines, you’d have found some reason to include them.</p>
<p>Example: of the top-20 universities in US News, only two don’t offer linguistics as a major: Princeton and Johns Hopkins. JHU, incidentally, is ranked the absolute #1 university in linguistics in the NRC ranking, because it has extensive offerings through its cognitive science program. Princeton, on the other hand, has very little through its cogsci offerings and only offers a certificate in linguistics. Every major university offers linguistics. Yet you decide to discard it. (Fun unrelated fact: math is the oldest known discipline, and linguistics is the second-oldest.)</p>
<p>Do you see why some might question your motives?</p>
<p>Wow. There are a lot of accusations here. </p>
<p>Phantasmagoric, this clearly has touched a nerve, in spite of your denials. Exactly how is this analysis “shady”? That’s certainly a pejorative description. Again, I’ve told you exactly how the analysis was run.</p>
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<p>I’d be interested in hearing your description of the “manipulation”. It’s very straightforward, actually. The “R” and “S” rankings are the quality rankings done by the NRC and are defined that way on the website. The easy to use website allows anyone to create an ordinal ranking of universities based on the averages of the two systems. What exactly is “shady” about that or is some kind of “manipulation” and how would you suggest that website be used?</p>
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</p>
<p>Well, actually, I did. I was trying to cover all of the basic arts and sciences. Earth sciences is, in fact, included in the analysis. I simply referred to it as Geology/Geophysics. Communications is a specialized pre-professional discipline not found at many schools and few people would consider theater/drama to be part of the core arts and sciences. Linguistics might have been included but it too is generally not considered part of the traditional core. When you refer to its antiquity, you’re confusing it with the traditional study of foreign languages (already included in my analysis) and philology. More recently, linguistics has become a specialized field of philosophy and related to the study of what deep language structure tells us about human thought in general. Philosophy, of course, is included in the analysis.</p>
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<p>Actually, a number of the fields that were excluded, including public affairs, heavily favored Princeton. Princeton, in fact, was ranked number one in the nation in public affairs.</p>
<p>So, here’s a challenge for you, Phantasmagoric. Redo the analysis adding in Linguistics and theater/drama. These apparently are the only fields you think should have been included in the core and that you argue are found at all universities. Use the website to average the “R” and “S” scores and report your results. Explain any other change you make in the methodology and show us that this has significantly affected the overall rankings. </p>
<p>I think you’ll find no change whatsoever in the ordering of universities.</p>
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<p>If you think it’s touched a nerve, go ahead. It’s shady for the reasons I described above.</p>
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<p>And that’s exactly what makes it questionable. You can specify the data any way you want.</p>
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<p>Again, that’s partly what makes your analysis shady. Communications is a “pre-professional discipline”? This tells me you aren’t even paying attention to the NRC rankings, which are doctoral rankings. By definition they are not “pre-professional.” Further, communications is not pre-professional; it’s an academic generalization of journalism, which is definitely pre-professional. It is as academic and non-pre-professional as any other social science. Look it up.</p>
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<p>So false - if you were a little more aware, you’d know that linguistics has always been considered part of the traditional core.</p>
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<p>No, don’t tell me what I was referring to. I was not referring to the traditional study of foreign languages. I was not referring to the study of philology (although much of the study of linguistics was through that). I said what I meant. Either way, it doesn’t matter, since the evidence supports what I was arguing: almost every single top university offers linguistics.</p>
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<p>And this shows just how little you know. No, linguistics has NOT become a specialized field of philosophy. In fact for many decades it was considered a subdiscline of anthropology. The only thing it has “become” is independent from these departments. The only top school that still considers it part of philosophy (and by the way, this is extremely uncommon; almost no university ever considered it part of philosophy) is MIT, who is in the extreme minority.</p>
<p>As for your challenge, I’ll find and present to you the rankings that another poster did without bias. Princeton did not do as well as you pretend it does.</p>
<p>These are the other disciplines that you excluded, most likely because Princeton isn’t ranked in them, despite the fact that many or most other top universities are:</p>
<p>Aerospace engineering
American Studies
Cell biology
Microbiology
Industrial/systems/management engineering
Statistics</p>
<p>in addition to linguistics, earth sciences, theater/drama, and communication. None of these are specific to universities with medical schools. For example, Berkeley is ranked in all of them despite not having a medical school. (UCSF is separately ranked.) Yet you offer no legitimate reason for why these disciplines are excluded.</p>
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<p>PtonGrad, perhaps you might recognize the mark of a true critical mind when one does criticize an analysis or methodology that yields a very positive result for a … favorite school. </p>
<p>In this “business” of culling data from various sources, it is a given than the person who gratifies this forum with yet another masterful excel spinner has found a mousetrap that fits his or her agenda. That is done through selection and obfuscation. Then, the readers will proceed in rejecting or applauding the outcome according to the ranking assigned to their … academic friends and foes. Does it get any simpler than that? </p>
<p>This is not about quibbling. It is all about pretending that there is a scientific analysis behind the data masturbation that is being passed as a methodology. And, fwiw, an invitation to “rerun” the “analysis” with a few changes is just a silly attempt to give the original a bit of credibility when none is due. </p>
<p>The NRC results have some validity. The validity that comes from being the only game in town. However, if their researchers were running the NFL, Troy Aikman would still be the Super Bowl MVP. But, in the NRC world that does not mean much; it’s about historical performance. The limited value of the results is just part of the territory. A yawner if there was one! </p>
<p>The only problem arises when someone starts adding up and substracting elements that were never meant to be processed in such manner.</p>
<p>May I just say once again. . . wow?</p>
<p>I see a great deal of dodging and weaving here along with red herrings and baseless claims. Id be interested to know if other Stanford posters (are you out there Ewho?) agree with your comments.</p>
<p>Look, this is really very simple. The analysis is straightforward, transparent and based on a rational selection of fields if one is trying to look at just the core disciplines in the arts and sciences that all major universities share. If you want to redo it (perhaps youre planning to include all the medical research fields which are not comparable across all universities) then please do so and tell us why you think thats a reasonable comparison.</p>
<p>Who knew this would get such an over-the-top reaction. . .? (Methinks you feel Stanford to have been slighted in some way.)</p>
<p>^ forget about any possible motivations. Tell me why you excluded these disciplines, even though many or most top universities have them and even though none of these are linked to a medical school (i.e. universities that have no med school have these programs):</p>
<p>Aerospace engineering
American Studies
Cell biology
Communication
Earth sciences
Industrial/systems/management engineering
Microbiology
Linguistics
Statistics
Theater/drama</p>
<p>And a question I’ll ask anyone who’s reading these posts: do you think it’s a coincidence that Princeton isn’t ranked in any of these areas? (For comparison, peer universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, UCLA, Chicago, Cornell, Michigan, Duke, Penn, Columbia, and myriad others are ranked in all or many of the above disciplines.)</p>
<p>All of the categories that phantasmagoric mentioned besides Linguistics, Theater and Communication should be added in. I respect why PtonGrad2000 did what he did though; I"ll unbashedly make the value judgment that subjects like Physics, Mathematics, Economics and Political Science should be given higher importance over fields like Theater, Communication, Nursing and Nutrition which aren’t found in most universities so an apples to apples comparison is unavailable to us.</p>
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Of course you would, the Power Rankings you created using the USNWR Graduate Rankings are antiquated in nature and rely on “expert opinions” who will be forever biased towards places like Wisconsin, Texas and Michigan at the expense of Penn, Duke and Brown.</p>
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Is this version better? I like it better. :)</p>
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<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/11258833-post5.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/11258833-post5.html</a></p>
<p>For some reason, I like it better too! ;)</p>
<p>As much as I like NYU being ranked above Northwestern, Brown, JHU, Duke, Cornell, UNC … I don’t think many people are of the opinion that NYU is above these schools? I think, in fact, that most people would disagree with them based on, at least, that exact ranking?</p>
<p>“The NRC is not reliable or clear.”</p>
<p>"Of course you would, the Power Rankings you created using the USNWR Graduate Rankings are antiquated in nature and rely on “expert opinions” who will be forever biased towards places like Wisconsin, Texas and Michigan at the expense of Penn, Duke and Brown. "</p>
<p>Huh? </p>
<p>"NRC Quality Assessment Rankings
For 32 Core Arts & Sciences Programs
Based Solely on the Regression Analysis</p>
<p>100----Berkeley</p>
<p>96.6—Harvard</p>
<p>88.5—Princeton
81.5—Stanford</p>
<p>—gap—</p>
<p>63.0—Columbia</p>
<p>59.8—Yale
58.2—MIT
51.9—U. of Michigan
51.5—U. of Chicago
51.0—UCLA</p>
<p>40.6—UT Austin"</p>
<p>Look an NRC ranking with no Penn, Duke, or Brown at the top. ;-)</p>
<p>I actually prefer this ranking of the real 10 top schools from the NRC:</p>
<p>Of the 32 fields, the following schools had the given number of programs ranked in the top 20 of all universities:</p>
<p>NRC Quality Assessment Rankings
For 32 Core Arts & Sciences Programs
(number of top 20 programs out of 32)</p>
<p>27----Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley</p>
<p>24----Columbia, Yale</p>
<p>21----U. of Michigan</p>
<p>19----UCLA</p>
<p>18----MIT, U. of Chicago</p>
<p>:-)</p>
<p>goldenboy, as rjk aptly points out, the NRC’s overall rankings of schools like Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin are loftier than those of Brown, Duke and Penn. I do not dislike the NRC ranking because of its evaluation of Michigan (#9 overall) but rather, because it is unclear and inconsistent.</p>
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No it doesn’t Alexandre. Rjkofnovi and UCB are selectively quoting only the R-Rank subscore adjusted ranking from PtonGrad2000’s overall analyses and ignoring the S-Rank subscores which should be averaged to create a consistent reputational ranking as specified by the NRC. According to the NRC, neither the S-Rank nor the R-Rank have greater pull over the other and the two should be viewed equally when judging academic programs.</p>
<p>PtonGrad2000’s original post contained the quality assessment rankings that we should be using and they are as follows:</p>
<p>NRC Quality Assessment Rankings
For 32 Core Arts & Sciences Programs</p>
<p>100—Harvard</p>
<p>97.1–Princeton</p>
<p>89.5–Berkeley
86.8–Stanford</p>
<p>— gap—</p>
<p>62.0–Yale
61.8–Columbia
61.5–MIT</p>
<p>— gap—</p>
<p>48.6–U. of Chicago
47.3–U. of Michigan
42.6–Cal Tech</p>
<p>39.1–UCLA
38.9–Duke
36.7–Penn
35.4–NYU
34.1–Penn State
32.7–Brown</p>
<p>26.4–Northwestern
25.3–Cornell
24.4–UNC Chapel Hill
24.2–UT at Austin</p>
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Look, Penn and Duke are back on top of Wisconsin and Texas! ;)</p>
<p>It does not matter goldenboy. Michigan (#9 overall as I stated above) is still ranked ahead of Brown, Duke and Penn (while PSU and Texas-Austin are not far behind), and I still think the NRC ranking is unreliable and unclear.</p>
<p>"NRC Quality Assessment Rankings
For 32 Core Arts & Sciences Programs</p>
<p>100—Harvard</p>
<p>97.1–Princeton</p>
<p>89.5–Berkeley
86.8–Stanford</p>
<p>— gap—</p>
<p>62.0–Yale
61.8–Columbia
61.5–MIT</p>
<p>— gap—</p>
<p>48.6–U. of Chicago
47.3–U. of Michigan
42.6–Cal Tech</p>
<p>39.1–UCLA"</p>
<p>I decided to add UCLA to this distinguished list since they are above the 39.0 threshold. After that, does it really matter anymore anyway? ;-)</p>