Geez, what is up with people on this site attacking people based on where they went to school? It’s hilarious that you brought up the National Merit winner count since Duke has more official National Merit Scholarship winners besides any school outside of HYPSM and Penn. Schools like Northwestern, Chicago and USC inflate their NMS count by sponsoring the scholarship so anyone who’s a National Merit Finalist and chooses one of these schools as their first choice will be termed a “National Merit Winner” even when they didn’t win the actual NMSC sponsored $2500 award. If Duke sponsored this scholarship, it would have more NMS than any other school in this country including Harvard given the large number of National Merit Finalists who attend schools like Penn, Duke, Brown, etc.</p>
<p>The faculty membership rankings don’t take into account the size of the school in question; it’s easier for a larger public school with lots of different departments and a higher faculty count to begin with to have more professors win these major faculty awards and NAS/NAE nominations. I’m not sure how this is relevant to undergraduate education either. You don’t see me bringing up professional school strength either for example.</p>
<p>Well to be fair, most of the schools that beat Duke in this regard are small/medium-sized private schools with less variety in their departments than most public universities (like MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc.). And the majority of public schools that do have many departments and larger faculties don’t have nearly the same number of faculty in the various academies. So size/variety of department may correlate with academy membership, but there’s no cause there.</p>
I think HYPSM are exceptions to the rule since their academic reputations are so strong that even their smallest departments attract the most highly cited researchers in the world so they are still able to compete favorably with even the best public universities that may have a lot more faculty in the field (Berkeley, UCLA, etc.).</p>
<p>It’s likely that as the California budget costs make UCLA and Berkeley less and less appealing places to launch or sustain an academic career, more and more of these “star” faculty members will jump ship and join the departments at elite private schools like Duke or Penn or whatever instead.</p>
<p>^ Berkeley and Harvard have the same-size faculty; Stanford’s is a little smaller; Princeton and MIT are the smallest. So size doesn’t have anything to do with this.</p>
<p>UCLA and Berkeley are the two UCs that are stabilizing well after the recent budget cuts; they have large alumni networks and the largest endowments among the UCs. Their faculty haven’t been jumping ship as expected, since the universities have worked hard to retain them. The UCs that have lost a lot of faculty, from what I’ve heard, are UCSD and UCSB. It’s the more financially-dependent UCs that suffer most from these budget cuts.</p>
<p>By whom? (Few in academe would have expected it.)</p>
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<p>Source please? Define “lot”; in comparison to a previous time period/decade? (Turnover always exists in junior faculty. Some ‘move up’ to Cal and UCLA from a lower tier UC.)</p>
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<p>Actually, not it is not so likely. Academics are prestige hoes; it’s in their DNA. They will gravitate to the highest rank that they can get. Sure, they might head to Duke (or WashU, or…) instead, but Duke can only hire so many; Ditto HYP. While richer than Congress, HYP’s have departmental budgets too. There are literally thousands of PhD’s cranked out each year, and only a few job openings. HYP (and Duke) can’t hire them all. </p>
<p>Young up-ad-comers would go to Cal/UCLA way before Podunk State (or UC Merced) with a housing allowance.</p>
<p>I was looking at some information on faculty retention at one major university after years of salary freezes. The main faculty that were leaving were in the medical school - they were the ones with the most choices and the highest potential incomes from non-teaching jobs.</p>
<p>There’s yet another angle to consider, and one I could not resist to bring up. The overwhelming prcentage of faculty, starting from its puppy years, is focused if not obsessed by research. Adding that success is measured in terms of publishing, the academic factories that favor researching over … educating will always play the sirens’ song. </p>
<p>The proposal of spending a few years in indentured servitude before landing the prized sinecure has not lost its appeal. While the go-go years of unabated spending, lax controls, and total lack of accountaibility are numbered, there are no reasons to believe that for whoever who can work through the gauntlet, the UC system remains at the top of the food chain. </p>
<p>Even if teaching and dedication to the teaching are becoming part of the lingua franca. Not to mention to jumping ships and landing in a rowboat that requires … rowing might not be all that great.</p>
<p>I believe that the UC system will remain at the top of the public food chain for a long time. (All states, other than perhaps Texas and North Dakota, are experiencing financial woes. Thus, tax contributions to public Unis are shrinking in many other places.) </p>
<p>OTOH, I do believe that Cal and UCLA will continue to lose USNews points, and that is by design of the (egalitarian) UC Regents, which views the individual campuses as interchangeable. Since they can’t fund Riverside (and Merced) enough to make them powerhouses in their own right, better to ‘spread the wealth around’ and take $ from Cal and UCLA.</p>
<p>BB, I think that the top UC schools will continue to move in lockstep with the other prestigious public schools. As far as the USNews goes, the current rankings of schools such as Cal and UCLA is pretty much guaranteed to remain in the same narrow band. Simply stated, there are no reasons schools that are in the 5-10 spots above would be jumped, and no reasons for the schools that are 5-10 below to make substantial move upwards. There might be movements such as the one Michigan experienced, but in the end it is a game of musical chairs that is pretty much rigged, as the position of the prior year all but ensured a repetition of the past, and this as long as the peer assessment dwarfs the remaining elements. </p>
<p>But then, this is neither unwarranted or unwelcomed. After all, the schools are moving ever so slowly and rarely in isolation. </p>
<p>I do not think that Cal or UCLA will be ranked differently in the future editions. Changes in the admissions and student body will be managed and massaged by Morse through changes in the methodology and the introduction of different intangibles.</p>
<p>PS While much attention is given to Cal and UCLA, it is important to note how many UC schools are listed on the first page of the USNews university ranking.</p>
<p>“I do not think that Cal or UCLA will be ranked differently in the future editions. Changes in the admissions and student body will be managed and massaged by Morse through changes in the methodology and the introduction of different intangibles.”</p>
<p>Look for Penn to be ranked in the top three later this year. ;-)</p>
<p>Actually, such statement is not about the school… (I’m sure the Duke education has helped others).</p>
<p>And let’s remember, you’re the person who has been citing podunk “rankings” from things such as fly-by-night college admissions preparatory companies which are filled w/ errors in your quest to make certain schools look bad, so you’re hardly one to talk about sources.</p>
<p>And comparing schools based on select dept. rankings from USNWR is no less credible than those based on select dept. rankings from the NRC.</p>
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<p>So I guess we exclude what we want to exclude and not exclude what we don’t want to exclude - such as Duke awarding merit-based scholarships which helps the academic profile of its student body.</p>
<p>WUSTL gets dinged for that, so it’s hardly fair if Duke doesn’t get similar criticism.</p>
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<p>There are plenty of private universities w/ more such faculty memberships than Duke.</p>
<p>And when it comes to size of the school - it also impact things like Duke’s admit rate, etc. - so there’s a flip side to the coin in pretty much everything, but somehow, when they negatively impact Duke, you conveniently overlook them.</p>
<p>Anyway, your broadbased claim about Duke has been debunked.</p>
Acceptance rate only matters in the sense that a more selective school can assemble a stronger and more geographically diverse student body, nothing more and nothing less. I guess acceptance rate impacts the exclusivity of a school which may make it more “prestigious” to some in a broader sense but I personally don’t care too much about that.</p>
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Why should WUSTL get dinged for that? If they want to use institutional money to attract the strongest students in the country, then so be it. HYPSM have reputations strong enough where they don’t need to do that but Duke doesn’t, not yet at least. It sucks for the other schools that they don’t since they’re losing out on some of the brightest minds in the world.</p>
<p>Does it not also impact the quality of education?</p>
<p>Do teachers teach differently to students at much more selective schools? Do they teach at a faster pace or cover the material in greater depth? Do they ask more sophisticated questions?</p>
<p>Are your learning opportunities (in and out of class) greatly improved when surrounding students are smarter, harder-working, or more involved in extracurricular activities? Can you expect better career opportunities to arise from friendships with the same kind of alumni?</p>
<p>I assume the answer to all these questions is “yes”, but can’t point to any studies as evidence. It may be the case that the effects (if any) vary by major, by school size, or in other ways. </p>
<p>Isn’t the acceptance rate (or selectivity more broadly) also a rough indicator of a school’s market value? The most selective colleges are the schools that manage to convince many of the best students that they are the best schools … and the best students after all are the ones who have the greatest freedom of choice. So I tend to assume that a more selective school must be “better” in some important ways (or else the best students would not choose it). Of course, that’s assuming those students are making rational, well-informed choices.</p>
<p>30 merit scholarship recipients out of an incoming class of 1700 students is not really the same as 250 ‘national merit’ scholarship recipients out of a class of approximately 1500 students is it? Do you really think these 30 individuals significantly boost Duke’s statistics? I would argue that if anything some of them lower the average scores because they come from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, and have non conventional academic experiences. Stop hating on Duke just for the sake of it, it gets tiresome after a while.</p>