^^ Undefined, generally accepted elites. It doesn’t matter how many or which. It’s a concept.
@vonlost well there has to be a line. Because someone from Dartmouth could say they are more elite than Harvard because they have less students and therefor more attention. Or someone could say WUSTL is the most elite as they have the highest average income of students (i.e. the most of the top 1%). Stanford could say they have the lowest acceptance rate and so they are elite. Whats your line?
You have explained well why there is no line.
@vonlost alright then. for a better definition whats an example of a non-elite school?
Let’s examine the USNews National U ranking criteria and see if they do point to undergrad quality:
- Freshman retention rate and grad rate
- How well does the school inspire students to do well in their courses and stay at the school? How cool is the experience, so they don't want to transfer? How well do course advisors help students sign up for appropriate courses to keep them on track? How easy is it for students to get the classes they want so they can graduate before burning out or running out of money? Finally, how good is the academic support, to help kids through tough courses?
- Peer Assessment
- Deans/provosts are asked to rate undergraduate academic strength based on things like faculty dedication to teaching. (The experts rate other schools on their undergraduate academic strength, a direct, informed commentary on academic strength)
- Counselor assessment
- They are asked to rate academics. (I think this is bogus. How would they know? They know which schools are popular... but that isn't the same as knowing how strong schools actually are academically.)
- Test scores/Acceptance Rates/Top 10% Prevalence
- These are measures of the quantitative strength of the students and of the popularity of the schools. While acceptance rate is based on popularity (demand as expressed by the # of apps), student strength does speak somewhat to the academic quality of students at a school. They don't do the teaching (well... they shouldn't...) but they do add to classroom discussion and can help each other on team projects, homework, etc. Those things can enrich the learning environment and give a bump to overall academic quality.
- Faculty Resources
- Average class sizes: class size has a direct effect on the quality of classroom interaction, student-prof face time, and the ability to ask and answer questions. Smaller class sizes also make it harder for students to hide, improving student accountability.
- Prof salaries -- Schools are better able to keep and recruit talented profs by paying them well.
- % of profs with terminal degree: ...because we want experts teaching lectures (at least).
- Student/Faculty ratio: related to class sizes. It's also a way to check course planning efficiency and university preferences: if a school has a 6:1 S/F ratio but some classes have 300+ students in them, the school isn't doing a very good job of making lecture supply meet academic demand. Or if one major has much larger classes than another major, there may be an imbalance of priorities. (instead of, or in addition to, poor planning)
- Proportion of faculty who are full-time. Possibly important because full-time faculty are able to build greater rapport with students than part-timers and have more office hours to spend one-on-one time. (I'm open to other pros and cons of full-time faculty...)
- Alumni giving
- This points both to the success of graduates and their satisfaction with, and loyalty to, their alma mater. This measures satisfaction with... the whole undergraduate experience -- academics, career support, sports and social scene, environment, everything.
- Financial Resources
- Here they measure the amount spent on each student (or the capacity to spend it -- endowment per student). This has a direct effect on quality of education, opportunities, campus activities, financial aid, quality of dorms and food, etc.
- Grad Rate performance.
- Here USNews tries to measure how successfully a school graduates its students given the inputs -- they compare grad rate to "expected" grad rate. This one's questionable, but at least here they are recognizing that the quality of input can yield different expectations. How well did the school do, given the expectations?
It isn’t a perfect ranking, but it seems to focus on the things that shape – and comment on – the undergrad experience, including academic quality.
I might remove the HS counselor rating and do a student satisfaction survey instead, where they rate the quality of their profs, teaching, curricula, etc., to bolster the academic rep ratings from the deans/provosts. But most of these things seem to point directly to ideas of undergrad academic quality or the overall quality of the undergrad experience.
So there’s a lot of anti-ranking sentiment going around, which I think is good, the best summarized by Frank Bruni in his book about USNWR:
"In the case of US News, they’re largely subjective. They’re easily manipulated. They rely on metrics and optics of dubious relevance. They’re about vestigial reputation and institutional wealth as much as any evidence that the children at a given school are getting an extraordinary education and graduating with a sturdy grip on the future and society around them. They’re attention-getting, money making enterprise for US News, not an actual service to the college-bound. He goes on to say that many people in higher education including schools whose rankings are high have contempt for them.
Can anyone criticize some of the points in the above paragraph?
Yes.
- Wealth (a large endowment) means the schools have the capacity to spend a lot on the students, improving their academic and social environments, the look and utility of campus, career prospects, research opportunities and internships, etc.
- Academic rep is voted on by people who know what comprises undergraduate academic quality, college deans and provosts. They assign a rating based on the quality of undergrad academics. It is their job to drive academic quality, so they likely have analyzed the competition. If they take it seriously, they can do a darn good job of rating schools' academic quality.
The biggest downfall (IMO) is the counselor rating – they know which schools are the most popular, not necessarily which are the strongest academically. How would they judge academic strength, given that they aren’t actually working in higher education?
@prezbucky, how do peers assess the other school’s undergraduate academic strength? What does acceptance rate have to do with undergraduate quality? Do class size metrics include classes taught by TAs? Does the ranking say anything about professor and TA qualifications to actually teach? Why can’t I compare Amherst physics to Berkeley physics? Why are schools that don’t offer PhDs ranked separately from schools that do for undergraduate? I could go on and on, but it’s of little use.
@ANormalSeniorGuy, elite at what? What is your metric? Are we measuring deep and broad knowledge for knowledge’s sake? Job placement? Return on investment? Production of students that ultimately get PhDs? Medical school placement rate? Producers of Fulbright recipients? Rhodes?
@eyemgh Well im asking you. you and @vonlost both mentioned the idea of an “elite” school and/or elite students. What do you define as elite? vonlost did not have a line and only described it as “generally accepted elite” which could mean a lot. What places do you think are elite? What are your criteria?
“If they take it seriously, they can do a darn good job of rating schools’ academic quality.”
This is where academics disagree: "… a peer evaluation for which I’m asked to rank some 220 liberal arts schools nationwide into five tiers of quality. Contemplating the latter, I wonder how any human being could possess, in the words of the cover letter, “the broad experience and expertise needed to assess the academic quality” of more than a tiny handful of these institutions. Of course, I could check off “don’t know” next to any institution, but if I did so honestly, I would end up ranking only the few schools with which Reed directly competes or about which I happen to know from personal experience. Most of what I may think I know about the others is based on badly outdated information, fragmentary impressions, or the relative place of a school in the rankings-validated and rankings-influenced pecking order.’
- At universities, TAs typically lead discussions, not lectures; profs (terminal degree...) lead lectures. So -- profs are qualified to lead lectures; TAs are qualified to lead discussions and labs. (profs are qualified to lead all three, but typically don't at universities)
- Academic experts assess undergrad strength by (I imagine...) looking at things like quality and frequency of student-prof interaction, class sizes, quality of the faculty (a touchy subject), faculty publishing (learning from the source...), curricular quality, any other number of things that shape the quality of the faculty itself, what they teach, and the quality of the classroom environment. If they don't, they should.
- Acceptance rate has little to do with undergrad quality, and US News weights it at only 1.25% of its formula.
- No, class size metrics take only lectures into account.
- They don't compare LACs to universities because in some respects they are apples and oranges. Universities have much broader academic offerings, while LACs typically have a more intimate classroom environment, especially at the survey level. But I'll try:
- Berkeley has on its campus some of the leading minds in Physics. They are there primarily for cutting-edge research with one another and with grad and PhD candidates, though they may do some undergrad teaching (?). Berkeley probably has other more teaching-oriented faculty who spend more time with undergrads. They have their PhD (or other terminal degree) and are fully qualified to lead lectures. TAs (Master's and PhD students) probably lead discussions and labs. Intro courses number in the 100s in size, with multiple discussion sections of ~20-30 students and labs with ~15-20. As a student moved up into more advanced-level courses, lectures come down under 100, then 50, then maybe 15-25 for high-level (400-level...) courses. The Physics program is expansive, with many electives to choose from on top of the (I'm assuming..) core courses.
- At Amherst, the top profs probably do more teaching and less researching. There is less cutting-edge work going on because, generally, LACs see teaching as 95% of their job -- with maybe 5% for research. So they aren't writing the books, but their top profs are probably teaching the material. I don't know if LACs have discussion sections at all, or if lectures suffice, given the smaller class sizes. Profs may also lead the labs. Fewer Physics courses are offered at Amherst than at Berkeley.
I made some assumptions but anyway, that’s my best guess on how Physics works at Berkeley vs. Amherst.
@prezbucky, fully qualified to teach based on a technical terminal degree that very likely includes no education courses what so ever? At a school that offers no support or reward to be competent at instruction? Fully qualified to research, yes. In many cases, no qualifications or desire to teach.
As for assessing other programs, you give the methodology way too much credit. It’s quite simple. It goes something like this, “name 8 institutions you consider peers.” The end.
If we are ranking, presumably to determine what institutions will result in a wonderful and happy life, why are LACs and research institutions apples and oranges. For undergrads, they are trying to achieve the exact same goal.
Per your Berkeley vs. Amherst comparison, I largely agree, so why would an undergrad ever choose Berkeley when those teaching their curricula have admittedly different priorities?
@ANormalSeniorGuy, I never mentioned elite. I will sometimes use the term the head of admissions at Brown uses when describing applicants “those who are fully qualified to matriculate.” The definition can be vague, but a high GPA with well rounded course work, including Calculus, three or more years of a foreign language, exposure to literature, and plenty of lab sciences is probably a good start. You could also pick some random percentile for SAT, but it’s easy to game with money and time, and known to disadvantage certain socioeconomic groups. Plus, we put WAY too much stock in the actual number. My son scored a 760 on math. How many did he miss? A single question, a careless mistake on the easiest class of problems.
As for schools, I don’t buy the term elite for undergraduate institutions. It’s supposed to correlate with a high quality of education, and too frequently it does not. Graduate programs, that’s a different story, but then it isn’t institutional, but departmental, and in many cases, individual.
- Well, I was under the impression that an Education degree was for teaching K-12. Do profs typically bolster their academic laurels with Ed classes? I mean, maybe that would help; I just don't know.
- Well I'm more optimistic and you're more pessimistic. I would like them to include a descriptive paragraph with the rating -- something to tell us why.
- They just go about things differently. Often, the students want different things out of their experiences: school sizes, environments, anonymity vs. intimacy, big sports scene vs. a smaller sports scene, intellectualism vs. pre-professionalism, striving for more from academia vs. striving for a job after graduation, big Greek scene vs. small or none, etc.
This is not to say that all U’s are alike and all LACs are alike; there just seem to be differences in both what the students are looking for and what the schools provide.
All that said, sure, they could be ranked together. I think in terms of overall quality, balancing LAC and U pros and cons, my top 100 would be a fair mix of U’s and LACs…
As for why a kid might choose Berkeley over Amherst – maybe it’s cheaper, or they want a larger environment with a bigger sports scene, or a more varied curriculum, or any number of reasons. While academic fit is the most important thing, then probably cost… those social and environmental fit variables can be weighted a bit too.
I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic on this subject. I am agnostic. Why? Because I know the methodology, what it actually measures versus what most people infer that it measures. There’s nothing to be optimistic or pessimistic about. It is what it is.
Food for thought. Sweet dreams. 
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2015/03/09/dont-divide-teaching-and-research/
“Stanford could say they have the lowest acceptance rate and so they are elite.”
Stanford has $22 Billion in the bank. Why don’t they just pay people $10 each to apply, for US high school seniors only, and they can become even more elite! Given that there are less than 5,000,000 US high school seniors in any given year, this could only cost them $50,000,000, which they could afford.
The number of advertisements that 16 year old and 17 year old kids get in a desperate attempt by schools to become more “elite” is, frankly, quite sad. Something is very broken about the way that universities are ranked, and the way that these rankings are used.
Well, admit rate is only worth 1.25% of the total score, so increasing demand/apps isn’t the best way to game the USNews ranking; taking more high-stats kids is.
Regarding deans and provosts feeling uncomfortable with rating schools they don’t know much about: they aren’t supposed to. They’re only supposed to rate schools they are familiar with.
This is where i’m getting my USNews formula info:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
Even if admit rate is only 1.25% the schools at the top are at an arms race with each other to get more and more apps and drive the rate lower and lower. Then they do a press release talking about how many apps they got, and how the acceptance rate is even lower than previous years, lowest it’s ever been. The US News rankings is not a big part of this, I agree. However the effect of this arms race is getting people to apply who have no chance of getting in and making the college admissions process more stressful than it has to be.
Some ivies come out here on a road show and I asked one of them, why they’re out here, do they need more apps from the bay area. And the admissions rep said they have a tough time convincing Californians to come there, which is totally untrue - every body that’s gotten into this ivy from around here has gone there. Obviously they’re here to increase the apps. If less and less students apply that would be a good start.