@Chrchill
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html
[quote]
“It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,”
As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”
“In all our meetings, faculty would tell us, ‘I enjoy teaching, I find a lot of satisfaction in contact with students, in improving my courses, but I don’t feel the institution values it or rewards it or cares about it,’ ” she said. “It’s about institutional culture and reward.”
“I think many people spend a great deal of their time in large lecture classes, have little direct contact with professors, and are frustrated by poorly trained teaching fellows,”
[/quote]
I don’t know if they ever made the changes they were planning to when this article was written in 2007.
@prezbucky, you’re off by a factor of 10. Selectivity is 12.5%. It is and has historically been easily gamed. That’s why schools like Wash U, Vanderbilt and Rice, all strong schools in their own right, but historically only known in their respective regions, have vaulted into national consciousness. They all worked to drive up applications to increase rejections.
@DadTwoGirls @theloniusmonk Very true points. However what do you guys think about certain schools not being able to cut acceptance rates or not being able to travel to become elite? For example, while this university has stated it does not participate in ranking, reed does not travel but it still seen as a good school. Another example that comes to mind is the UC’s, where I have never seen a single road show or information presentation, so how can UCB and UCLA come off as elite when no one can view them? They are not raising more apps and are not in this arms race, so will they ever be elite? and @eyemgh what do you think of public schools that can’t increase rejections artificially, say UT Austin, UCB, and UCLA? Are they forever doomed to not be elite/decrease in rank?
so the peer review, the indisputable strength of USNWR, has been misused by deans as well to make their rival colleges look worse, this has happened.
Second, do deans even fill this out, or have their admins do it? this is basically what happens - the dean tells the admin to fill it out, use the ranking from last year, keep the top ten the same, and mix 11-20 to keep things interesting. She then reviews it before submitting to USNews.
And quite a few don’t fill them out, it’s tough to rank 200 colleges of which you may know five.
I just have a question: Why are you so damn fixated on this idea of an ‘elite school’? Aren’t you the guy that got into Cal with Regents? If you’re STILL looking for validation from others about Berkeley’s status (Which is what I think you’re doing, based off of what I’ve seen in your previous posts), I pity you.
@beepybeetle I agree. I am actually stunned to what extent folks are looking for meaningless validation from a bunch of anonymous strangers on a website. Fact is rankings and perceptions of prestige are all out there. What is there to debate ?
@theloniusmonk so would you say the peer rank is ineffective? It often counters the negative push of public universities in the overall rank as UCB, UT Austin, UCLA, UDub, and others all benefit from this rank
@beepybeetle @Chrchill this was meant to be a general discussion of the viability of ranking systems. Because many based their college decision based on rank (including me), I thought it would be good to discuss the viability of ranking in general to show that in reality its very flawed, and really should not be a key factor in college choice. As someone who is about to graduate, I see this far too often: people going to a school they dislike more because of the rank. As a side note, I wish to go into investment banking and so the prestige/rank of schools matter, hence my wanting to validate its status. In this, its clear they want “elite” schools (ensured in the HYPSM), and so for definition sake I was trying to seek out a “line” where colleges stop being elite and just good. This matters more for employment as compared to my ego, as frankly I was the 5th best kid in my school/class and I got the 5th best ranking college the school got.
@ANormalSeniorGuy This circuitous debate is really pointless. Berkeley and Michigan are the top two state schools in the country followed by UCLA and UVA. All great schools. Berkeley as a whole is one of the world’s great universities… It has major challenges – class size, budgets, housing, teacher student ration, increasingly off the charts leftist nonsense, inability to graduate in 4 years etc . These issues are why Berkeley is not in the “elite” for colleges.
While you can debate the internal rankings, there is wide consensus about what I would call the 11 top 10 schools:
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UChicago, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Penn, Duke, JHU and Dartmouth
@ANormalSeniorGuy
The University of Chicago does receive uneven rankings that are spread over a broader range than some other schools.
US News #3
The Wall Street Journal #13
Niche #18
Forbes #28
USA Today/College Factual #38
Chicago gets excellent students and works them hard, and gives them a great education. However, they are not so focused on students who want to stop after 4 years and work for a while. It is probably a better choice for students who plan to go right to grad school. So a ranking that focuses on graduate school admissions and percent of students who eventually get Phd.s would probably show Chicago as a top school.
In contrast, a ranking of average salaries of grads who did not go to grad school would likely put Chicago a bit further down the list. For example, if you look at median salaries 10 years after enrollment, then according to The Economist, Chicago is a $62,800. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university
That is solid, but, for example, it is below all of the Ivies except Brown. It is even below schools like Tufts, Lehigh, Lafayette, Case Western, Bucknell, and (gasp!) Northwestern.
Like all other schools, UChicago may be better or worse for you than rankings show, depending on what matters to you.
there’s no wide consensus after HYPSM, where’s this wide consensus coming from? is it you and your peers, the rankings? California (where I live) has a lot of people, and you’d be hard pressed to find many of them thinking Duke or Dartmouth or JHU are more elite than Berkeley. Cal Tech - a lot of students in the bay area have the scores to get in there, they use it as a safety, apply early, are in, and wait for the truly elite schools - Harvard, Stanford, MIT before deciding. Can an elite school really be a safety?
If you’re really elite, you also wouldn’t need early decision to force students to accept, so I give Chicago credit for being open and without restriction, as is Georgetown. Now those schools don’t have engineering programs so they could be dinged a little for that. The UCs don’t have any early so they’ll be dinged as well and not have lower acceptance and higher yields. Now I kind of understand why Columbia uses ED, not only for rankings, but honestly they know that someone who gets in there will get into another ivy or Stanford, and that’s their concern. Most of the kids who got in to Columbia out here did so via ED, which I do agree turned out good for Columbia, any of those kids would have chosen Stanford if they got in there.
@ANormalSeniorGuy, again, elite by what metric? There is absolutely no doubt that some of the world’s best science and engineering discoveries have come out of Berkeley. By this metric, Berkeley is elite…as in…one of the best.
Now does this translate to quality undergraduate education? My argument is no. It is an institution known for ginormous lectures (CS is the largest lecture in the nation with over 1000 students), TA instruction and bureaucratic inefficiency. Yet, because of the cachet conferred primarily by the doctoral program, the degree will be very respected.
I’m not picking only on Berkeley and will confine my discussion to engineering programs because that’s what I know the best. LOTS of schools fall into the same category, great grad schools, less than ideal undergraduate experience, yet a respected degree. Stanford, Caltech, Cornell, and MIT are all great examples.
So, again I ask…what does ELITE mean to you?
@ANormalSeniorGuy - the UCs will never have an issue with number of apps, UCLA became the first university to have over 100,000 freshman apps, UCSD had 88K, UCB I think 85K. And this was with the UC (Merced) campus being built recently. Their issue in the rankings will be acceptance rate and yield because if you’re a Cal HS student and finish in the top 9% of your class, you’re guaranteed admission to one campus (at least). And the UCs have their own app system so it’s really easy to apply to all of them - as long as you pay the app fees. This helps in apps going up but if someone gets into 3 or 4 (common), yield will suffer for the ones the applicant didn’t select.
@Much2learn You forgot the world university rankings where it is 5th or 7 th in the US and if you exclude MIT and Cal Tech 3-5. It is also second with Cal tech in terms of :“smartest students” by test scores ranking. If you rank by Nobel prizes Uchicago and Columbia lead in the US. …
@theloniusmonk Cal tech is in my list of the 11 top ten. Berkeley and Michigan are major publics and top of the line. They are not in the same group.
@chrchill "there is wide consensus about what I would call the 11 top 10 schools:
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UChicago, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Penn, Duke, JHU and Dartmouth"
By non-Harvardian math that is 12 top 10 schools. lol
@Chrchill “it is also second with Cal tech in terms of :“smartest students” by test scores ranking.”
Zero credit for this from me since I have seen them take some students with very low gpas but a 35 or 36 ACT from our school that were rejected by every other top college. Taking test scores overall else does not result in better students, it is a rankings play. It is also one reason they will not publish gpa’s or CDS like the other schools on your list.
@Much2learn I will alert the press. Zero credit from you …
@Much2learn Dartmouth was a typo …
Again, top ten BY WHAT METRIC? Caltech has and continues to produce some of the world’s top science, yet is widely known as basically a terrible undergraduate experience. Not one, but two Caltech/JPL profs told my son not to even apply. Their words: “It’s not an undergraduate institution.”