<p>kb, hope2 and bagels,
“Attack the messenger” is a fun game on CC, but the recognitions for undergrad teaching are hardly apocryphal. I remind you that it was not me who created the rankings for undergraduate teaching. It was the college presidents, provosts and deans of admissions that replied to USNWR’s survey. </p>
<p>There are many sources that provide opinions on the quality of undergraduate teaching. IMO, this is a neglected part of the college search process and too frequently leads to unsatisfactory experiences in the collegiate classroom. Colleges that function with research as their greater mantra should be more clearly identified so that prospective students can evaluate whether this is the type of undergraduate experience they would like to have and whether they’re willing to accept the institution’s priorities and put up with the trade-offs. </p>
<p>Likewise, colleges which have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and regularly score well in various student surveys (Sparknotes, COFHE, BW, NSSE, ************** and the survey among academics done by USNWR) should be recognized for this talent. For the great majority of college students, what goes on in their classroom is far more important to them than what goes on in some research lab in an unrelated department. Best of all, IMO, is those schools that can retain a great commitment to undergraduate teaching and a quality classroom experience while still providing the opportunity to pursue research in their field. </p>
<p>If you take the time to go through these many sources that reflect on the quality of undergraduate teaching, certain schools appear time and again in a positive light while certain others consistently are either not mentioned or are given a lower regard from the graders. No one, including me, accepts this as scientific proof, but there is very likely something behind these opinions and which merit the consideration of prospective students. </p>
<p>tg1,
The rankings in this thread are derived from 2 of the ranking components (Faculty Resources and Financial Resources) from the latest issue of USNWR. The rankings will not be the same as their overall USNWR ranking.</p>
But I thought these college presidents, provosts and deans don’t understand what they’re responding to…</p>
<p>The survey was not to identify “undergraduate teaching excellence”, it was a survey to identify universities with a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. Two different things…you can be strongly committed but still incompetent.</p>
<p>UCB,
Unlike the opaque PA survey, the goal of the teaching commitment survey was defined and very clear. Argue with the results if you like, but I don’t think that this survey suffers anywhere near the problems of the still-running albatross know as PA.</p>
<p>As for the competency remark, I’ll grant you this. As part of their college search, maybe some will want to investigate the execution in the classroom. Here is the full list of colleges that were recognized by USNWR:</p>
<pre><code>NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
</code></pre>
<p>1 Dartmouth
2 Brown
3 W&M
4 Rice
5 Princeton
6 Stanford
7 Duke
8 Miami U (OH)
9 Notre Dame
10 Yale
11 U Virginia
12 U Chicago
13 Emory
13 UC Santa Cruz
15 Vanderbilt
16 Boston College
17 Harvard
18 Northwestern
19 Caltech
20 Wake Forest
20 U North Carolina
22 BYU
22 Wash U
24 Georgetown
24 Tufts</p>
<pre><code>LACs
</code></pre>
<p>1 Carleton
2 Swarthmore
3 Williams
4 Grinnell
5 Amherst
6 Earlham
7 Haverford
8 St. John’s
9 Colorado College
10 Davidson
11 Oberlin
12 Pomona
12 Wellesley
14 Bowdoin
15 St. Olaf
16 Bryn Mawr
16 Macalester
18 Bates
18 Middlebury
18 Reed
21 Kenyon
21 Spelman
23 Smith
24 Sewanee
25 Centre</p>
Hawkette, we’ll likely never agree on this, but the PA score, IMO, is not opaque. It clearly says schools with higher PA scores have more distinguished academic programs. I think the PA ranking is accurate in this regard.</p>
<p>UPenn, MIT, Columbia, JHU… Harvard with undergrad teaching excellence? ■■■■■. The seven classes I’ve taken at Harvard, two at MIT, and kajillion at JHU are virtually the same. Professors don’t care about undergrads… Lectures are unfortunately regurgitation of the textbooks. Really, I am interested at how this survey was conducted.</p>
<p>Let me see If I got this straight. The survey for “undergraduate teaching excellence” was done one time in 1995. It was so highly thought of that the USNWR never did it again. The PA scores have been a part of USNWR for years. If all I stated is correct hawkette, how could anyone take that “UTE” survey seriously, unless they have an agenda to support?</p>
<p>^ It’s not a survey of undergraduate teaching excellence.</p>
<p>They asked the same deans, presidents and provosts in 1995 to name some universities that have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. The list Hawkette posted in #23 are the universities that received the most mentions.</p>
<p>It is the same methodology USNWR used in 2009 to name “up and coming” universities.</p>
<p>phead,
Among top-ranked colleges, the colleges which you mention often receive some of the lowest scores for undergraduate teaching, eg, I would agree with you on Harvard as the COFHE surveys are pretty damning for that school. </p>
<p>As for your comment that “professors don’t care about undergrads and lectures are regurgitation of textbooks,” I won’t disagree. In fact, it is that sad story that I am suggesting is the needs-to-be-told story of the college search process. Prospective students would benefit from better understanding where an institution and its faculty place their emphasis and what this will mean to their classroom experience.</p>
<p>BTW, the teaching survey was done in the same way that the PA survey is done. I would agree that, absent other datapoints, both are unreliable and IMO should NOT be part of any rankings calculation. </p>
<p>rjko,
I have an agenda. I support the undergraduate student and prioritize their interests. I think that the classroom experience is the most important service/product that a school can provide to its undergraduate students. If this is not a priority for the institution or if the institution is not executing effectively on this, then I think that current students are being shortchanged and prospective students should more seriously consider other alternatives.</p>
<p>So what you are telling me UCB is that while hawkette believes that the PA scores from USNWR are totally flawed, the exact same people used to determine those scores were accurate in 1995 for their comments about universities that had a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching.</p>
Hawkette, unfortunately your priorities don’t seem to mesh with the priorities of students who responded to a survey on this website…here are the two top priorities in selecting a college:</p>
<p>“Academic strength in my intended major” - 54% of respondents found that most important.</p>
<p>“Prestige, overall academic ranking or reputation” - 42% of respondents found that most important.</p>
<p>1 Dartmouth
2 Brown
3 W&M
4 Rice
5 Princeton
6 Stanford
7 Duke
8 Miami U (OH)
9 Notre Dame
10 Yale
11 U Virginia
12 U Chicago
13 Emory
13 UC Santa Cruz
15 Vanderbilt
16 Boston College
17 Harvard
18 Northwestern 19 Caltech
20 Wake Forest
20 U North Carolina
22 BYU
22 Wash U
24 Georgetown 24 Tufts</p>
<p>All of the colleges in bold are frequently described in CC as “LAC-like” universities. Chicago and Yale could arguably be included in a similar category. While not LAC-like, many of the others (Duke, WUStL, Vanderbilt, Emory, etc.) place their major emphasis on undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Let’s not disagree with a survey simply because it does not hold true to our preconceptions or fails to support our chosen colleges. ;)</p>
<p>^ The difference between the 1995 “commitment to undergraduate teaching” survey and the PA survey of “academic excellence” (on a scale from “marginal” to “distunguished”) is that the latter includes some things college and university presidents and provosts actually KNOW something about. It’s their JOB to know who among their competitors have the strongest faculties and the strongest academic reputations in every academic discipline in which they’re competing or might compete; and their knowledge is based, by and large, on information that is public, readily available, and widely and regularly scrutinized in the academic community, such as who’s on what faculty, what and where they’ve published, how often their published work is cited, how influential their work is within the larger literature in the field, who’s gotten what competitive research grants, and so on. Believe me, college and university faculties watch this stuff like hawks; it’s the currency of the realm. Deans, provosts, and college and university presidents absolutely obsess over it, and are constantly checking where their own institution stacks up against their peers and competitors, discipline by discipline and institution by institution.</p>
<p>What they DON’T have is information on teaching at their peer/competitor institutions. The unfortunate fact is, they don’t really even have good and reliable information on teaching at their own institution. I’ve served on faculty hiring committees at a number of major research universities. It’s the easiest thing in the world to tell where a lateral faculty hiring prospect stands in the “academic excellence” pecking order. The hardest thing to determine is the quality of their teaching. That’s pretty much a black box, because it all goes on behind closed doors without any external transparency or observable metrics. And the same holds true for faculties as a whole.</p>
<p>There is an unfortunate bit of ill-informed subjectivism that infects the US News PA rating—and it’s the part that invites survey respondents to speculate on “intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching.” That’s something they’re clearly not in a position to know anything about, and it should be out-of-bounds in any serious rating of academic excellence. It is also, unfortunately, the one element of the PA rating that hawkette would single out and elevate by continuing to trot out the widely discredited 1995 US News survey dedicated exclusively to that topic.</p>
I would agree with this. Heck, even in very good departments there will be some sour apples with tenure.</p>
<p>A better description of hawkette’s survey, I think, would be commitment to undergraduate education – which is not necessarily the same thing as quality of classroom teaching.</p>
<p>rjko,
I agree that the data is old. I’m not recommending that anyone interpret it literally. However, I would encourage prospective students to use the information in combination with other data that they collect. If the quality of classroom teaching and the institution’s commitment to provide that is important to a prospective student, use the teaching information as a spur to make inquiries and/or test out the veracity of the reputation during a college visit. </p>
<p>Also, don’t forget that, while the USNWR data is old, there are many other sources of data that help provide a more rounded view of ABC College, eg, Sparknotes, COFHE, BW, etc. </p>
<p>UCB,
A large majority of college students have no idea what they want to study when they get to college. Furthermore, a large number of them change their target field of study once they get to college. I would also conjecture that the changes in major are often in response to lousy teaching or in response to great teaching.</p>
<p>bc,
Your comment says it all far better than I. Many people in academia view teaching the undergraduate student as an afterthought, if not a nuisance. </p>
<p>It’s clear from your comments that you believe that college administrators/faculty measurements of academic quality have little to nothing to do with the student and the teaching that he/she receives. </p>
<p>As for your insistence that Presidents, Provosts, Dean know about these academic measurements because it is their “JOB” will someone please inform them that serving students is a major reason for colleges to exist. Even the research colleges need those pesky customers…. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^ hawkette,
I Hope you’re insinuating that I view teaching undergraduates as “an afterthought, if not a nuisance.” Nothing could be further from the truth. And I would defend the vast majority of my academic colleagues who view teaching as a central and critically important part of their professional responsibilities.</p>
<p>I think it’s really quite irresponsible of you to be taking these cheap shots at the acadmic profession. And frankly, I don’t see how any reasonable person could draw the inferences you draw from my previous post. As I quite carefully pointed out, the problem is NOT that college and university administrators and hiring committees don’t care about teaching. It’s just that it’s the least public and least transparent part of an academic’s job performance, consequently the most difficult to measure and evaluate—and therefore certainly the most difficult for academic administrators to rate in the kind of survey you tout. But that’s not because they don’t care about it. Nor does the fact that they DO care about other aspects of the job of an academic—contributing to the creation of knowledge, in addition to transferring what’s already known—in a</p>
<p>Anyway, my point is, there are SOME parts of an academic’s job performance that can be measured and evaluated more effectively than teaching. And the fact that administrators DO also care about those parts of the academic enterprise—particularly, the individual’s contributions to the production of NEW knowledge—does not in any way imply that they devalue or disrespect the parts that are harder to measure, namely classroom teaching. </p>
<p>I absolutely refuse to buy the false dichotomy hawkette and a few others on CC would pose between teaching and research, which would have us believe that academics are engaged in a zero-sum game in which commitment to high-quality scholarship implies a devaluation of teaching, and vice versa. Look, I was a student once, too. I encountered some good teachers who were not top-notch scholars, and some top scholars who were mediocre or even poor teachers. But the very best teachers I ever had, as an undergraduate or at any other level, were also top scholars; indeed, they were the people who were at the very pinnacle of their academic disciplines, people who could teach well beyond the basic outlines of learning others had produced and bring their students along with them to the front lines of exciting and path-breaking new academic discoveries with which they themselves were intimately familiar—because making those discoveries, and sharing the excitement of those discoveries, was their passion and their life’s work. To disrespect that project of academic discovery is, in my opinion, to disrespect knowledge itself.</p>
<p>bc,
Evaluating undergrad teaching may be difficult to do, but there are many, many things in business and in life that are hard to do and which are still worth doing. If a college really does want to excel in undergraduate teaching, then they can dedicate resources to this and hire faculty to make this happen. The colleges that I have highlighted, here and elsewhere, as being undergrad-friendly and with good teaching have probably done the best job of this. </p>
<p>And none of this is about you or is a personal comment. I have no idea what kind of a teacher you are, but your anecdote in # 34 about hiring patterns of research universities only supports the idea that low value is assigned by research universities to great classroom teaching. </p>
<p>Finally, your statements notwithstanding, I don’t believe that this has to be a zero-sum game. The best professors can handle both roles effectively and I attach great value to both sets of skills. However, I do believe that there are industry emphases that reward accomplishment in research and not necessarily in the classroom and this affects the behavior of some faculty at the expense of the undergraduate student.</p>
Really, I am interested at how this survey was conducted.</p>