Should universities be compared and ranked by size?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>USNWR made the decision a long time ago to rank the LACs separately from the national universities. Has the time come to further split the national universities for evaluation and ranking purposes? </p>

<p>Comparing a university of 25,000+ students with much smaller universities seems like an exercise doomed to failure. The smaller schools have many advantages from better class sizes to higher average student quality to more resources dedicated to a small universe of students and faculty. Larger colleges also offer some advantages, eg, sometimes offering much greater breadth of academic programs, perhaps some greater access to (probably graduate school-dominated) research resources, greater variety of social and athletic life for potentially broader non-classroom experience. </p>

<p>While clearly there will be crossover from group to group in terms of the applications to these schools (likely highest among Groups 1A and 1B), the undergraduate academic experience of a college is likely to be most similar to another college in its group and the statistical comparisons to other colleges is, in many cases, best done with others in its group or sub-group. </p>

<p>Here are some logical breaking points for comparing the undergraduate programs at the USNWR Top 40 colleges:</p>

<p>GROUP 1, SECTION A: Less than 5000 students
Princeton, MIT, U Chicago, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Tufts, Wake Forest, Brandeis, Lehigh, U Rochester</p>

<p>GROUP 1, SECTION B, 5000-10,000 students
Harvard, Yale, Stanford, U Penn, Duke, Columbia, Wash U, Northwestern, Brown, Emory, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, W&M, Boston College</p>

<p>GROUP 2: 10,000-25,000 students
Cornell, UC Berkeley, U Virginia, USC, U North Carolina, NYU, Georgia Tech, UCSD</p>

<p>GROUP 3: 25,000+ students
UCLA, U Michigan, U Wisconsin, U Illinois</p>

2

<p>ultra cali,
I agree with your point about P and H and that is why I did groups 1A and 1B so as to not separate them too strongly and also because there is undoubtedly a huge amount of cross applications going on for these colleges. Still, I think that there is a distinction to be made between a smallish college like Princeton or Rice and a larger one like U Penn or Notre Dame.</p>

<p>I also struggled a bit with the larger sizes (15k? 20k? 25k?), but there does seem to be a big difference in comparing a school the size of Cornell or U Virginia (each around 14k undergrad) with schools having 10k or more undergrads. </p>

<p>In any event, the statistical comparisons that we often make are probably better guides when we compare schools of similar size.</p>

3

<p>I have no argument with distinguishing Group 3 from Group 1A/1B. I graduated from one of the Group 3 and my son was accepted at two of the others. There is no question he put those two in a different category than the other schools of interest to him simply because of size-related implications. (They both rank very high in computer engineering/computer science, and Big Name prestige is a non-issue with him.) </p>

<p>I think splitting Group 1 into two subdivisions is not appropriate, however. Some of Group A are barely below 5K undergrad enrollment, and some of Group B are around 6k. Son applied to two in Group A and three in Group B and neither he nor I found any reliable difference in undergrad. focus, faculty involvement, access to research labs, etc. among those schools based solely on undergraduate enrollment. (At least not for programs of interest to him.)</p>

<p>As for H and P, I would think both would be happy under this system, since it guarantees both a Number One slot for some time to come.</p>

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<p>Interesting. The usual problem of where to draw the line. Yale with 5304 undergraduates and Princeton with 4790 in are in different categories.
Another metric I'd be interested in would be the percentage of all students who are undergraduate. This was an important issue to me as my first 2 applied to college. They either agreed with me that an undergraduate focus was important or simply got indoctrinated.
I was in a PhD. program at the University of Chicago. None of the profs wanted to teach undergraduates. Even the youngest, most student-friendly prof wished he didn't have to teach undergraduate courses.</p>

5

<p>danas,
I did the analysis you inquired about involving size of undergraduate population and how this relates to the entire student body as a percentage of the total enrolled students. The percentages can be a little misleading in some cases due to an individual school's very small or very large size. Here is the data:</p>

<p>Total number of undergraduate students, % of undergrads relative to entire school enrollment, college</p>

<p>3049 , 60% Rice
3304 , 62% Brandeis
4085 , 75% Dartmouth
4127 , 40% MIT
4332 , 76% Wake Forest
4478 , 73% J Hopkins
4743 , 69% Lehigh
4760 , 70% Princeton
4807 , 45% U Chicago
4904 , 58% U Rochester
4995 , 63% Tufts
5260 , 23% Columbia
5333 , 52% Yale
5669 , 56% Carnegie Mellon
5734 , 81% W & M
6010 , 77% Brown
6330 , 54% Duke
6378 , 62% Vanderbilt
6422 , 38% Stanford
6646 , 62% Emory
6715 , 40% Harvard
6853 , 60% Georgetown
7386 , 61% Wash U StL
8153 , 51% Northwestern
8352 , 76% Notre Dame
9020 , 70% Boston College
9730 , 59% U Penn
12361 , 69% Georgia Tech
13562 , 72% Cornell
14676 , 66% U Virginia
16729 , 55% USC
17124 , 67% U North Carolina
20965 , 56% NYU
21369 , 82% UCSD
23863 , 73% UC Berkeley
25432 , 70% UCLA
25555 , 64% U Michigan
30055 , 77% U Wisconsin
31472 , 76% U Illinois UC</p>

<p>Looked in this context, a few schools really jump out as being dominated by graduate students (more than 50% of the total enrollment), eg, MIT, U Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard.</p>

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<p>So Columbia has like 80% graduate students??</p>

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<p>another thing to consider is location of the grad schools, i.e., are they off campus? For example, Hopkins Med and Public Health and in particular, SAIS, are way off the main undergrad campus, so the undergrad 'community experience' is not so much tainted with grad students. And, of course, med school faculty wouldn't be teaching undergrads anyway. However, the distant location does not mean that Hopkins Med does not dominate the administration.</p>

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<p>Actually, Stanford is close to 45%. And Harvard is closer to 35%. I don't know where you're getting your numbers.</p>

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<p>Johns Hopkins med does not dominate the undergrad experience, as I have often said in the past. However, undergrad students often do take graduate courses at Hopkins, and can do research and take courses at the med school. And although the med school is in a different neighborhood, the Hopkins shuttle takes undergrad students back and forth, if they so choose. However, the Homewood campus is really dominated by undergrads.</p>

<p>But what is the purpose of ranking by size? I think that size is an important stat for a student to know, but to rank according to size is not a good idea because separating schools like Princeton from the Dartmouth from the rest of the Ivies makes little sense. The groupings are only good for catagorizing the size of the student body, not for any sort of ranking.</p>

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<p>Thank you, hawkette.
One confusion on total student numbers we've talked about before is that some sources (like College Board, I think) count just undergraduate and graduate students, while others count undergraduate, graduate and professional school students.</p>

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<p>Hawkette- as usual you have a keen insight on these issues. I agree there should be additional separation to distinguish between schools that are definitely not peers. Student size and % grad students reveal great difference that current ranking do not reveal.</p>

<p>I think a better breakdown would be 3k - 6500, 6500-12k, 12k to 20k, and 20k+. This breakdown might be better at grouping "apples to apples"</p>

<p>What do you think?</p>

12

<p>gabriella:</p>

<p>please go back and reread carefully my words which agree with you for the most part....</p>

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<p>Are you including special and part-time students? The numbers look high on some of them.</p>

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<p>Yes, bluebayou...I was agreeing with you.</p>

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<p>I'm really not getting the point of trying to come up with new and ever increasing ways to rank schools. I agree that size can be very important and I would even agree that at a certain point, the undergraduate experience definitely changes due to size. However, there are so many ways to parse these sorts of distinctions. For example, Cornell is divided into 7 different schools, all of which have enrollments under 5000 I believe. Does that make the undergraduate experience, particularly in the smaller schools such as the Hotel School, different than a school which is not divided into so many units? Because U Penn has a total enrollment (graduates and undergraduates) of about 20,000, does that make it different than Boston College, which has a similar number of undergraduates, but a much smaller number of graduate students? </p>

<p>I also don't understand what you would do with schools in IA and 1B--would you somehow rank them vis-a-vis each other (that would, I should point out, help a school like Wake Forest, which I know is one of your favorites Hawkette, because it would not be ranked in the overall pool, but would get to be 10th or so in 1A, rather than 20th or so in the mixed pool). Does that really make sense? Aren't Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Duke and the rest similar enough that they should be in the same pool?</p>

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<p>midatlmom,
Re the thread, I'm just thinking, questioning, etc....is there a better way? Hopefully, you find this an interesting topic. If not, sorry and maybe next time.</p>

<p>As for your comments about the 1A and the 1B groups, I agree that this is a great weakness. Maybe the other suggestions are better or something you might suggest is superior. I'm not pretending to have all of the answers but I do frequently run into these issues of trying to compare schools of greatly different size and I think that can lead to false conclusions. Furthermore, I think that the experience that a student has on a campus of 6000 undergraduates is quite a bit different than one with 25,000 undergraduates, yet now we rank and consider them together. Perhaps there is a better way. That's all. </p>

<p>Re your comments on Cornell, I think you make an interesting contribution about its many undergraduate colleges. The same could be said for many colleges and almost all of the larger universities. Is it that different on a campus like Cornell with 13,000 undergrads (even divided among many colleges) vs an experience at Emory which has about half as many undergraduates? I don't know and I was hoping that this discussion might elicit some information to help us all understand better what a student can expect on campuses of various sizes and how best to compare and evaluate colleges.</p>

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<p>Midatlmom: re your comments-your points are extremely valid, and "your contribution" right on the mark.</p>