@Chrchill omg ROTFL
PhengsPhils, the CDS asks universities to exclude faculty and graduate students of programs made up entirely, or almost exclusively, of graduate students. That means Law and Medical schools, Pharmacy, Public Health, Social Work, Business schools (only in the case of MBA-only programs, such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern, but not in the case of Penn, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or Michigan) etc…
However, universities are expected to include graduate students and faculty from programs and departments that have a significant number of undergraduate students, which usually includes Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, Nursing, and Business schools that offer undergraduate degrees, such as Penn, Michigan, Georgetown, CMU etc…
@CALSmom What is ROTFL ?
@Chrchill “Rolling on the floor, laughing.”
Good one. And I agree
It absolutely is possible to game the rankings (Exhibit A: Northeastern). There’s a piece in the Boston Globe detailing steps that school went to increase its U.S. News ranking. According to U.S. News, Northeastern is now a better research university than UT-Austin or University of Washington. Lol.
Well, at the undergrad level anyway.
The USNews National U ranking only ranks the undergrad level – or that’s their stated intent anyway.
OK, my last piece of research here. I took the Niche poll results on undergraduate teaching (Post #123) and averaged it with the Niche poll results for “students get money’s worth from program”. I thought these are good undergraduate indicators. It comes out this way:
Rank College
1 Princeton*
2 Stanford
3 Notre Dame
4 W&M (public)
5 Rice
5 MIT
7 WashU
8 Dartmouth
9 Harvard
10 Chicago
11 Wake
12 Yale
13 Tufts
14 Vanderbilt
15 Duke
16 UNC (public)
17 Brown
18 Michigan (public)
19 Georgetown
20 CMU
21 Penn
22 UVA (public)
23 Emory
23 Tulane
25 USC
26 Rochester
26 Northeastern
28 BC
28 Columbia
28 NYU
31 GT (public)
31 RPI
33 Northwestern
34 Cornell
35 Brandeis
36 Case Western
37 UCSB (public)
38 UCLA (public)
39 Hopkins
40 Berkeley (public)
41 BU
42 UC Irvine (public)
Princeton had a perfect score on “students get money’s worth” based on only 8 responses, which likely skewed results. Most of the others schools had significantly higher numbers of responses. Still, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT also had quite high scores in that category, so I believe Princeton would have still scored high, albeit lower in that rating. I had to omit Caltech due to low number of responses. Stanford continues its strong performance coming in at #2 fractions of a percent below Princeton. The UCs fare poorly. I did not include them, but I note again that top LACs do really well.
The trend I see here is a number of the typical top schools (e.g. Harvard) have high scores on money’s worth even if they did not rate teaching particularly high. At the bottom of the table, low teaching ratings correlate pretty closely with lower scores on “money’s worth”. The differences between adjacent schools is pretty small, but the difference top to bottom is sizeable.
Just like anything else, this should be taken with a grain of salt, but I see better relative performance from some schools that I have thought put a bit more wood behind the undergraduate arrow.
Based on Princeton’s graduate giving rate and apparent love and fealty shown by its students and alumni, I bet their “students get their money’s worth” numbers would have stayed pretty high even with many more responding.
Re: Princeton, that would be my guess as well. Peer schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT scored high.
“your ranking looks interesting, but I’m not sure I understand the formula. Can you elaborate? Is it top to bottom in post #137”
Yes that was top to bottom.
I ranked the schools by highest dropout rate then added that to the niche ranking.
Wake forest came out on top they had a high teaching satisfaction and a decent dropout rate.
Yale was at the bottom had a low satisfaction and a low dropout rate.
Yale students aren’t happy and school is too easy.
Wake students are happy and challenged.
1 11 Wake 12
2 19 W&M 9 (public)
3 21 CMU 11 ***
4 23 Brandeis 9
5 24 Tufts 9
6 26 Caltech 12 ***
6 26 Case Western 21 ***
8 27 Rice 7
Is it possible school is “easier” at Yale than at Wake because most Yale students are smarter and/or more motivated/focused/organized than Wake students?
Or there are more Humanities majors at Yale, perhaps?
Or a combination?
IzzoOne, Robert Morse is the worst offender. As the administrator of the US News ranking, he knows exactly what is happening, but he is more concerned with profit maximization than with the quality or integrity of his product.
@Greymeer, it’s not clear that a high dropout rate means a school is harder (or that a low dropout rate means it’s easy). A low dropout rate could be due to a variety of factors including the student qualifications & motivation level, the quality of student support services, and the level of financial aid. Do we really believe that Yale, Harvard, and JHU are easy, low STEM diploma mills?
I wonder which Niche numbers indicate that Yale students aren’t happy.
It appears you used the ranking IzzyOne derived in post #123.
Only 60 Yale students responded to the Niche questions about vaguely-defined faculty characteristics.
I don’t think we can conclude Yale students in general are unhappy just because a few of them (~6-13 depending on the question) fail to agree their professors are “passionate”, “approachable”, “caring,” or “engaging”.
When you get to say UCLA and Berkeley, Niche has 330 and 230 responses respectively. I wonder at what point they are more relevant. Presidential election surveys are typically 1,000 people nationwide with a plus or minus of about 3%. Berkeley comes in at 18 in USNews ranking of undergraduate teaching. Niche certainly wouldn’t suggest that is accurate.
There is also an expectations problem. Students who go to the most elite schools have spent years striving for that brass ring, and as a result many of them have extremely high expectations for their dream colleges, expectations which turn out to be almost entirely impossible for any school to meet.
On top of that, many Niche and Rate My Professor-type reviews tend to favor those professors who give out easy As. Shocking, I know.
^ Good point!
What students might like in a teacher might not be what’s best for the students. Rigor would be one area where what most students prefer does not necessarily indicate quality.
@IzzoOne Your ranking way too low for UCB, putting it next to Irvine. I’d say relook at your formula.
@ThankYouforHelp , expectations could clearly be an issue, but it might also expose some differences between schools where there are similar expectations and USNews rankings (e.g. Michigan, Virginia, Berkeley, and UCLA or Hopkins and Dartmouth). These differences may reflect something about the undergraduate experience.
Regarding “easy A grades”, you might be right, but the ones at the top don’t look particularly easy to me.
@preppedparent, I was just isolating the teaching and value responses in Niche. There were no other factors on purpose. If I were going to come up with an alternative to USNews, I’d probably look to combine some more direct feedback on undergraduate quality like Niche with some other metrics like USNews might use. Berkeley would likely be higher with that methodology.
“@prezbucky Is it possible school is “easier” at Yale than at Wake because most Yale students are smarter and/or more motivated/focused/organized than Wake students?”
Could be. Wake scores are the 93 percentile. Yale 99.
CMU and Rice though are 98 percentile.
There is probably truth in that high expectations of an ivy education aren’t met.
Besides the low dropout rate and high avg gpas at ivy schools, I only have anecdotal evidence that ivy schools are easy… probably not hard. I know lawyers that have public engineering degrees and ivy law degrees. The opinion is that an undergrad engineering degree was harder than a Harvard JD. One said he felt like he earned his EE degree and was more proud of it… he “breezed” through the law degree. They are two different fields though, math and science vs application of law.
https://www.quora.com/Just-how-hard-are-the-Ivy-League-colleges
Funny Quote:
Yeah, as others have said, getting in is hard, but once you’re there, there’s a ton of grade inflation because the students who get into these colleges are used to doing well, and since they or their parents are paying for school, these schools have to cater to the customer to some extent and award “Gentleman’s B’s” at the very least. In fact, in all my time at Yale U. & Harvard Law School, I wasn’t personally familiar with anyone getting less than a B- in anything. I assume if you just failed to submit exams/papers, etc., you’d fail just like anywhere else, but short of that, it’s not that hard to do okay. You have to work for A’s, though. I’d actually decode the inflated Ivy grading scale and convert it to a real grading scale like this:
Ivy Grade Real Grade
A A
A- B
B+ C
B D
B- F
Below B- Incomplete
It’s also the case that there are easy classes (referred to as “gut” classes at Yale) that everyone knows about, so that, for instance, if you’re an English major looking to fulfill a math/science requirement, you can always take a class colloquially known as “Physics for Poets” in which there will be a lot of fascinating high-level concepts discussed but no math whatsoever.