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The U.S. News and World Report college rankings: A public vs. private dilemma
“UC-Berkeley does very well on just about every ranking, except for U.S. News,” university Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks said in an e-mail to The Washington Post. “We compete for undergraduates very successfully (against all of the top 20 schools) and offer great programs for them, but the metrics for the U.S. News ranking seem ill suited to reflect our excellence, or for that matter any of the great flagship publics.”
Sorry, but this wins the boggle award for today (and it’s still early morning in my time zone).
I mean, you do realize that all of the private universities in this country, with a very few exceptions (e.g., Hillsdale), do receive federal tax dollars, and in many cases lots and lots of them, right?
^ well they all get property tax abatements though those are mostly local, not federal. Beyond that most get Pell and federal research funding. If we’re calling “tax money” anything the gov’t spends on them, then they do all get it, even Hillsdale.
I think it misses the mark to say the international ranking “is geared towards graduate school.” The metrics that go into this ranking are about the breadth, depth, productivity, quality, and impact of a university’s research and scholarly outputs, and about the reputations of its various academic faculties among their peers both regionally and worldwide. For U.S. institutions this includes not only faculties in Ph.D.-granting disciplines, but also the strength of its medical, law, and business schools. All research universities worth their salt care deeply about these things, and invest heavily in them. Graduate education is in a sense ancillary to that research mission–as is undergraduate education, for that matter, at least at research universities. It’s a different story at LACs, where undergraduate education is the central and overriding institutional mission, and it’s research that generally takes a back seat.
Almost all U.S. research universities do provide undergraduate education as part of their overall mission, though there are exceptions like UC San Francisco and Rockefeller University. They approach this in different ways, with the polar extremes being what I would call the “hothouse model” and the “mass market model.” Most elite private schools opt for the hothouse model–they take the resources of a great research university and append to it a smallish class of undergraduates. Not that all the resources are devoted to the care and feeding of undergraduates, by any means–they also do graduate education, in some cases having more grad students than undergrads (e.g., Harvard has 6,694 undergrads and 13,235 grad students), and of course there’s that pesky research mission which ultimately gets most of the resources, with undergrads at best along for the ride. Most public research universities operate under a mandate to provide undergraduate education on the mass market model—even the best of them take the resources of a great research university and append to it a large class of undergraduates, most of them in-state residents, because undergraduate education on that scale is part of their mission as public institutions.
That, in a nutshell, is why the great private research universities fare so much better than the great public research universities in the US News undergraduate rankings, which heavily reward expenditures per student (even if the expenditures aren’t actually going toward undergraduate education). But strip out those metrics, along with a few others like median undergraduate SAT scores (which are much easier to maintain at stratospheric levels with a small class than with a large one), and you see what the rest of the world sees, and indeed, what academics and university administrators here and abroad see. Yes, Harvard almost certainly is the world’s greatest research university, and MIT is certainly a plausible contender at #2. But it’s equally plausible that UC Berkeley is breathing down MIT’s neck at #3, ahead of Stanford at #4 (though you’ll never find anyone in Palo Alto who will admit that). It’s also plausible that Oxford and Cambridge are the only non-U.S. research universities to crack the top 10, that only 4 non-U.S. research universities crack the top 20, and that Princeton is only #13 and Yale #17 behind the likes of #8 UCLA, #14 Michigan, and #14 University of Washington. It’s not that their graduate programs are worse; it’s that their research and scholarship outputs are in the aggregate not as broad, as deep, or as impactful (and Princeton is probably hurt here by not having a law school, a medical school, or a business school). That also explains why Brown comes in at a lackluster #106, and Notre Dame a pedestrian #184.
Should any of this matter to prospective undergrads? That’s an age-old debate. I would say for most undergrads, it probably doesn’t matter at all, except for a certain kind of bragging rights. On the other hand, there are some prospective undergrads who are intellectually equipped and motivated to accelerate through a normal undergraduate curriculum and do graduate level work, or in extreme cases even to do cutting edge work that pushes the boundaries of the discipline, while they are still undergrads. Those types really should consider whether they might be best off at a top-notch research university that has particular strengths in their areas of possible interest.
“That’s the outcome of dividing an endowment by 40,000 students, instead of dividing it by only 10,000 students.”
Are you also factoring other “outcomes”? Such as economies of scale and state funding? You should add $6 billion to the endowment of a public university that receives $300 million annually from the state because universities may only use 4%-5% of their endowment on an annual basis.
So a public university like Michigan has an endowment of $10 billion. But if you factor in state funding, it functions like a private university with an endowment of $16 billion.
And while taking student body size into consideration (relative) makes sense, one should also take economies of scale into consideration, as well as the overall size of the endowment (absolute).
Federal research grants (i.e. Johns Hopkins receives more than any other university, by far)
Non-profit status
Tax free growth of their massive endowments (plus charitable deductions for donors)
Federal financial aid funding the huge tuition for most students
Private universities certainly depend on tax dollars.
“Dartmouth is not a top ten college no more. Wow, I’m surprised. I guess in the future all the ivy leagues will start to go down in the ranks.”
Dartmouth hasn’t been in the top 10 since the previous rankings (11th) and I think it’s pretty preposterous to say “I guess in the future all the ivy leagues will start to go down in the ranks.” but I’m sure you already know that.
UCI has also moved up, passing UCD and pulling even with UCSD at #39 (just behind UCSB at #37).
Given the fact that UCI was, I believe, tied with U Florida at #49 just a few years ago, it seems to be on a trajectory to move into third place among the UCs, after UCB and UCLA.
Let’s get one thing clear: USNWR doesn’t take into account endowment size at all. If they did, Harvard would be a consistent #1. USNWR looks at annual expenditures divided by the number of students.
“Let’s get one thing clear: USNWR doesn’t take into account endowment size at all. If they did, Harvard would be a consistent #1. USNWR looks at annual expenditures divided by the number of students.”
I knew that, and it is truly laughable. First of all, there is no way of knowing what universities are spending their money on, and how effective it is at benefiting undergraduate students. Furthermore, much of a university’s operating budget is research/graduate school based. Finally, universities that have reduced costs efficiently are penalized. The USNWR should take a university’s financial health as the measure of financial resources.
^ Yes, we can always argue over the methodology used. Surely, factoring in total endowment size would benefit your university’s ranking.
I’d say lack of medical school research spending hurts my university’s ranking. The argument then being why count medical school spending when it doesn’t have anything to do with undergrads - if USNWR is supposed to be an undergraduate ranking?
What about Johns Hopkins and its Applied Physics Lab?
Princeton does extremely well with hardly any professional schools. And you could argue that if this ranking is for undergraduate, Princeton does have a strong undergrad focus and deserves its No. 1 ranking.
I think by now, the magic formula for achieving a high USNews rank is pretty obvious: Charge as high a tuition as you possibly can and then line-item the amount you discount the official rate (i.e., financial aid) as an expenditure. In almost every instance, the higher the tuition, the higher the discount rate is going to be. Pretty simple.
Here’s another ranking which came out recently. The Center for World University Rankings. The top 15 are
Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, CIT, Tokyo, Penn, and UCLA. http://cwur.org/2015