<p>UF</a> falls again in U.S. News rankings | Gainesville.com</p>
<p>UF is now at 58, behind UMiami at 38.</p>
<p>As some of us predicted a few years ago, UF continues to fall in the rankings. With all the budgets cuts and faculty leaving for other institutions the trend is not good. Still a solid institution though.</p>
<p>I would say that having an admisssions policy that, rightly or wrongly, seems to focus on on “diversity” and “holistic” evaluations, rather than gpa and sat statistics, also may be a reason for the decline.</p>
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<p>floridadad55, I have not looked at the specific parameters but I do not think that GPA and SAT scores have dropped significantly because of a focus on “diversity” and "holistic"evaluations in recent years. I think it is a matter of lack of money, larger classes, faculty leaving and perhaps a loss of the reputation at a national level in terms of Peer Assessment ( the score that other Presidents give the school).</p>
<p>thats a very narrow, slanted, and altogether misinformed position. UF has been rising in academic competitiveness faster than it used to, against a scale that does not change. the only way that you could move down in the rankings due to lack of emphasis on academics (while somehow raising academic standards at the same time) in the admission process is if there was a massive gulf developing between the schools with the smartest students and everyone else. this isn’t occuring, and UM’s only marginally more difficult to get into in terms of scores required.</p>
<p>this is almost entirely related to budget cuts and a poor economy. if you actually read it, its pretty clear that the caliber of students, or the admissions process in general, are a very insignificant factor (especially considering admission standards continue to rise).</p>
<p>key paragraph:
“U.S. News based the rankings on 2010 data that includes graduation rates, resources and selectivity. It gives the greatest weight to an academic reputation index that is based on surveys from administrators.”</p>
<p>read: graduation rates are down–bad economy. resources are down–public institution with budget cuts. selectivity–likey takes into account admissions rate, a measure that puts large state schools at a disadvantage despite having little to do with a quality of education. the final quote should pretty much cause you to stop reading and is very useful for understanding why these rankings are not the greatest way of determining if you should go to a school. they’re about as useful as SAT scores–good at ball-park estimations and general qualifications, but not the most useful at differentiating between students on a list of qualified applicants when making admissions decisions.</p>
<p>correction: when i googled UM’s admission data, i clicked the university of michigan’s page. surprisingly, UF has almost on par with that UM in terms of quality of student. when looking at the <em>other</em> UM’s data (miami’s that is–the one i intended to compare with in the first paragraph), its clear that UF’s ACADEMIC admissions stardards are higher, despite a lower ranking.</p>
<p>^^ I’d like to add, graduation rates at UF are actually up. For this reason they are holding off on the block tuition for next year…</p>
<p>It seems like all the higher ranked public schools have taken a bit of a hit as well. UF needs to be given more flexibility from the state to set its own tuition.</p>
<p>goufgators, guess where UF took the biggest hit? Peer Assessment score. It was just payback time from all the other University Presidents… remember this story from 2009?</p>
<p>[University</a> of Florida President Bernie Machen places his school among the most distinguished universities in the United States. Other Florida universities get poor ratings. | Gainesville.com](<a href=“http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090616/ARTICLES/906169915/-1/SPORTS0102?Title=Machen-rates-Fla-schools-low#]University”>http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090616/ARTICLES/906169915/-1/SPORTS0102?Title=Machen-rates-Fla-schools-low#)</p>
<p>And guess what PA scores USNEWS took into consideration?? 2010 surveys, the year after Machen’s triggered scandal. I have a feeling, that UF is going to staying down for years to come. </p>
<p>I wonder where SSobick is now…</p>
<p>i doubt they’re really petty enough for that to be a factor. the most reasonable explanation is that administrators know that public universities are all being squeezed–so private institutions ought to be ranked higher all other things equal. i don’t care enough to check, but a simple way of seeing the validity of this is see what 5 schools jumped ahead of UF. a better way would be to see what share of schools who moved up were private vs private.</p>
<p>University of Florida is still in the solid top 30 for engineering, and that’s all I care about. Also, their grad school remains steady at around 30 as well for engineering. Pretty much engineering is what UF is known for, and I don’t think those rankings are going to change anytime soon :D</p>
<p>2010:
UF-47
Miami-50</p>
<p>2012:
UF-58
Miami-38</p>
<p>I think the benefits of a private university are definitely shown. Miami doesn’t need to worry about Gov Scott squeezing the budget for years to come. Add the desirable location and re-commitment to academics post-football glory days, and Miami looks primed to become the USC of the East</p>
<p>If the state wants to keep cutting UF’s budget then it needs to let it run more autonomously and become more of a public/private hybrid.</p>
<p>uf will be fine, we just need to get over a recession is all.</p>
<p>UF Engineering, still ranked 32nd :)</p>
<p>Grad Program ranked 26!! :D</p>
<p>Join me engineering brothers!!!</p>
<p>there have been other cases of it working fairly well (UVA comes to mind). its definitely a long term goal–not something you decide to do over the course of a decade, much less over the course of a recession. i imagine theres a certain endowment threshold where it becomes feasible. achieving that threshold would indeed be very difficult.</p>
<p>This was to be expected of course for the publics. That’s the only way I can even begin to fathom how USC is ranked over UCLA. USC is amazing but c’mon…</p>
<p>If you check out the the rankings for UF’s individual departments and programs, they haven’t suffered. Engineering, business, journalism, etc. are all tops. So what gives aside from the budget cuts? The peer assessment provides a decent sized part of the overall equation used. I do agree those scores played some part in the slide.</p>
<p>Yea, Miami is a great school- no doubt. But the recent scandal reaches far and raises questions about the university’s administration. I expect it to fall in the 2013 rankings and I wouldn’t send my (hypothetical) kid there.</p>
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<p>I would be thrilled if UF is allowed to raise tuition to the levels of even the average UC schools.</p>
<p>That is exactly what needs to happen, goufgators. Unfortunately tuition can’t be increased too quickly or students might start rioting. </p>
<p>:-)</p>
<p>Let’s get real here. I’m all for UF going up in the rankings. However, how much more beneficial would it be if UF was ranked in the 30’s or higher at the cost of thousands of dollars a year more for tuition?</p>
<p>UF prides itself as being one of the best, if not the best, school in Florida. It serves the job market in Florida which also serves the tax payers. I may be biased here but I’m going to be taking my UF degree and working in Florida. The only case where I would see paying more for tuition which would of course raise the rankings would be to go out of market and complete with the higher ranked schools in NYC or elsewhere.</p>
<p>If you’re able to afford the increase in tuition that’s great but I can’t without taking on more debt. I think we have one of the best values in the country at our school and if you wanted to pay more then maybe you should have went to a different school :P</p>
<p>thats an interesting question that i don’t think anyone really has a great answer for. if there is a scale of ranking vs tuition where the two are positively correlated, and schools had the ability to choose where on that scale they’d like to be located, what ultimately determines their placement?</p>
<p>three things come to mind:</p>
<p>1) legislation determines placement. for instance UWF/UNF are locked and cant grow if they tried. CC’s are also more or less immobile by decree.</p>
<p>2) who makes these decisions? politicians have an incentive to increase their ‘fame’ and leave a legacy in a sort of roundabout way, so in a very basic way you can think that politicians would generally be in favor of increasing rankings. administrators probably have the most to gain: higher tuition=>higher endowment=>more money=>higher ranking=>higher salary. thats a pretty easy thing to see. their actual behavior seems to reinforce this notion. their power almost guarantees that the school moves in this direction as long as their influence is greater than any influences that might prevent it (ie, recession, decree)</p>
<p>3) on a bigger scale, all universities 'ought to be better. over time you want to improve outcomes. you want to improve workforce with increased human capital, productivity, rate of innovation, etc. if all universities just stopped and said ‘no more money, we have enough, we’re doing fine’, i think we would have a problem because there would be fewer resources dedicated to improving human capital. in terms of game theory, if there are 2 schools that can either become better or stay the same, with both preferring to be better than the other, if one school chooses not to keep trying to get better, the other one will raise tuition and become a better institution. in that model theres only 1 nash equalibrium.</p>
<p>so i think partly inevitable that tuition will go up as the university continues its mission towards being more and more competitive. its very hard to make an argument for why it wouldn’t. from a societal standpoint, its probably better that way too, and that normative analysis is pretty easy to make.</p>
<p>i think another problem with the suggestion that UF just stay the same goes back to my 3rd point a little. if florida universities stop trying to keep pace with out of state universities, 2 things will happen. a) because the market for labor is very liquid and people move around a lot, as UF slips in the rankings (which would inevitably happen if it didn’t increase funding), and as the quality of graduates slowly declines, better educated people from out of state will move into florida. this puts florida graduates at a serious disadvantage. b) assuming that didn’t happen (and it would), and workers all stayed within their home states, the state of florida would fall even further behind in therms of the kind of jobs that it creates. i could elaborate on this, but i think its pretty obvious. if the average georgia graduate is smarter than the average florida graduate, and thus the workforces are similarly balanced, you would think that georgia’s economy and development would surpass florida’s.</p>
<p>I would not worry too much about the drop in the rankings for University of Florida. With the exception of Berkeley, UCLA, Virginia, Michigan, and perhaps a couple others, I would say that the top 20 or so “flagship” state universities are roughly equal.</p>
<p>For example, let’s say you and your identical twins/triplets, etc. each went to one of the following flagship universities, and each earned a 3.6 gpa, majoring in political science. And then all of you applied to the same law school. I would say that you would be treated as equal applicants:</p>
<p>Maryland
Florida
Minnesota
Wisconsin
SUNY Binghampton
Indiana
Ohio State
Rutgers</p>
<p>etc etc. etc.</p>