Using pledges instead of actual donations is one of the older tricks, but evidently USNWR changed the rules on this some years ago, and for some reason UCB didn’t catch on. Whether this was an honest mistake or not, it certainly raises questions as to the level of oversight.
Is UCB having some trouble maintaining donor levels? My neighbor and his wife are both Cal grads, and he was commenting to me about how much was spent on the recent stadium renovation, yet when he went to a game he saw that there were port-a-potties at the rear of the student section instead of real bathrooms. He said he decided then and there not to donate anymore.
I cannon tell you how many times I have heard USNWR rankings mentioned by administrators at universities, they are as obsessed with it, but the reality is they do matter and the consumer of universities (parents and students of applicants) use them to sort them out. That is not going to change and neither is the obsession by administrations on it. Frankly we and most other cultures love rankings, we literally rank everything, best companies to work for, best restaurants, best……….
I can tell you that working with them, I never heard anything about it. They have better and more specific info on which to self assess.
An admissions person at UCB claiming they’re number #1 is no view to their mission and primary focus, their standards and wants. No view to the variety of strengths, weaknesses, differences, or challenges.
This reminds me of folks who can’t grasp that holistic isn’t “hierarchical”…because it’s not hierarchical. It IS possible to stand back from this insistence rankings like USNews matter. They offer another perspective, is all. It’s not as easy as leaning on a rating scheme. Same, really, for the CDS.
The political stuff is often a cost forced on the campus by outside extremist groups (out-of-area alt-right and local black mask) who want to use the campus as a battleground. You can thank them for costing the campus large amounts of money (police/security/damage/etc.) that could have been used elsewhere.
@ucbalumnus , yes, absolutely. But what I’m talking about is the focus of the college at large. When I get on berkeley.edu or read the Daily Californian, there is a great emphasis on the social agenda of the times, whether it be a victimized group, or union activism, or, for G-d’s sake, the City of Berkeley’s recent decision to no longer call manhole covers manhole covers. I just get the feeling that the reset button needs to get hit so the mental energy can be redirected towards the mission at hand–our kids’ education and well being.
Sometimes it seems like Cal is an organization trying to peddle a point of view, rather than a state-funded institution of higher education for which many of us will be paying 36k+ per year for our children to attend.
“Alumni giving”–even though just a 5% factor in the rankings–is not worthy of inclusion in the ranking & rating system for National Universities–especially for public universities, in my opinion. Seems as though it measures effectiveness of the alumni office’s fundraising talents rather than the quality of education or quality of students at any particular school.
UCal-Berkeley deserves a high ranking for academics & quality of student, & UCal-Berkeley deserves praise for self reporting its repeated error. But, if one is punished for misreporting, then all schools should suffer similiar consequences for similiar misreporting / misconduct.
What I gather is that some rules in reporting to US News had changed sometime in 2014. Either Cal’s misreporting was deliberate or just complete oversight. This wa under Dirks’ watch, so let’s blame him. According to the ProPublica article, the school self-reported the error, so I’m sure it will be cleared up by the time the 2020 rankings come around in September. Eight more schools (plus schools at universities - business school at Temple, for instance) have been slapped down for the same misreporting of data, so I guess the big news is the size and reputation of a school like Cal getting called out for it.
To speak to the subject of alumni donorship level: I’m not sure this is a legitimate measure of the quality of education (even if it is just 5% of a school’s overall score).
Students who are saddled with a lot of college debt, supporting multiple family members, struggling to find affordable housing and decent paying jobs are not going to make giving to a school they graduated from 5 years ago a high priority. Have a large enough of those students in your school population, and that particular metric will suffer.
As graduate school continues to grow in importance I think we will see a fall off in donations derived from undergraduate degrees. Donations will be highest (as a percentage of total graduates) in the final degree someone earns. I know that I donate more to the school I earned my MBA from than my BS.
DH and I are Cal’s graduates over 20 years ago, we just started to make donations for the last 5-7 years (sorry). Now the kiddo is going there and we are paying OOS tuition and were debating if we should stop but decided to continue.
As far as the situation at Cal, I think the parents seem to have a much harder time than the students. For some reasons it bothers them a lot more. Things could be nicer, but as my kid said, she picked Berkeley for all the good and the bad and that’s what makes Berkeley so special. She would have gone to Carnegie Mellon or JHU or UMich or even UCLA if she wanted a nice and easy (not academically easy) college experience but then it wouldn’t be Berkeley.
