<p>“MIT, UW-Madison and UIowa were all cheated out for the Lab. Oh well, high stakes competitions have high stakes consequences.”</p>
<p>Fixed it for you.</p>
<p>Baghdad is upset because his school, “Suntan U”, isn’t included in the NHMFL award with FSU and UF.</p>
<p>Sun Tan U blabs all the time about their hearty undergraduate curriculum, but in truth they need to focus on building up their graduate & professional programs. In short they need to focus on substance over marketing. If UM can build up the endowment, faculty prestige, and graduate student quality then they will in fact be a formidable institution.</p>
<p>Barrons, the correct way to say what you’re trying to say is:</p>
<p>“[We</a> wuz robbed](<a href=“Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions”>Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions) of the NHMFL by those stinkers in Florida.”<br>
If you’re going to store sour grapes the least you can do is to turn them them into a classic whine. :D</p>
<p>bclintok, the quality of undergraduate education at the top liberal art colleges in the nation compares to places like Yale, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth. LACs have no research. The point that I was trying to make was that a school does not need to be a research powerhouse in order to provide a top notch UNDERGRADUATE education.</p>
<p>The discussion in question had to do with the fact that those who are trying to justify Machen’s rankings are doing so by constantly going back to the strength of UF research. He was ranking UF as an undergraduate institution. Period.</p>
<p>Amherst, Williams and Wellesley are much better undergraduate programs than UF…and they “ain’t got research” going.</p>
<p>^ The engineering programs at most LACs are either poor or nonexistent. Harvey Mudd is an exception to the rule.</p>
<p>^ Smith College offers engineering. Note from the first graduating class of engineers, in 2004: “To date, the graduating students have been accepted into engineering graduate programs at Harvard-MIT, Michigan, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, Berkeley and Notre Dame. Two have received highly competitive National Science Foundation fellowships for postgraduate study in engineering at any U.S. university. Several have positions waiting for them at national firms in fields ranging from information systems to finance to construction management.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not true. Not at all. This is a complete myth. Look at the faculty profile pages for schools like Amherst, Williams, Wellesley, and Swarthmore. One of the things that distinguishes these top LACs from run-of-the-mill small liberal arts colleges is that many of their faculty are engaged in high-level research and scholarship. Some have publication records a mile long. They’re respected scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities. Because they generally have no grad students, they rely on undergrads to work as their research assistants, which often means the student research opportunities are stronger at the LACs than at major research universities. Like research universities, the top LACs wouldn’t get top faculty if they didn’t afford their faculty opportunities to do research. Of course, depending on the field and specialty within the field, the opportunities for certain kinds of capital-intensive research may be more limited at smaller schools, and the overall scope and scale of the research effort is far smaller. But even at LACs, a strong research effort and a strong faculty tend to go hand-in-hand. You don’t get top faculty without providing great opportunities for research. And you don’t produce great research without attracting top faculty.</p>
<p>Myopinion-
I assume you are speaking in generalities and not literally when you say LACs have “no research”, as that isn’t accurate. While the research that is conducted by faculty at the LACs may not be at the level as at huge U’s with huge grants and tons of grad students working in them, there is still quality research being done at the LACs ( speaking specifically about the sciences right now), with undergrads helping in the labs and conducting their own research as well.</p>
<p>*** cross-posted with bclintonk</p>
<p>^^^ Being a guy, I never checked out the women’s colleges. Good find.</p>
<p>U of Miami aka Suntan U aka Trust Fund U aka Thug U aka Da U. </p>
<p>The place that helped shape illustrious role-models such as Ray Lewis, Michael Irvin, Najeh Davenport, Warren Sapp and the & the 7th Floor Crew. </p>
<p>The place that defined the term “lack of institutional control”. </p>
<p>The place where $30,000 a year will get you the same job as an FIU grad.</p>
<p>Da good ol’ U.</p>
<p>
Harvard, Dartmouth and Notre Dame are not known for their graduate engineering programs. For graduate schools, the Ivy label is not sufficient.</p>
<p>bclintok and jym626, yes, I am speaking in very general terms, of course. But whatever research goes on at LACs does not compare to power houses like Michigan and Florida in the fields that UF supporters of Machen’s rankings are referring to. However, i find interesting the fact that during the last couple years, all newspapers in Florida have been reporting about the inability of UF to attract top faculty. If anything, many faculty members are leaving. I guess that research - faculty correlation is not going very well there either.</p>
<p>JEZ21 says
</p>
<p>Thanks for the laugh. SunTan U was back in the 70s and I am sure UM supporters are pleased things changed. Now days you only hear that term coming from some of the UF ■■■■■■ who frequent these forums.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I hope that it does not take UF 30 years to change their perennial image of one of the top PARTY SCHOOLS in the country. After four years at number two, UF finally made NUMBER ONE on the latest Princeton Review Rankings. That ranking, together with being a top one also in the STUDENTS STUDY THE LEAST category speaks wonders about the place, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>Myopinion-</p>
<p>I have a good friend who is chairman of one of the graduate training programs at UF. I saw him at a conference recently and he told me their budget had been cut by an astronomical number. That said, I have not heard of one faculty member leaving the program. It is still a highly respected and sought-after program for students and interns, with top faculty and great training and research opportunities. I suspect many of the big state U’s education/training budgets are being cut, and FL is no different. No reason to single it out, IMO.</p>
<p>MyOpinion, your nearsidedness is not allowing you to see what is happening everywhere around the country. I understand you are a Suntan U homer and all and trying to come up with whatever you can possibly grasp at when it comes to trying to bash UF, but please use some common sense when trying to make an argument. Take a look at how the financial crisis is effecting a state with many great universities and faculty: [U</a>. of California Faculty and Staff Members Could Face 8% Pay Cut - Chronicle.com](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/news/article/6668/u-of-california-faculty-and-staff-members-could-face-8-pay-cut]U”>http://chronicle.com/news/article/6668/u-of-california-faculty-and-staff-members-could-face-8-pay-cut)</p>
<p>Couple points to make about UF & Sun Tan U</p>
<ol>
<li><p>University of Miami is not a member of the Association of American Universities (unlike UF).</p></li>
<li><p>Sun Tan U gets about half the research expenditures as UF.</p></li>
<li><p>UM could not even afford to keep the Orange Bowl and it got bulldozed.</p></li>
<li><p>UF was #1 party school for Princeton Review, Miami was #1 party school by Playboy.</p></li>
<li><p>Miami has half the endowment in comparison to UF.</p></li>
<li><p>UF is more selective, and is ranked higher on the undergraduate ranking.</p></li>
<li><p>Miami’s graduate programs are lousy (only exception is the Miller School of Medicine, but even then Shands at UF still blows it out of the water).</p></li>
<li><p>UF has an amazingly strong alumni-base, whereas the UM alumni-base resembles what you would find at a commuter school. You guys can’t even compete with Miami University (Ohio) on this front.</p></li>
<li><p>UF’s libraries are far greater than what can be found and Sun Tan U.</p></li>
<li><p>University of Miami is not even located downtown, it is off in the middle of suburbia.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Back from Bethpage Black, wow, what a golf course. </p>
<p>I would love to see, 60 Minutes do a piece on this. I would LOVE for them to ask USN&WR whether they used Machen’s returned survey or not. If they did, that would make for some interesting questions as to whether USN&WR knows what the word “familiar” (i.e. their own term as the qualifier for someone to rank a university) means and how they could possibly believe someone is credible who claims to be familiar with all National Universities in the United States. This would then lead to questions as to how many other responders ranked the vast majority of colleges on the survey and how it could possibly be that these administrators have an informed opinion about these schools and how something that accounts for 25 percent of the ultimate ranking could possibly be seen as credible. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, news organizations shy away from directly taking on other news-related organizations, so it’s not going to happen.</p>
<p>^^^^Look ctyankee, Clemson was found to be jobbing the so called “objective” numbers. You think that doesn’t happen as well? The whole thing is to be taken with a grain of salt and people shouldn’t put so much value in these stupid rankings.</p>
<p>ctyankee, if the PA of the USNWR were to be investigated, it would be the least of the magazine’s concerns. The PA is by nature and opinion score. It does not profess to be factual based on any tangible figure. As such, any investigation on that particular criterion would be excused. The problem would be with the remaining criteria used by the USNWR, which profess to be grounded in exact figures adjusted for manipulation and differences/variances in weighting and recording. Very slippery road indeed.</p>