What has UMich’s trend been like over the last few years ? Is it improving overall as a school (and what about college of engineering and Ross) ? Is it becoming more selective (and what about for OOS/International students) ?
All universities improve over time, and Michigan is no different. They improve their facilities, hire more faculty, increase their financial resources etc…Has Michigan improved more than other universities in this domain? In some ways yes, particularly where finances are concerned. Michigan’s endowment was quite small in the 1980s, which was to be expected considering that it is a public university and most public universities back then did not need endowments as state funding was ample for the operations of a university. Fortunately, Michigan recognized the precarious nature of state funding very early on and starting developing its endowment in the late 1980s, when its endowment stood at $250 million and was not even among the 25 largest university endowments in the US. Since then, its endowment has grown faster than that of any university in the nation, by a large margin. Today, Michigan’s endowment stands at $9.5 billion, 6th largest single-campus university endowment in the country.Only Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and MIT have larger endowments.
With regards to facilities, Michigan has also outpaced most universities in recent years. Since 1995, Michigan has spent over $5 billion on building new facilities and refurbishing old ones.
Finally, in terms of faculty size, quality and departmental strength, Michigan has maintained its position nicely. It is still ranked among the top 10 faculties in the nation overall, and its departments are, without any exception, all ranked among the top 20 nationally. Michigan’s lowest ranked department is Biology, which is ranked #20 in the nation. Chemistry is the second lowest ranked department, and it is ranked #15 in the nation. All other departments are ranked in, or around, the top 10 in the country. Only Harvard, Stanford and Cal have stronger faculties or higher ranked departments across many disciplines. On average, other than Harvard, Stanford and Cal, Michigan’s faculty and department rankings are only matched by Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, UCLA and Yale.
Selectivity is a separate entity from quality and resources, but like those two, most universities have become more selective in recent years. From 1990-2010, Michigan actually lagged many of its peers, primarily because it was not part of the common application. However, since 2010, Michigan has joined the common application, and as a result, Michigan has experienced a burst in selectivity that few other universities have experienced in that same period. In fact, most Michigan peers (like Cal, Cornell, NU, Penn and UCLA), have seen a flat line in their admissions figures since 2010, while Michigan has seen a steep incline. From 2009 until today, Michigan’s applicant pool exploded from under 30,000 applicants to over 50,000 applicants for the same number of spots. As a result, Michigan’s acceptance rate dropped from slightly over 50% in 2009 to most likely under 30% this coming admissions cycle. Mid-50% ACT ranges and SAT ranges also increased from 27-31/1230/1430 in 2009 to most likely around 29-33/1300-1500 at the current time. Virtually all of the increase in applicants has come from out of state and international students. As such, the selectivity has increased predominantly among them, not among Michigan residents.
As Alexandre notes: “Michigan’s lowest ranked department is Biology, which is ranked #20 in the nation. Chemistry is the second lowest ranked department, and it is ranked #15 in the nation. All other departments are ranked in, or around, the top 10 in the country.”
However, one could go further and note the following: most of those rankings include ties above Michigan’s ranking. If you consider all ties as a “mini-cohort” and rank all such schools equal such that ties are eliminated, Michigan’s ranking is around #7 across the board. In other words, even departments which are ranked “only” in the top20 are actually top10 if ties are removed. Of course, given the foregoing, a final ranking would not be #7, but higher given the non-linear nature of a ranking cumulation.
“Only Harvard, Stanford and Cal have stronger faculties or higher ranked departments across many disciplines. On average, other than Harvard, Stanford and Cal, Michigan’s faculty and department rankings are only matched by Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, UCLA and Yale.”
The above statement is supported by the fact that the UM faculty routinely ranks in the top 5 for: teaching prizes, citations and patents.
It is also worth noting that Michigan is the de facto farm team for higher education administration: 1) ranks #2 nationally for teaching higher education administration (generally ranked in the top 3 for this metric); 2) many UM students and former administrators end up at the provost, chancellor, presidential levels for other major universities (current dean of Harvard Law and Harvard school of public health, 2 of the last 4 presidents of MIT, president of Dartmouth, president of UVA, president of Columbia…). A partial list may be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Michigan_alumni#Educators:_university_presidents
A final point: as to facilities, it is hard to imagine how large a number $5Bln, is in academia…it is worth expanding to $5,250,000,000. This is a gigantic amount of money over roughly 10 years. A school the size of MIT probably has research revenue of $662MM, so this is the roughly equivalent of adding nearly 8 times the MIT research budget to the physical plant.
thank you for the detailed posts @blue85 and @Alexandre !
This pretty much answers all my questions 
I just wanted to know more about the school i will be attending. Thanks for the comments !
Go Blue !
“Michigan’s lowest ranked department is Biology, which is ranked #20 in the nation.”
I think President Schlissel is taking on that ranking:
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/02/university_of_michigan_to_go_f.html
@Alexandre What are your sources for the rankings? Can you post a more comprehensive list?
The source of my rankings is the USNWR graduate rankings. According to the latest edition, Michigan was ranked:
19 Biology
15 Chemistry
13 Economics
13 English
13 Computer Science
11 Physics
9 Mathematics
8 Geology
7 History
4 Political Science
4 Psychology
4 Sociology
Michigan was already ranked #4 in Business and #7 in Engineering at the undergraduate level.
Interesting link rjk. Yet again another benefit of having a $10 billion endowment. Michigan can afford building world class facilities. We are no likely to see the benefits of this initiative for several years, but it will definitely lay a foundation for the future in the life sciences.
Doesn’t make sense to my why it’s ranked so comparatively low (#29) by USNWR in its overall college rankings.
“Doesn’t make sense to my why it’s ranked so comparatively low (#29) by USNWR in its overall college rankings.”
I think the answer is that the rankings, at a certain level, are nonsense: 1) after years of using minute differences in point count the magazine is finally ranking ties/multiple-ties or cohorts; if you remove the ties, UM ranks even higher than the rankings posted…generally around #7; given that sort of average ranking, the overall ranking is not convex; 2) USNWR penalizes large schools and favors LACs, yet as Michigan has cut its student teacher ratio, the needle hasn’t moved on the school’s ranking; 3) Michigan is one of the wealthiest schools in the world (size of endowment, $300MM plus in state aid…) and pulls in more research dollars than all other schools but one, yet USNWR penalizes Michigan for not having sufficient faculty resources; nationally, Michigan is one of the few schools where the faculty actually pull in more money than they are paid…the ratio is around 1.15 to 1; 4) As noted above, Michigan has 100 graduate departments in the top 10, yet the argument is somehow that the graduate programs which are ranked 4th in aggregate are somehow separated from the undergraduate division to the detriment of the undergraduate division by some sort of magic boundary layer; in fact undergraduates get access to many of the same professors and most of the facilities and the same bleeding edge research. Undergraduates also have access to one of the most highly ranked research programs (UROP) in the country
Michigan runs a research budget which is 5 times larger than Princeton. For research domains ranked in the top 10 in the nation, Michigan has 8 such domains and Princeton has 4. Yet it was interesting to note that the recent university wide USNWR ranking (based largely on research and similar inputs) ranks Michigan one rank lower than Princeton (from memory Princeton is at 13 and Michigan is at 14). Princeton has some amazing departments but is a smallish boutique and Michigan is a large machine. In the eyes of USNWR, they are approximate equivalents.
My overall/final take is that USNWR and other publications have a narrative that small and private (especially Ivy) trumps large and public, and their “surveys” and “rankings” are then backfit to that preconception.
As a final thought, it is worth noting that all 3 of the global rankings (ARWU, QS, THE) rank Michigan higher globally than domestic magazines rank Michigan nationally. To me that suggests that when a less subjective ranking is used and when facts and numbers count, Michigan’s ranking will-rise/does-rise significantly.
Michigan global reputation ranking in 2014 according to the THE survey is #15: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014/reputation-ranking
So, globally, one of the most respected reputational surveys ranks Michigan 14 spots ahead of its position in the USNWR survey.
It should also be noted that the USNWR data collection is not consistent. For example, most private universities do not include graduate students in their student to faculty ratio, which is one of the heavier criteria used by the USNWR formula. Public universities include graduate students in their calculations. The USNWR also includes scholarship money handed out to students, but does not include subsidies provided by state universities in their calculations. There are many other data inconsistencies that really give private universities the upper hand in the ranking based on incorrect data, not based on actual quality. If the USNWR actually audited the data and accounted for those inconsistencies, Michigan would be ranked in the top 20 for sure.
Not to nitpick Alexandre, but we are ranked #2 in Geology behind Penn State (we were #1 last year if I remember correctly). We love our rocks here! 
Nursing, #6 ahead of a few ivies…
to clarify, nursing undergrad is probably #2 and the clinical opportunities are second to none!
19 Biology
15 Chemistry
13 Economics
13 English
13 Computer Science
11 Physics
For each of the above rankings, I’d be willing to bet that there are 2 to 4 tied rankings. As a result, you could reasonably argue that those programs are, at worst, top15 and all but bio and chem are probably top10.
I don’t get that. If you are number 4 because of the following ranking
1.
2. tied with
2.
4.
Then you are 4th, not 3rd.
“1.
2. tied with
2.
4.
Then you are 4th, not 3rd.”
I can use numbers in a few ways: 1) as a label with no inherent meaning (as is “1)” in this clause…I’m using the numbers to build a list but “1)” is there by happenstance, not due to importance); 2) as an indicator of cardinality (number of items in the set); 3) as an indicator or ordinality (i.e., to sequence numerically based on some sense of qualitative ranking).
In your example above “2.” and “2.” are not cardinal (the cardinality of numbers is 2, but that is accidental, it could have been a 3-way tie for second best) but also not entirely ordinal.
The first “2.” is second on the list, but the second 2. is third on the list, so the number “2” is not being used for ordering the sub-list. We have no indication as to how the sub-set should be ordered, unless we use an alphabetic (not numeric) ordering). If we go to an alpha ordering, then the number “2” is used as a list placeholder but is ambiguous with regard to the second school and acts more like a label.
If the first “2.” is one school and the second “2.” is a school which is tied with the first, why not, conceptually, treat them as one large school? If I do so, the point of the list, to assert something qualitative or ordinal, is not conserved if I list the fourth school as “4.” If the point of the list is to signal quality, and I signal that there is a leader and then two schools which aren’t quite as good but are otherwise fungible then by transitivity the fourth school on the list is lesser by one integral unit of ordering relative to both the second school and the third school on the list. Qualitatively, the fourth school is third in ordinality along the qualitative dimension. In other words, if both schools in the #2 position are otherwise fungible or indistinguishable or could be used to build one large set out of two smaller sets, then the next school is the third best.
That explanation is about 10 times longer than I expected when I started typing, but the point is non-trivial: 1) for years USNWR used a few decimal points to make really trivial distinctions between schools; making these distinctions is a way for them to engender controversy and print money; 2) they have finally introduced the concept of the tie, which indicates that those distinctions were spurious; 3) my point is a logical extension of that precept: it should be possible to treat ties as cohorts…if the bottom school in a cohort is ranked tied with the top school, then since we are no longer using real numbers, but integers, the integers should be built up as a set using qualitative ordinality in an integral step-wise fashion.
Going to 20X the original intended length of my reply: you’ll note that the national research council which publishes, at best, every 10 years, has actually gone to probability distributions. This is the reductio ad absurdem of my argument in that this process means you no longer have a ranking, you have merely a suggestion that some schools are better than others. Unfortunately, the result is pretty useless for making decisions both because you can no longer adduce strong ordering, but because the methodological complexities outweigh the added decisional salience…things are made more murky than they were to begin with.
My suggestion is simply to stick to integers, assign the same integer to reasonable ties, and increment them the way integers are normally incremented.
To quote Pascal: “Had I more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.”
What the heck was that: :-/ My point is still correct. You don’t treat two tied schools as one large school.
“You don’t treat two tied schools as one large school.”
According to whom? Where are the tablets on which that written?
If two schools are tied, which school is the better of the two? The correct answer is that they are equal. If you have already assigned an integer to each of two schools, what is the next integer in Z? If the schools are equal and there is no preference between them; from an ordering perspective, why can’t they be treated as one school? They each carry the same integer, so on what basis do you then distinguish them…alphabetic sort…reverse alphabetic…size…geography? All of those choices are arbitrary. If you put them into a set theoretic context, under basic set theory, one of them is redundant and is eliminated. Why can’t two sets of fungible things be combined into one set?
So, again, why should I skip integers in a qualitative/ordinal ranking when the next-least integer is applied with equal force/measure to two different critters?