UNDERGRADUATE ranking based on the student’s environment

College Search & Selection
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<p>Well, I’m not sure which schools you’d be referring to, harvardgator. Schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, UVA and the University of Michigan have no trouble “attracting commensurate excellent students.” In fact, each one of these schools “attracts” and enrolls more high-performing (700+ SAT CR, 700+ SAT M) students than Harvard. Now it’s true, they also have some other students who are not in that category, but only because their mission is different from that of an elite private institution. Harvard can elect to educate a small handful of excellent students on a high cost-per-student model, subsidized by its enormous endowment, and leave it at that (though even that’s not quite so simple, as roughly a quarter of their entering class is sub-700 SAT CR and a like number sub-700 SAT M). The publics have a broader mission—to educate much larger numbers of the state’s better HS grads at a low cost-per-student rate. By sheer force of numbers, not all of these enrolled students will be as impressively credentialed as the class at a much smaller elite private. But that’s not reflective of a “failure to attract” top students; it’s reflective of a mandate to do more than educate a small number of top students. Top students they have aplenty, in greater numbers than Harvard. Ask anyone who’s taught there.</p>

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I disagree that it’s all smoke, but I appreciate the caveat that your experiences lie in the humanities and social sciences. My own alma mater (a private) is very blunt about having separate undergraduate and graduate faculty in the sciences. Most students don’t really mind, since the undergraduate faculty are generally the better instructors anyway (and speak better English!), and it’s not like they don’t complete research themselves. </p>

<p>I can think of at least a handful of examples in the humanities (e.g. art history at NYU) where there are separate faculties, but it is generally less common.</p>

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<p>bc, harvardgator doesn’t think UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine should be rated so high in USNWR because avg. SAT scores aren’t as high as other states flagship campuses (ie Penn St.) and the weight placed on top 10% of class disproportionately favors UCs…however, these UCs do offer some leading academic programs and have attracted a renowned faculty. I believe the lower SAT scores at these “mid-tier UCs” are reflective of the numerous great colleges in CA…Berk, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Claremont consortium and Caltech skim the cream of most CA students…fewer high scoring SATers are available to attend the other UCs. But that should not take away from the “mid-tier” UC’s academic offerings.</p>

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<p>bc,
No one is disputing that the publics have a different mission. I think that that fact is a major reason why USNWR should rank publics separately from the privates.</p>

<p>But the public mission and its accompanying obligations does have an impact on the quality of what arrives on campus and the nature and experience that they will have. A big school like U Michigan is like a combination of schools. Maybe its top quartile is statistically competitive with the non-HYP Ivies or other top privates, but its lower quartile is more akin to what one would find on average at schools like Rutgers or Fordham or maybe Michigan State. </p>

<p>The beauty of a big school like U Michigan is if one can get into the smaller elite programs such as the Honors program, the Engineering program, or the Business program, then it could be a very good experience. I would wager that many of the U Michigan posters on CC come from these areas and want their school to be given equal status to higher ranked colleges. But these areas account for less than 30% of the U Michigan students so it’s obviously a major stretch to claim that overall it’s an elite student body. I mean, there are over 18,000 students in these other areas. </p>

<p>Compare U Michigan’s student body to a school like Notre Dame. There are probably as many good students at U Michigan as at Notre Dame, but I would argue that the quality is much deeper and more consistent at the latter. </p>

<p>25994 U Michigan undergrad population
8363 Notre Dame undergrad population</p>

<p>27%, 7018 students = % and # of U Michigan students scoring below 600 on SAT CR
8%, 669 students = % and # of Notre Dame students scoring below 600 on SAT CR</p>

<p>14%, 3639 students = % and # of U Michigan students scoring below 600 on SAT Math
4%, 335 students = % and # of Notre Dame students scoring below 600 on SAT Math</p>

<p>and perhaps most revealing of all</p>

<p>56%, 14,557 students = % and # of U Michigan students scoring below 30 on ACT
12%, 1171 students = % and # of Notre Dame students scoring below 30 on ACT</p>

<p>These are huge differences. And the idea that over 14,500 U Michigan students, 56% of the student population, could not break 30 on the ACT, well….I think that reflects pretty well how academically un-elite of a student body they enroll.</p>

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<p>OK, thanks for the clarification. I guess I wasn’t thinking of UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UCSB among the “world’s great universities,” unlike Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA and a handful of others. But I’m still confused. According to US News, the middle 50% SAT scores at the “mid-tier UCs” are nearly identical to Penn State’s, and their US News rankings are also very close:</p>

<p>Middle 50% SAT CR+M/ US News ranking</p>

<p>Penn State 1100-1300/ 47
UC Irvine 1090-1300 / 46
UCSB 1080-1320 / 42
UC Davis 1050-1300 / 42</p>

<p>I do agree with your broader point, though. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, some schools with very strong academic programs are just not as popular with top students as some other schools with weaker academics. I think some of the top women’s colleges fall into this category, for example. Wellesley’s faculty can match that of any LAC in the country, but it’s playing the admissions selectivity game with one arm tied behind its back, automatically excluding 50% of the eligible pool on gender grounds, then fighting an uphill battle with many of the women who don’t want to go to a women-only college. Under the circumstances, it’s extraordinary that Wellesley manages to be as selective as it is. But the fact that it’s not as selective as Amherst, Williams, or Swarthmore is not a reflection of academic weakness. Instead, it should be seen as an extraordinary opportunity by some enterprising women out there, a true admissions “bargain.” Similarly so (but for different reasons) at the “mid-tier UCs.”</p>

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<p>I think you’re arguing out of both sides of your mouth here, hawkette. On the one hand you acknowledge that a big, multi-dimensional university like Michigan (or Cornell, for that matter) represents a mosaic of vastly different academic experiences, not a single homogeneous entity. On the other hand, you want to average the statistics of all the participants in those vastly different programs together and suggest that the quality of the experience of attending the elite parts is somehow diluted by their physical proximity to some less elite parts—that somehow, this composite amorphous “environment” is what counts. But that simply doesn’t reflect the reality of academic and social life at a big, complex, multi-faceted university.</p>

<p>Look, I went through Michigan in the LS&A Honors Program, a pretty elite outfit where average stats are easily Ivy-caliber. I never once shared a classroom with a student from the School of Nursing—a very good school of nursing, mind you, but one whose admissions stats don’t begin to approach those of the Engineering School or the Business School or even LS&A, much less LS&A Honors. In fact, I believe I met one nursing student on one occasion in the entire time I was there, and then only because she was the summer sublet roommate of a friend of a friend. I met more students from Eastern Michigan University some 10 miles down the road—and they didn’t taint my academic experience any more or any less than the nursing student did. Was my life as a student-- my “environment,” as you put it—in any way affected by the admissions stats of the School of Nursing? Of course not, and it’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest that it was. And that’s not just true of the Honors Program. As you point out, it’s also true of Engineering, Business, the Residential College, and many other programs, which operate as separate spheres.</p>

<p>The same is true at Cornell, where the Engineering and Liberal Arts Colleges are far more selective than the numerous state-supported “contract colleges” that share the same campus, many of which have admissions rates twice as high as those of Engineering or Liberal Arts, and SAT scores correspondingly lower. Cornell Engineering students may have little or no interaction, in the classroom or outside it, with students in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations or the School of Hotel Administration. They’re operating in different universes. What matters most to students in Engineering is the quality of their Engineering professors and other Engineering students—not what the average SAT scores are in Hotel Administration. Yet you (and US News) continue to rely on university-wide averages to construct a purely hypothetical (i.e., fictional) “average” environment that in fact doesn’t exist for any actual student.</p>

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<p>Expand ND’s undergrad to the size of Michigan’s and let’s see if they can maintain those higher average SAT scores. </p>

<p>Heaven forfend that you might have to communicate with someone who only scored 29 on the ACT…</p>

<p>ironically, that seems to be a more arrogant stance than bclintonk’s post.</p>

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<p>As for Cornell specifically, “somewhat more” would be a better choice of words than “far more” for most of the colleges IMO. At this point. They each have great students in their own right, and more importantly each college is among the very best at what it does. The “other” colleges actually appear to be getting more relatively selective, if anything. Though each college is still different.</p>

<p>I agree with the point that one should look more to the characteristics of the particular college of interest when considering a multi-college university, and it is pointless to use an aggregate of one institution for most purposes, when only one college of it can be attended and its colleges are different.
Michigan LS&A Honors program is not a worse place to go by virtue of the fact that Michigan also has nursing students, someplace. Nobody will consider graduates of such program as anything less than what they are. IMO.</p>

<p>Most people are capable of distinguishing between colleges, and special programs, within unversities. Certainly every employer I worked for was capable of this.</p>

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<p>@hawkette</p>

<ol>
<li><p>The trouble with your ideal professor who “recognizes student potential and excites it” is that recognizing and exciting students is a deeply personaly trait that is impossible to measure with quantitative data. To “excite” someone is a subjective action that will vary based on the individual. I may find the idea of a Nobel-Prize-winning professor enough to excite my interest in a subject, but that doesn’t mean that someone else will follow their lecture rapturously. Learning styles are individually varied.</p></li>
<li><p>I honestly have no idea why you care about the bottom half of Michigan’s entering class. Discussing the “elite” status of the entire student body makes a fairly entertaining argument between the partisans on both sides, but it has very little relevance outside of our little ivory tower here on CC. If you have over 10,000 people whom you consider important personal influences, with whom you engage on a daily basis, and whose average SAT scores are a matter of great concern, then I’d like the list. Otherwise, why worry about people who a high-achieving student at Michigan will probably never even see?</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>Bc,
Talking out of both sides of my mouth? Sheesh. I’m actually trying to compliment your school and other big schools and some of the benefits that they can provide. There are some good things there, but I’m not so blind as to realize that there are also a lot of things that aren’t so great and that the halo only extends so far. Even more importantly, I can see that there are a lot of other colleges that have a better story for their entire student body. </p>

<p>Ucb,
No argument from me on the size thing. One could make similar arguments about a lot of colleges. IMO, for the individual student, size is sometimes a blessing, but more often a curse. </p>

<p>I think that the ideal college size is 3000-8000 undergrads. Big enough for critical mass and lots of activities/resources, small enough for intimacy across several venues. </p>

<p>Noimag,
My comment about teaching style was to contrast with the idols described by bclinton, </p>

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<p>We value different things. And I don’t denigrate as anti-intellectuals those students who might actually enjoy and benefit from a classroom with an entertaining professor. </p>

<p>Re the query on U Michigan’s bottom 18,000+, I consider them part of the school. When comparisons are made between the student bodies of various schools, you can’t cherrypick which groups you want to include. I’m sure that there are subsets of students at Ohio State that are statistically every bit as good as some subsets at U Michigan. Does that make the student bodies of those colleges equals or peers? </p>

<p>I guess I’m weary of the non-stop, self-promoting efforts of too many U Michigan partisans to advertise these folks as premier students. They’re not. Good perhaps, but not on the level of top privates that they incessantly seek to associate themselves with.</p>

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I think you missed my point. I’m arguing that comparing the entire student bodies of various schools is an exercise in futility that offers a prospective student nothing meaningful. If there are 5,000 top-caliber students, that should be more than enough to find a niche.</p>

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<p>“Re the query on U Michigan’s bottom 18,000+, I consider them part of the school. When comparisons are made between the student bodies of various schools, you can’t cherrypick which groups you want to include. I’m sure that there are subsets of students at Ohio State that are statistically every bit as good as some subsets at U Michigan. Does that make the student bodies of those colleges equals or peers?”</p>

<p>Was that your experience there hawkette?</p>

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<p>To add in my 2 cents. I agree completely with bclintonk. I think only 40% of Michigan undergraduates are in rigorous majors like sciences, math, economics, engineering, business. when you get a degree from Michigan in one of these disciplines, the degree is as good as any degree from any school save HYPMS. It gets fishy when you get into the sociology/psychology/asian studies and likes of these majors, you could be very good, but it’s very easy to get by and get a degree. And there’s a significant number of these majors at Michigan. In graduation year 2009, over 1000 undergrad degrees were granted in Psych, sociology, communication, and general studies. But, i’ve had a very easy time in the humanities/social sciences classes at Michigan, but i doubt it would be different at other top schools, as it’s just the nature of the course material. Most students are pretty motivated, but there’s no clear wrong answer in these studies. </p>

<p>But even then, most of them are considered pretty smart by most standards, as over 75% of Michigan LSA students were in the top 5% of their high school class.</p>

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<p>Hawkette, Notre Dame does not have officially verified published statistics, so their numbers are not admissible. Last I checked, ND’s mid 50% ACT (31-34) range was equal to Harvard’s. That is highly suspicious if you ask me, and you know it. Michigan’s mid 50% (28-32) is close to Brown’s (28-33), Chicago’s (28-33), Cornell’s (28-32) and Penn’s (29-33). I find it highly unlikely that Notre Dame’s mid 50% ACT range would be higher. As for SAT ranges, they are completely inadmissible as private schools superscore, aiding their averages by unknown amounts.</p>

<p>That is not to say that Michigan’s undergraduate student population is, pound for pound, identical to Brown’s or other non-HYPM elites, but to claim that a mere 25% of Michigan undergrads are at that calibre is WAY off. I mean WAY, WAY, WAY off. Statistically speaking, and that seems to be the only language you speak, 50% (give or take a few) of Michigan students are of that calibre. On the flip side, 25% of students at those private elites AREN’t! There is a significant difference between 25% and 50%. 50% of Michigan students have 30+ ACT scores and 1330+ SAT scores. At most non-HYPM elites, 25% of undergrads have LOWER scores than that. </p>

<p>But to repond to your thread’s main topic, any top 20 undergraduate student environments that does not include Michigan is a joke. In fact, only a moron would leave Michigan out of the top 10, and since you are clearly not a moron, I must conclude that there must be an underlying and questionable notive/agenda. Not surprising considering the source. Michigan is generally regarded as the best university all alround…FULL STOP. Top 10-15 pure academics in a top 5 college town, with top 5 athletic traditions, top 5 alumni base, top 5 campus spirit/environment and top 5 performing and visual arts offerings. No other school can offer that. Some schools may have compete with Michigan on some levels, but none do on all fronts.</p>

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<p>hawkette, I think that it’s fair to assess a school like Michigan on a per department basis. Michigan’s size is too huge to be assessed as one especially when you try to compare it to a small-sized school like ND. </p>

<p>For example, when a student wants to major business. Would ND be a better option than ND? I don’t think so. What about for engineering? Would ND be a better option than Michigan? I don’t think so either. But maybe ND would be a better option than Michigan for some programs. But to say ND is better than Michigan because statistics say so, I think you are completely missing a lot here.</p>

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<p>What a bunch of disingenuous deceitful bunk. This is not environment, this is another veiled attempt to rank schools by selectivity…another attempt by hawkette, the resident “ranking expert” to advance yet another list to support her agenda. </p>

<p>Its rough alright…subjective and bogus. Its another spin on the USNWR rankings. </p>

<p>Blagh.</p>

<p>It serves no purpose but to create controversy and “eyeballs for this website” and a lot of heated debate. Its very harmful to the person actually looking for a college.</p>

<p>Good grief.</p>

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Selectivity makes up only 30% of her ranking. Would you propose that she leave it out entirely?</p>

<p>Like it or not, selectivity DOES have an effect on one’s experience (both inside and outside the classroom). Minute differences in SAT scores are useless, of course, but selectivity is important when looking at a broader picture.</p>

<p>As for the “controversy and heated debate”:

  1. Any ranking that doesn’t put Berkeley and/or Michigan in the top 10 will immediately get attacked.
  2. Any ranking that doesn’t grovel at the feet of peer assessment will immediately get attacked.
  3. Rankings of any sort tend to generate controversy, as AA threads do. Posters should know that when opening the thread.</p>

<p>I’ve noticed on CC a peculiar variant of Godwin’s Law. As we all know, Godwin’s Law states that the longer a thread on a forum runs, the probability of someone comparing someone to a Nazi or Hitler approaches 1. </p>

<p>On CC, the longer a thread runs, the probability of a debate between hawkette and Berkeley/Michigan posters taking over a thread approaches 1. :rolleyes:</p>

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Which was done by you in Post #4:

Pot, meet kettle.</p>

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<p>I think it’s because hawkette (and a few others here) still don’t understand that schools like Berkeley and Michigan (among others) are not right to be compared to schools of different nature, objectives, system and set-up. I don’t understand why hawkette, who appears to be a smart poster, couldn’t understand that Berkeley is not the same as ND, and ND is almost entirely different from Berkeley - from the admissions criteria, objectives of the schools, set-up within the school, and maybe even the curricula. Despite that, she keeps on publishing rankings using criteria that are clearly engineered to boost the private schools. And when there’s a ranking that uses criteria fair enough to large schools, she’s quick to critique the results. </p>

<p>Again, you can’t compare ND or Emory or Vandi to a school like as big and as complex as Berkeley or Michigan. Because Berkeley/Michigan run by departments, not as a whole.</p>

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<p>alex,
Your unsubstantiated slander toward ND is not appropriate. If you have documentation of falsification by ND authorities, then post it. Otherwise, your comments are totally out of order.</p>

<p>Re your statement, </p>

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<p>this is another example of the inaccuracies often posted in CC by U Michigan partisans. U Michigan’s ACT 25/75 is 27-31. See line C9 of the Common Data Set.</p>

<p><a href=“Office of Budget and Planning”>Office of Budget and Planning;

<p>As one can see, the ACT 25/75 is 27-31. </p>

<p>U Michigan’s peers for student bodies are not Brown, U Penn, Cornell, etc. LOL-nice try…again. If you consider the full student body and don’t just cherrypick which students you want to count, among national universities, U Michigan’s student body would rank somewhere in the 30-40 range. </p>

<p>The following colleges have student bodies that would correctly be seen as U Michigan’s peers:</p>

<p>1220-1430, 27-31 U Michigan</p>

<p>1170-1410, 25-31 UCLA (low end is materially weaker)
1220-1440, 27-32 U Virginia
1250-1420, na-na Georgia Tech
1180-1400, 26-31 U Illinois
1160-1400, 26-30 U Wisconsin</p>

<p>1160-1380, 25-30 U Florida (stretch)</p>

<p>1240-1400, 27-31 Wake Forest
1250-1440, 28-31 NYU
1250-1430, na-na Boston College
1230-1400, na-na Lehigh
1190-1380, 27-31 U Miami</p>

<p>Not the following (I can easily add more, but you get the idea):</p>

<p>1330-1520, 30-33 U Penn
1300-1500, 29-33 Cornell
1320-1540, 28-33 Brown
1290-1510, 29-33 Johns Hopkins
1330-1500, 30-33 Vanderbilt
1320-1500, 31-34 Notre Dame</p>

<p>Why do U Michigan partisans repeatedly claim higher numbers and association with higher ranked colleges? Who knows for sure, but it looks a lot to me like an attempt to convince themselves and others that their school and student body really belongs among the elite. Parts might warrant Top 20 consideration. Overall, I don’t think so. </p>

<p>Also, it’s funny, but I don’t see this promotional behaviour nearly as much from fans of other schools that have every bit as strong an argument as U Michigan. </p>

<p>RML,
I don’t know how much you know about ND’s business program (Mendoza) or its student placement record. It’s pretty good. Not Whartonesque, but certainly every bit as strong as what you’d find at the other top Midwestern colleges, ie, Northwestern (no direct undergrad b-school, but a certificate program), Wash U (Olin), U Michigan (Ross), U Illinois, Indiana U (Kelley). I think arguing about which of these is the better business program is probably a waste of time as employers will see quality graduates from all of these places. </p>

<p>IB,
I really don’t think you should call the U Michigan partisans “Nazis.” They aren’t that bad. :)</p>