“Isn’t the USNWR ranking intended to align with the notions of prestige” (#14)
A statistically based ranking at its most sophisticated would be designed to presage the public’s awareness of prestige. In this sense, it will be resisted to the extent that it does not comport with the current status quo.
However, the quoted comment as a sociological observation may be entirely apt, in the sense that the rankings may be calibrated to confirm rather than challenge prevailing conceptions.
“I have yet to see a suspicious . . . report come out of a public university.” (#35)
“[The peer assessment score] is probably the most comprehensive and consistent rating of undergraduate institutions.” (#22)
Some public universities have been irresponsible and self-serving in the PA survey in particular in the way they have rated their own institutions in relation to their peers.
“. . . an official at Clemson revealed that her bosses, as part of a larger strategy to propel her university up the rankings, had regularly given low scores on the ‘reputational’ survey to make Clemson look better.”
(“Reputation Without Rigor”; Inside Higher Ed, 8/19/09.)
Nope. I am not a “firm believer” that they are “inferior”. Cal and Michigan clearly are prestigious, as are other universities of similar rank (like Georgetown and CMU). For some students (engineering students for example) they would be better choices than some higher-ranked schools, even if the net prices were equal.
I believe it is in everyone’s interest for all universities to report their data as accurately as possible.
But I’m not persuaded that private universities, and only private universities, are deliberately and systematically misrepresenting their data, or that if only the data reports were more nearly perfect, the results would be the ones you would prefer.
“I don’t think an ~20 position ranking spread means too much” (#34)
I’m not sure why sophisticated posters refer to ranking spreads at all. Twenty positions can represent over twenty points in overall score or less than five. Statistically, it’s only the latter that should matter.
The mention of the faculty student ratios is interesting. US news allows schools to make up their own definitions of certain very critical features of the variables used for ranking. The World ranking from Times (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings) are very strict about their rankings. I am very impressed with their efforts to report only clean data. They make schools sign off specifically on the information rather than simply taking the mucked data from the Common Data Set or from US News. I’ve challenged US News to be more explicit with its definition of what constitutes an applicant, a faculty member etc but I don’t think it has been cleaned up any. A friend sent me information from an email sent from the World Rankings-very impressive!
I believe some schools count as faculty anyone who teaches a class (including grad students) and faculty or former faculty who don’t teach anything. Both groups are not really available as mentors to college students (although I guess grad students may keep office hours). And some may count only college students to calculate ratios.
Compare the ratios of the World University Rankings to those published in US News. Very Very different for some schools.
This is the criteria used by The World University Rankings-pretty clean:
"Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) definition: All data regarding staff and student numbers are reported in terms of FTE to account for whether they work / study on a full-time or part-time basis: 1.0 FTE may be thought of as one person working full time for a year, while an FTE of 0.5 means half of a full work or study load.
Academic Staff: The FTE (see above definition) number of staff employed in an academic post, eg, lecturer, reader, professor. This equates to “faculty” in US.
• This should include permanent staff and staff employed on a long-term contract basis.
• This will NOT include: non-teaching “fellows” (the term varies across countries), researchers (only doing research), postdoctoral researchers, research assistants, clinicians of all types (unless they also have an academic post), technicians and staff that support the general infrastructure of the institution or students (of all levels).
• This will NOT include staff that hold an academic post but are no longer active (eg, honorary posts or retired staff) or visiting staff.
• Note that “academic staff” should not include clinicians from affiliated hospitals unless they also have an academic post and a sizeable portion of their workload involves teaching or research.
Students: This is the FTE number of students in all years and of all programmes that lead to a degree, certificate, institutional credit or other qualification.
• Typically these will be undergraduate AND postgraduate students who are studying for higher education programmes such as bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral or other equivalent degrees or components of those programmes, but NOT postdoctoral students.
“Some public universities have been irresponsible and self-serving in the PA survey in particular in the way they have rated their own institutions in relation to their peers.”
merc81, I assume this happens a lot, but the beauty of the PA rating is that outliers are excluded from the average score.
“The score used in the rankings is the average score of those who rated the school on the 5-point scale; “don’t knows” are not counted as part of the average. In order to reduce the impact of strategic voting by respondents, we eliminated the two highest and two lowest scores each school received before calculating the average score.”
If someone has access to the USNews PA scores, it would be interesting to know how well they align with the Times “Reputation Ranking,” which claims to be “based on nothing more than subjective judgement - but it is the considered expert judgement of senior, published academics - the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities.”
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2015/reputation-ranking#!/page/0/length/25
Re #46, the surveys attempt to measure different qualities, however. USNWR is attempting to quantify intangible aspects such as “faculty dedication to teaching” on the undergraduate level, which in principle is highly relevant to students. Times Higher Education states they are interested in the “most powerful global university brands,” which . . . well, it’s hard to say what this means.
The ones that might open a campus in Dubai…LOL
Re #47, here is what the Times thinks it means: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-reputation-rankings-2015-methodology
The funniest part about that link is that they are using milliHarvards as their metric…well, actually centiHarvards, but still…
[quote]
The scores are based on the number of times an institution is cited by respondents as being the best in their field. The number one institution, Harvard University, was selected most often. The scores for all other institutions in the table are expressed as a percentage of Harvard’s, set at 100.
[quote]
OK, then. The methodology is more substantive than the headline.
^ (50) Yes, that’s why it’s more accurate…LOL.
Here’s another angle on prestige:
which colleges capture the most matriculations from the nation’s premier private high schools, as identified by Business Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/best-private-high-schools-america-2014-11?op=1)?
This population of high school students is wealthy, well-informed about colleges, and presumably prestige-conscious.
I’ve aggregated the matriculation numbers posted for 9 of Business Insider’s top 10 (the exception being the Castilleja School, for which I could not find numbers). I added #16 Harvard-Westlake (a school in LA) to make 10. Below are the top 25 colleges, showing first the average rank then the school name (where “average rank” indicates that on average, for these high schools, the college is the Nth most popular matriculation choice). The 4 schools in bold are the only ones to appear among the top 25 matriculations for all 10 high schools.
AVERAGE COLLEGE (top matriculations for 10 private high schools)
6.7 Harvard University
7.3 Columbia University
7.5 Cornell University
8.2 Yale University
8.9 New York University
10.3 Stanford University
10.6 University of Pennsylvania
10.8 University of Chicago
12.1 Brown University
13.7 Princeton University
16.8 Tufts University
17.2 Georgetown University
17.4 University of Michigan
18.3 Dartmouth College
19.0 Johns Hopkins University
19.6 Wesleyan University
19.7 University of Southern California
20.0 Northwestern University
24.5 Williams College
24.6 Barnard College
25.0 Middlebury College
25.7 Washington University
26.2 Carnegie Mellon University
27.3 Duke University
27.4 Amherst College
AVERAGE COLLEGE (top matriculations for 5 private high schools in the NE)
3.6 Yale University
4.4 Harvard University
4.6 Cornell University
5.4 Columbia University
7.2 University of Pennsylvania
7.6 New York University
9.2 University of Chicago
10.0 Princeton University
11.0 Brown University
12.0 Georgetown University
12.6 Dartmouth College
13.4 Wesleyan University
13.6 Stanford University
19.2 Johns Hopkins University
19.8 Tufts University *
21.0 University of Michigan
22.0 Hamilton College *
22.2 Northwestern University
22.3 Bowdoin College *
22.5 Middlebury College *
23.6 Williams College
24.6 Colgate University
24.8 Amherst College
25.8 Duke University
26.3 Barnard College
AVERAGE COLLEGE (top matriculations for 5 private high schools outside the NE)
7.0 Stanford University
7.5 University of Southern California*
8.3 Washington University**
9.0 Harvard University
9.2 Columbia University
10.2 New York University
10.4 Cornell University
11.3 University of Michigan**
12.8 University of Chicago*
13.2 Brown University
14.0 Yale University
14.0 University of Pennsylvania
14.4 Tufts University
17.0 UCLA***
17.3 Northwestern University*
17.5 University of California Berkeley*
18.3 Princeton University*
18.8 Johns Hopkins University*
20.5 Carnegie Mellon University***
21.0 Kenyon College***
21.5 Claremont McKenna College***
22.4 Georgetown University
23.0 Barnard College*
24.0 Whitman College***
25.3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology**
Of the top 100 by matriculations, 40 are private research universities, 40 are LACs, 13 are state universities, and the remainder are international/other.
@tk21769: Your data (#53) clearly required a good amount of work to compile. However, without normalization for the size of the school being entered into, it’s difficult to understand its significance. Larger universities will have more matriculants of all types of students on average.
^ I was going to say the same as @merc81
^^ Yes.
Many of the above-listed colleges enroll approximately 5K-7K freshmen.
NYU, Michigan, and USC are much larger; the LACs are smaller.
One probably would want to account for admission rates, too.
!^^I think another way of looking at it, @merc81 and @Ohiomomof2 (pending a data dump), is just how surprising it is that any college with <1000 freshmen made the list(s) at all!
OP here, I’m going to Vanderbilt in the fall. I know prestige doesn’t really and honestly don’t care that much about it, but where you’re from, how do you view Vanderbilt? Have ever heard of it? If have, only its name or hear a good school it primarily from athletics? just curious as is regarded outside South.
^^ Wesleyan ranged from 7th to 16th for most matriculations at the 5 NE prep schools, 7th at College Preparatory (Oakland CA), and 14th at Harvard-Westlake (in LA). At College Preparatory (a continent away) it gets as many matriculations as neighboring UC Berkeley. At the same HS, Swarthmore gets more matriculations than any other college (more than Stanford and almost as many as Berkeley and UCLA put together). At Hotchkiss, Middlebury (~2500 students) gets more than 3X as many matriculations as Michigan (with its > 28,000 undergrads). At Lakeside (Seattle), Pomona makes the top 10 (tied with MIT, and ahead of WUSTL, Western Washington, or the enormous NYU).