<p>According to the College Search and Selection forum, the US News and World Report's 2006 Rankings of top universities has been leaked two days before hitting the newsstands... Here's the overall scoop on California universities:
[list=0]
[<em>]Stanford remains the same, at 5th
[</em>]Caltech moves up one, to 7th
[<em>]UCB moves up one, to 20th (1st among publics)
[</em>]UCLA remains the same, at 25th (3rd among publics)
[<em>]USC remains the same, at 30th
[</em>]UCSD moves up four, to 31st (7th among publics)
[<em>]UCI moves up three, to 40th (10th among publics)
[</em>]UCSB remains the same, at 45th (12th among publics)
[li]UCD moves down by six, to 48th (14th among publics)[/li][/list]
We're now officially tied with Michigan for 25th place overall, as well as 3rd place among the public universities. What's more interesting, however, is that UCSD has jumped up in the rankings and is only one spot away from overtaking USC, whose ranking hasn't improved at all despite the successes of its "war-chest" fundraising campaign.</p>
<p>Hmmm... Is there something disturbing US News knows about UC Davis that we don't?</p>
<p>it has improved a lot it seems. wasn't it known as the UC party school?</p>
<p>really though, these rankings don't really mean shiet. cuz no one really gives a shiet about undergrad. you can get a good education at any of the top 50 schools.</p>
<p>flopsy, can u post full rankings? i'm having trouble finding the real one on the other threads, it's so messy!</p>
<p>yea i wonder what happened to davis too. </p>
<p>but for sure, UCI is improving and getting more popular, especially with the biotech and IT businesses springing out in irvine. </p>
<p>i expected UCSB to move up because they're cleaning up their image and improving, although their factors of improvement probably weren't the same ones used by US News. for example, bringing in star faculty improves the school but it doesnt improve the ranking because it's not calculated in US News. UCSB needs to pull a WashU or a USC. </p>
<p>i had suspected that the disparity between UCSD and USC in the past few rankings weren't really accurate. UCSD had been ranked higher than USC as recent as 3 years ago (UCSD is significantly higher in 2000), and UCSD has been on the rise. so has USC, and at a faster pace, but i believe UCSD's rank this year reflects the overflow effect where too many qualified students cant get into Cal or UCLA and thus end up making UCSD into a better school. </p>
<p>as for USC... well, from what i understand, the data has a 1-year lag, meaning this data is actually for entering class of 2008. so maybe their hop in the rankings will come next year. </p>
<p>speaking of the 1-year lag, something happened at michigan for entering c/o 08 that made it drop. i believe it was something dealing with harsher admissions standards or harder application, and that discouraged some ppl to apply i think. no sure. </p>
<p>that's my analysis, but of course these rankings dont mean anything because theyre just going to do some minor shuffling again next year as if colleges were baseball teams competing for the penant.</p>
<p>UCSD is a better school than USC. Infact, in the general ratings, all public schools get shafted. The reason is very simple. Some of the factors that are used in the methodology for US News rankings skew the results toward private schools. The greatest example of this is the annual giving rates. Public Universities are ALWAYS far behind in this realm than private universities. If you throw out the category, then the public schools rise in comparision. Also, on that point, USC is having a large giving campaign right now, like UCSD. However, at private schools, the alumni base is a much larger source of private support than public schools. Therefore, their recent campaign is pushing USC up in the rankings where UCSD's isn't quite the same way. It's just a bias in the system.</p>
1 Harvard University 0
1 Princeton University 0
3 Yale University 0
4 University of Pennsylvania 0
5 Duke University 0
5 Stanford University 0
7 California Institute of Technology +1
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology -2
9 Columbia University 0
9 Dartmouth College 0
11 Washington University in St Louis 0
12 Northwestern University -1
13 Cornell University +1
13 John Hopkins University +1
15 Brown University -2
15 University of Chicago -1
17 Rice University 0
18 University of Notre Dame 0
18 Vanderbilt University -1
20 Emory University 0
20 University of California/Berkeley +1
22 Carnegie Mellon University 0
23 Georgetown +2
University of Virginia -1
25 University of California/Los Angeles 0
University of Michigan/Ann Arbor -3
27 Tufts University +1
University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill +2
Wake Forest University 0
30 University of Southern California 0
31 William & Mary Univeristy 0
Lehigh University +6
University of California/San Diego +4
34 University of Wisconsin/Madison -2
Brandeis University -2
University of Rochester +3
37 Case Western Reserve University -2
Georgia Institute of Technology +4
New York University -5
40 Boston College -3
University of California/Irvine +3
42 University of Illinois/Urbana Champaign -5
43 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute +3
Tulane Universty 0
45 University of California/Santa Barbara 0
Washington University +1
Yeshiva University +1
48 Pennsylvania State University/University Park +2
University of California/Davis -6
50 Syracuse University +2
University of Florida 0</p>
<p>Those are almost spot on, except Lehigh and UCSD should be at 32 (and +5, +3 respectively). I created that list but was messed that up. The final updated list with more is on the second post of this thread:</p>
<p>Actually, no, USC isn't having a major giving campaign like UCSD is; that concluded quite awhile ago. Further, alumni giving plays a small role in the US News Rankings - 5% for crying out loud - yet despite the fact that UCSD has a major campaign underway while USC does not, USC still demolished UCSD in the alumni giving category according to US News. And quite frankly, when are we going to surpass our childish tendencies to call any sort of methodology that spouts unfavorable results as biased? Oh, US News places a whopping 5% weight on alumni giving, a very important factor considering a university needs money to buy the best professors and facilities, and suddenly they're biased against public schools?</p>
<p>No, US News looks unfavorably on public schools because of public school tendencies. Look at your four year graduation rates. I have friends at UCLA and UCSD and they never stop lamenting about what classes they couldn't get into to fulfill their major requirements. Look at your student to faculty ratio. Look at your % of classes under 30. Look at your endowment. Look at your budget cuts. I'll be a junior at USC and the upcoming semester is the FIRST ever that I will have to sign up on a waitlist! And only because I decided to register for that class today, 4 days before classes begin. They never stop lamenting about the bureaucracy either. A friend tried to meet with his advisor because despite him taking 3 classes and having a 3.3 GPA, he erroneously got a letter saying he wasn't making satisfactory progress. Upon trying to meet with the advisor, he was referred to another office to complete paperwork first. You know what happened when I needed to meet with my advisor today (to register for the aforementioned class)? I waited 5 minutes and had cookies in the waiting room. Oatmeal chocolate-chip no less.</p>
<p>Perhaps sitting in a 300-person lecture hall isn't a problem to you but to the statisticians behind the US News rankings they do matter. It's not a bias; it's merely a specific methodological contruction. </p>
<p>Simply blaming the fact that USC is ranked higher on some sort of ever-present, "the system hates us" bias is hardly logically sound. Other than research output and number of nobel laureates, I challenge you to point out quantifiable (even non-quantifiable if you want!) categories where UCSD excels and why, from a comprehensive standpoint, it should be ranked higher than USC. Admissions? USC's tougher to get in to and its students have much better stats. Departmental rankings? USC has more top 10 and top 20 programs. Fiscal resources? No competition. The list goes on.</p>
<p>You can't seriously, objectively look at the data and say UCSD is a better school. So you've resorted to blaming it on some phantom, abstract notion. Tell me yeah215, were those stats and rhetoric classes closed the last time you tried registering?</p>
<p>I really don't want to get into a heated battle about this because it really isn't that important. But there is lots of objective data that says that UCSD is better than USC, but in that data much of the same problems exist. All I am saying is that USC (a private school) and UCSD (a public) school are fundementally different down to the core. So any time we try to use a single set of critera to evaluate them against eachother we need to consider the nature of the institution and how that plays out with the methodology. Public Schools will never have a higer giving rate that private schools, by nature. (I am using huge generalizations and we can find those that break the rule, but I hope you understand my points.) There are many reasons for this, but we don't need to get into them. That means that there is a bias in the methodology without correcting for that. Class size. Much of this is a funciton of school size. Publics are always significantly larger than privates (there are many reasons for this, we can talk about it later) so its not a fair comparision. Those would tilt toward USC's favor. Now if I look at professor citions and publications, or perhaps degrees given statistics and whatnot, it tilts the other way. (Why, by nature of the school. There are lots more professors, wouldn't you expect more citations and prizes.) Needs to be controlled for. These examples point in the other way. </p>
<p>I'm not trying to be combatative, just looking at things as objectively as I can (which in-and-of-itself is biased.) Just trying to point these things out. The reason why I raised the annual giving rate is because, with a 1 place differential, 5% could matter. Thats the point. Just trying to point out the flaws. </p>
<p>USC is making great strides, especially recently interms of academics. UCSD's path is steeper. I don't know if we can argue about this. UCSD just celebrated the graduation of its 40th class. Only 44 years with students. USC is celebrating 125. To say they are close and we are having this discussion lets you know something. If you want solid evidence, not just my criticism of rankings, then ask for it, don't assume its not there. My inherit conflict is that to show you, I will need to use a compliation on rankings. That's why, cause I think they are biased depending on the methods used. I could set up a pretty strong case, despite that, but come on. We all know rankings are fundementally flawed, and inorder to rank you need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges (or at least adequately control for the differences.)</p>
<p>Colleges crow, cringe over rankings (news item about USNews)
Magazine's annual list to be out Friday
By KELLY SIMMONS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/17/05 </p>
<p>Excerpt:</p>
<p>Educators say the data is skewed, particularly to benefit private over public institutions.</p>
<p>For example, the magazine measures a school's faculty-to-student ratio, the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students, the percentage of classes with more than 50 students, and the percentage of full-time faculty on staff all of which depend on an institution's financial resources.</p>
<p>Typically, a private institution, which charges higher tuition than a state school, will have more money and a larger endowment, which means it will rank higher in those categories.</p>
<p>The top 20 schools in the U.S. News rankings are private institutions.</p>
<p>"The formula disadvantages public universities," said Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech, Georgia's only public institution in the top 50 overall.</p>
<p>it has improved a lot it seems. wasn't it known as the UC party school*</p>
<p>It still is, but I think the administration is doing everything humanly possible to supress that. Also, UCSB has been pimping the College of Creative Studies, the 5 nobel prize winners since 1998, and the excellent physics and engineering departments a lot in the near future.</p>
<p>Also, I read on the UCSB website that the average SAT scores of enrolled students for the Fall 2005 class jumped to 1200 (it was 1182 in 2004). I don't know what it was like at other UCs (if you have data, please let me know because I'm curious), but that seems like an incredible jump to me.</p>
<p>I noticed in the print version of the US News 2006 college rankings that UCLA's business program is nowhere in the top 50. Is that a misprint or is UCLA's business program really not impressive at all?</p>
<p>Maybe Merced :D In any case, it's nice to see UCSB breaking into the 1200 average range. One thing I noticed among all the UCs is that their SAT ranges are usually lower than other schools ranked in similar areas. Maybe this will give UCSB a little boost in next year's rankings. I also noticed UCSB will be opening a new huge graduate housing complex in the future, so I guess they will be expanding their graduate programs.</p>
<p>UCLA (like many other schools out there actually) doesn't have undergraduate business as a major. People who want to enter into the business world end up majoring in business economics, which is essentially economics but with some business courses. </p>
<p>But don't be fooled. UCLA Business Economics majors are highly recruited. I think most agree that UCLA Business Economics graduates are on par with USC Marshall graduates, so I'm assuming UCLA would be ranked around wherever USC is in terms of "impressiveness" to recruiters.</p>