Alexandre, I don’t really understand your point. Universities operate off of revenue. Endowment distribution and private contributions can be one source of revenue. The others major ones are net tuition and fees, auxiliary enterprises from things like room and board, grants and contracts (including R&D), state appropriations, and at universities with hospitals/health systems, patient services. (Note that patient services is often by far the largest.) Penn is going to get a lot more in grants and contracts and net tuition and fees than UVA. UVA only get 5.2% of total budget from the state (this includes the health services), which is $150M or so. Penn’s research spending alone is nearly $500M a year more than UVA. Research (and a relatively small subsidy from the state) are UVA’s achilles heel, if it has one.
If your point is that UVA can provide as good of an undergraduate education as Penn, I would absolutely agree. Undergraduate education often has more to do with the institution’s commitment than with the resources being discussed above.
The endowments as a measure of wealth can be misleading. Universities with Health Services divisions (that are typically non-profit) often have surpluses and contingency funds that are counted as quasi-endowments in the total. These are often a third or more of the totals you see for university, but they are associated with health services. Beyond that, a lot of the endowment may be focused on graduate schools, athletics, research, etc.
If you just are referring to wealth in an accounting sense, it would be assets minus liabilities (debts). The assets could include endowments, cash reserves, and tangible assets (property, land). It would NOT include state contributions or anything else. Debt can impact this significantly, but there is good debt and bad debt. If it is debt that ultimately makes benefits the institution down the road, it is good. If it is used to close a budget gap due to profligacy, it is bad.
But again, I don’t think it should costs an arm and a leg to provide a really good education to undergraduates. It is things that are not very easily quantifiable that make the difference. Is there a good sense of community? Are the faculty actually good teachers? (I visited friends in great schools in college who had science lectures delivered by graduate students who were all but incomprehensible.) Does the institution actually commit its resources to undergraduate study. (Many top faculty don’t teach undergraduates.) Does the institution have rigorous standards?
UCLA has a medical school and Berkeley does not. This often makes a huge difference. If you combined UC San Francisco with Berkeley, it would look much different.
Trying to rank all universities by the same criteria makes about as much sense as evaluating all vehicles (trucks, motorcycles, sports cars, SUV, etc. and trucks) by the same set of criteria. (I think Malcolm Gladwell made this point.) For the person who said Berkeley and Michigan are the best, I might agree if the criteria was strength across the board for undergraduate, graduate, professional (although Berkeley lacks a directly controllled medical school [UCSF is nearby]), and research. But we don’t go to a university to do all of these things. We can go as an undergraduate with no clear idea of what we want to do. We can go with a clear idea that we want to do engineering. There are many possibilities.
If you think you would be interested in an undergraduate experience that that is similar to a private LAC, William and Mary may certainly be a much, much better match than Berkeley or Michigan. If you are from Georgia and are interesting in engineering, Georgia Tech is spectacular. If you are a good student from Texas and you are admitted to the business school or honors program at the University of Texas, would it really make sense to go to Berkeley or Michigan out of state unless there was another really compelling reason?
Which universities are on the rise and which are trending downwards? Anyone have this info with actual stats from this year’s and last year’s rankings? Who made the biggest jumps?
Don’t read too much into the rank changes of most of the top 50 (or even top 100). A lot has to do with how many schools are “tied” or clustered into groups and the impact of a slight change can cause a large movement in rankings.
Five schools are tied at 39, no schools are ranked 40 thru 43, then 6 schools are ranked 44, then no schools are ranked 45 thru 49. The difference between a school ranked 39 and 50 is very small, and really is just noise. Next year a school ranked 39 could be ranked 50, or 50 could move up to 39. It wouldn’t be as large a swing as it may first appear.
When the Common Data Sets for this year come out, we’ll be able to predict a lot more accurately. However, I expect WUSTL to stay where it currently is, and Northeastern to slowly rise.
On another note, Middlebury College early decision came out today. Their acceptance rate ED last year was around 50%. Curious about this year.
Actually, alexandre is wrong about Penn (which we’ve already discussed elsewhere on CC…). Despite the fact that, as we’ve mentioned in previous threads, Penn’s S-F ratio would be, at most, about 8-1 pretty much anyway you calculate it, none of the aforementioned ways of calculating Penn’s student to faculty ratio are appropriate because of Penn’s One University Policy which makes nearly all professors at the University open to all students. Thus the only way to calculate Penn’s student to faculty ratio is to use the total number of full time and part time, undergraduate and graduate Students (24,876) and the total number of faculty (4645) which would give you a student to faculty ratio of 5.3:1. But we can round up to 6:1. Because of Penn’s One University Policy, students are not only taking classes with professors in the undergraduate divisions of their schools, but instead, they are taking classes across the university’s graduate, professional, and undergraduate schools. Students from the engineering school are doing research with Penn Med professors while taking a course at Penn Law on the ethical implications of the ACA. Because there is so much more cross-enrollment and because the resources of all of Penn’s schools and institutes are so radically accessible to all students regardless of their primary field of study, the only way to truly account for the ‘wear and tear’ on faculty is to view all students and all faculty together. To divide them up by school at Penn just wouldn’t make sense because you would be discounting an enormous portion of the students who actually rely on those same faculty members. But no matter which way you slice it, Penn’s S-F ratio is very low; about 6:1
PennCAS2014, sounds fair. Michigan has 44,700 students and a faculty of 6,770, so its student to faculty ratio is slightly under 7:1. I like your system!
