@Greymeer West Point (#12), Naval Academy (#21), and Air Force (#26) are on the list of Liberal Arts colleges, not national universities, so I don’t think they’ll end up #1-3 on this list.
West Point, Air Force, Annapolis are all STEM universities.
In terms of the US News Rankings, they show up on the list of Liberal Arts Colleges, not National Universities, so they aren’t compared against the likes of Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, etc. And even on the list of LACs, they came in at #12, 21, and 26 last year, so a jump to 1,2 and 3 on that list this year is unlikely.
in terms of LACs, i don’t know if the rankings will even move when it comes to the top twenty. i can see pomona, bates, and wesleyan moving up a spot or spots, and bowdoin, colby, colgate, and smith moving down a spot or spots. the rest i think will remain unchanged or are too hard to speculate.
(also, this is not to bash the schools i think will move down. these are just my observations, and i could be [and probably am] completely wrong. didn’t haverford go from, like, #12 to #18 in a year [from 2016-2017]?)
^Only one or two things really move the LAC national rankings up or down. The most potent is the inaptly labeled, “Faculty Resources” weight. Most people are under the impression that it measures competitive faculty salaries. It really doesn’t. Academic salaries have been operating in a buyer’s market for decades, now, and most of the T50 colleges and universities oscillate within the same narrow band. Instead, USNews mashes together all the various professor classes (“assistant”, “associate” and “full”), averages out the salaries for each institution and then compares them. In essence, they are not measuring faculty salaries (and benefits like teaching loads, medical insurance, etc.) so much as how many new hires a college or university makes per year. It doesn’t affect the RUs so much since they are overwhelmingly top-heavy with tenured faculty. But, it does affect LACs which typically hire right out of grad school and mentor their faculty for six, seven or eight years before awarding (or denying) them tenure.
Thus, Amherst might trade places with Williams one year because they hired an especially large cohort of junior faculty. And, forget about beefing up your comp-sci departments with adjuncts and part-timers - USNews is watching.
I predict that Pomona will move up 2 slots to #4, or better. I haven’t looked at the data, but I’m confused as to why it’s so low, considering its massive endowment and extreme selectivity. I assume it’s because high school counselors rate it low, but that must be changing with the hoards of kids trying to get in.
My predictions:
- US News will need to make some changes simply to generate reader interest (and thus sales), while at the same time avoiding the sort of radical changes which would make all too obvious the fact that the entire exercise is a joint exercise in subjectivity and marketing.
- To generate interest in the Top-10 National Universities sector, UChicago will once again serve as the wild card, floating up or down a slot as the case may be.
- In the ever-competitive 11-20 range, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Cornell, Rice, WashU, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Emory, and Georgetown will renew their annual game of musical chairs. "Round and round and round we go. Where it stops, nobody knows!"
- UC-Irvine will continue to climb, but Northeastern will prove to have hit Peak Oil.
USC interim President slipped it in during an interview this week that USC ranked 15th. Not sure how correct this is, but their acceptance rate dropping from 17% to 13% could account for the big jump from 21st (tie) to 15th?? With a new freshman at USC, I am a curious parent waiting to see the new 2019 USN rankings.
USC gets some extra credit in my view due to their not jumping onto the ED wagon to boost their USN rankings. ED is a real blight on the entire college application process, with the entire ED purpose seemingly just to boost USN rankings at the expense of the families who have fewer financial resources. The schools in top 50 not practising the preditary ED process should in my opinion get boosted in the rankings for having better ethical practises.
“USC gets some extra credit in my view due to their not jumping onto the ED wagon to boost their USN rankings. ED is a real blight on the entire college application process, with the entire ED purpose seemingly just to boost USN rankings at the expense of the families who have fewer financial resources. The schools in top 50 not practising the preditary ED process should in my opinion get boosted in the rankings for having better ethical practises.”
You are missing the full picture. USC VERY aggressively bakes its data for ranking purposes. They don’t use yucky ED, but that’s more of a tool for the top 15 or so. USC (like many of their 20-40 peer schools) use several other tools from the rankings tool box.
For example, their big merit scholarship program is a tried and true baking method. Otherwise known as “the best class money can buy.” And that merit money often goes to higher SES kids who have the stats to get those schollies. USC’s median family income is $161k – about the same as Stanford’s at $167k. Stanford heavily relies on SCEA (which at Stanford, as a practical matter, operates almost like binding ED) but does zero merit.
And to further get their stats baked, USC requires scholarship applicants to apply early (non-binding early action). Which early scholarship application is specifically designed to get around the SCEA restrictions at Stanford. So USC is able to poach away Stanford’s high stat SCEA applicants (who typically can’t apply early to other private colleges) with fat merit schollies. Genius!
Also, USC is the king of transfer students among the top 25. About one third of its graduates every year are transfer students. By keeping the frosh class so small, USC gets a big boost to its selectivity and graduation rate data. Because USNWR only measures the stats of incoming frosh (who are smarter and richer than the transfer kids). The stats and admit rates for transfers (who are off the USNWR books) are significantly lower. Stanford takes almost zero transfers.
USC is a great school. And a good chunk of their transfers reflect the wise practice in California of kids going to CCs for two years. But it is completely wrong to think that they aren’t managing their rankings data. They just do their managing (merit schollies and transfers) in a manner that is typical for their peers and different from the schools that are higher up the ladder ED, SCEA). No extra credit is deserved.
They’ll be hiding the belts and scissors in South Bend, Westwood and Berkeley, though, if USC gets ranked higher than them. Fight on!
@sekere62 https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
Looks like the interim pres was mistaken, because USC is ranked 21 with Cal. UCLA cracked the top 20, however, at 19.
*correction. USC and Cal are 22.
The inclusion of the Pell student grad rate versus other students is a positive change and will encourage schools to do more to make sure first gen and lower income students do well once they are accepted. Colleges should and can do more to truly integrate these students and provide the suppport that will help them graduate and succeed.
To some extent, they are not trying to encourage lower income students, they are just not giving favor to wealthy families. To some extent semantics. Over the past 10 years, some schools have tried very hard to lower admission rates, and use ED more and more that favors wealth. US News is just trying not to be part of the problem.
Schools like Colby trying to increase applications just to reject kids went down in the rankings, and a school like Mount Holyoke that targets quality applicants moved up 6 spots. Now colleges wont be in a contest to get the most applications just for the sake of rankings, our students aren’t pawns anymore. Thank you US NEWS.