<p>Do you think that this stat is appropriate for use in the US News rankings?</p>
<p>My answer is, NO.</p>
<p>First of all, it penalizes large schools with large alumni pool. And it severely penalizes state universities which receive funding from the government. </p>
<p>Private schools rely funding from privates (students, alumni, donors, etc). That’s how private schools operate and survive or thrive. On the contrary, state universities operate through fundgin from the government. So, think about their different natures and set ups.</p>
<p>If USNews thought alumni giving is very important, how is that any different from government funding?</p>
<p>I’d say, financial resources are the useful and more appropriate criterion.</p>
<p>Perhaps this measure began as a proxy for “student valued the education s/he received.” But really, that logic is pretty tenuous IMHO.</p>
<p>I believe publics are really hurt here, as since so many students are in-state, their taxes already give. In reality, a $1.00 (or less) gets one counted as having given. A few years ago there was a story on CC about how one LAC was asking for just a penny to be sent to boost the rate.</p>
<p>I think yes.</p>
<p>I am firmly in this camp after talking an Associate VP in the Office of University Advancement. Simply, if someone had a great experience they are more likely to give back to the school monetarily. Private schools also benefit from tax dollars in some capacity. </p>
<p>Furthermore, it is a rather small component of the overall USNWR methodology.</p>
<p>^^agreed, it’s a small component, but it also favors schools with wealthy student bodies. Obviously, it’s easy to write a check for $100 out of a trust fund. State schools, with a huge % of low income, have students that can’t even afford a checkbook. The Pell Grantees at some UC campuses exceed 33%…</p>
<p>willingtonwave, </p>
<p>I had a wonderful time at Cambridge yet I have not donated a single cent to the university alumni fund. I am willing to donate, but no one has contacted me and made solicitation. So why would I give? I don’t even know how to start, in the first place. Based on your reasoning, it would appear that I didn’t have a great time at Cambridge, but I did. </p>
<p>The truth is, state-funded institutions don’t have the culture of soliciting donations from their alumni. It’s only very recently that some of them have adopted the system when they saw the success that Harvard has achieved. Berkeley, for instance, has just adopted the system very recently, or only when its peer private schools had already a huge headstart. But Berkeley isn’t inferior to schools like Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame, Washington U and the like.</p>
<p>
Well than that is on the schools for not tapping into another financial resource.</p>
<p>^ and you would penalize those schools that don’t tap/have not tapped their alumni to give back to their alma mater schools???</p>
<p>My school is penalized for not having a ton of graduate programs and for not being research orientated. You can argue about the USWNR methodology all day long.</p>
<p>So, are you now suggesting that USNews’ methodology and criteria shouldn’t look into factors that are biased? </p>
<p>You seem to take rankings as a mere pis$ing contest. I’m sure that’s not what USNews would want to achieve despite its imperfections.</p>
<p>
How sure are you about that? Williams, Amherst and even Dartmouth don’t have postgrad schools, yet they’re highly rated on the survey. How would you explain that then? Duke, Brown, Notre Dame, Emory, Vanderbilt, Washington U, Rice, to name a few, don’t have as powerful postgrad programs as Berkeley and Michigan do, yet they’re ranked higher than both Berkeley and Michigan. How would you explain that then?</p>
<p>Williams and Amherst aren’t peer schools to Wake Forest, Tufts, BC, William and Mary, Vanderbilt, etc. What do you mean by “postgrad school”? Dartmouth has a renowned medical school also. Furthermore, Dartmouth’s PA is hurt.</p>
<p>
Well…hehe</p>
<p>What are William and Amherst’s peer schools then? What are William&Mary’s peer schools? I don’t see any significant difference between W&M and Williams. </p>
<p>Prove it that Dartmouth’s PA has been hurt because it doesn’t have a postgrad school. By postgrad, I mean doctorate degree, as in Doctor of Philosophy (PhD.). </p>
<p>I would not rate Dartmouth’s PA very high either. Let’s be realistic here. It does not have a strong academic program as do Berkeley, Caltech, Chicago and Columbia, let alone, HYPSM.</p>
<p>Again, the USNWR is for undergraduate school. Dartmouth is on par with those schools for undergraduate at least, probably better. Peer Assessment includes graduate resources/programs and is thus largely irrelevant in the evaluation of undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Williams is in a separate category, because it is not a hybrid school. There are Research schools (Berkley, Harvard, Stanford, etc), Hybrid Schools (Dartmouth, Wake Forest, Tufts, Vanderbilt, William and Mary), and LAC’s (Williams, Amherst)</p>
<p>The peers of Williams would be Amherst, Swarthmore, etc.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I told you to prove this before I would even continue to discuss another topic with you. How is Dartmouth undergrad better than HYPSM’s undergrad?</p>
<p>Your definition of “peer schools” is rather the classification of schools. When I say “peer schools” I meant schools with basically similar academic level and somewhat similar academic prestige.</p>
<p>Undergraduate Teaching National Universities</p>
<ol>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>University of Md - Baltimore County</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>William and Mary</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Miami - Oxford</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>Bowling Green State</li>
<li>Howard</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Berkeley</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>UMich</li>
<li>UNC</li>
<li>St. Thomas</li>
<li>Wake Forest</li>
</ol>
<p>Dartmouth has a better faculty:student ratio and a higher proportion of undergraduate students. I also said that Dartmouth was on par/probably better than some of the schools you listed.</p>
<p>Furthermore, arguing about the definition of “peer” contributes nothing to this thread.</p>
<p>Your posts are full of lapses and subjective opinions. that’s the problem here. </p>
<p>first of all, you seriously believe that “undergrad teaching” is the ONLy criterion for assessing universities. and because of that, you made a conclusion that Dartmouth is superior to HYPSM. What about Dartmouth vs Williams or Brown? </p>
<p>second, you believe that rankings should be biased. That’s contradictory to what USNews (or any league table for that matter) is trying to come up with.</p>
<p>third, you don’t respect the nature of schools --whether state funded or private.</p>
<p>fourth, you seriously believe that USNews is biased towards schools with postgrad education, yet when I asked you why USNews wasn’t biased against Williams and Amherst, you resorted to an out-of-this-world alibi. </p>
<p>I’m still confused what your point really is.</p>
<p>RML, Williams & Amherst are ranked in the liberal arts category of which most of those schools have no postgrad programs.</p>
<p>We’re talking about schools in the national universities that have few graduate programs</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think RML is exactly right on this point. Public universities were created by their respective states and initially supported primarily by tax dollars. They don’t have the same culture and tradition of alumni giving as privates because state residents saw the state U as just another state-funded, tax-supported service like K-12 education, the state parks, the state highway patrol, or the department of motor vehicles. States no longer provide nearly as much support to their state universities; I think most residents of most states would be truly shocked to see what a small fraction of their state university’s budget comes out of their tax dollars (in the University of Michigan’s case, about 6%). But the culture hasn’t yet caught up with the reality. Public universities are working furiously to build up their alumni donor base. But they’re several hundred years behind Harvard et al., which have always been private charitable institutions subsisting primarily on private support (or more recently, as Harvard has been described, “a large private hedge fund operating a small educational institution as a side venture”). Under the circumstances, the rate of alumni giving at public institutions can’t possibly mean the same thing as the rate of alumni giving at private institutions. Whether a graduate of the state U gives or not has little to do with her degree of satisfaction with the experience; in all likelihood she scraped by financially to get through, and feels her parents and grandparents have already contributed through their taxes, she’s already contributed through tuition and sweat equity, and she continues to contribute through tax dollars either to her alma mater or to the public U in her new home state. The reality, of course, is that she, her parents, and her grandparents collectively contributed only a fraction of the cost of her education. But her indifference toward giving doesn’t mean she didn’t value the experience; it means she doesn’t fully grasp the financial realities, and the school doesn’t have a system in place to explain those realities effectively—in part because it didn’t need to do so in the past…</p>
<p>Under the circumstances, inclusion of “alumni giving” as ANY kind of factor in the US News ranking serves only to add a few bias points to private schools over public; and among the privates, to reward those with the most creative and aggressive alumni relations/development offices. What that’s got to do with the value of anyone’s education, I’ll never know.</p>
<p>Alumni giving keeps my school out of the rankings, which is absurd. I know these rankings should be taken with a grain of salt, but being penalized for having a large proportion of lower/middle class alums is very unfair.</p>