I make an assumption that serious students, and other people supporting them, do value quality of education. You make assumptions about my point of view and about how strongly wedded I am to that point of view.
It’s uncharitable, and illiberal, to claim that about high school seniors (and by implication about the other people who support them in that decision.) People make important decisions all the time based on imperfect information. That’s life. Who do you suppose is in a better position, and has more capability, to make the “correct” decision?
If you’re proposing that the educational community get serious about understanding and measuring outcomes, I’d agree that is a great idea. Meanwhile, you use the tools you’ve got. I think the information collected and made public by the Common Data Set (which comprises much but not all the input into the US News ranking) represents progress over lunch room gossip.
As for advertising, no, I don’t like it too much. Except some of the Super Bowl ads. I do find my own alma mater’s recent emphasis on marketing to be mildly embarrassing.
Rankings, even those that are “objective”, are just taking subjective information and creating a metric. In medicine we talk about the clinical significance of data. The data may show a statistically significant difference but it does not warrant a change in practice. I take the same view with USNWR and all other rankings.
@PurpleTitan hit the nail on the head when posting “in reality, #6 and #17 can easily switch places”. Is Princeton really that much better than Northwestern (other than for fodder for CC discussion threads)? A student who goes to any school in the top 30 will get an excellent education. The goal is to use the rankings, the unique qualities and strengths of the school and the needs/desires of the student to male a decision of where to attend. Rankings alone do not tell the complete story.
http://www.metauniversityranking.com/search/USA combines “the three most influential rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU or Shanghai Ranking), the QS World University Ranking and the Times Higher Education World Ranking (THE).” Adding the current USNWR national universities ranking as a fourth measure moves some schools up or down a few spots here and there, but according to this combined ranking, almost half of the “top 50” are public:
1 Harvard 2.25 avg. rank
2 MIT 4.25
2 Stanford 4.25
4 Princeton 5.75
5 Cal Tech 6.5
6 Yale 8.25
7 Chicago 8.75
8 Columbia 10
9 Penn 13.25
10 Johns Hopkins 14.5
11 Berkeley 14.75
12 Cornell 16.5
13 Duke 20.50
14 UCLA 21
15 Michigan 22.75
16 Northwestern 24
17 NYU 34.5
18 Wisconsin 35.25
19 UCSD 37.75
20 Washington 38.75
21 Illinois 40.5
22 North Carolina 43.5
23 Carnegie Mellon 44
24 Washington U 46.75
25 Brown 49
26 Texas 49.75
27 UCD 60.75
28 Boston U 62.25
28 UCSB 62.25
30 Minnesota 66.5
31 Georgia Tech 67
32 Penn State 69
33 USC 70.5
34 Ohio State 73.75
35 Rice 74.75
36 Purdue 81.5
37 Pitt 82.25
38 UCI 82.5
39 Vanderbilt 87
40 Maryland 89.75
41 Emory 98.87
42 Colorado 100.25
43 Rochester 102
44 Virginia 105.28
45 Florida 111
46 Tufts 113.63
47 Case Western Reserve 117.13
48 Texas A&M 117.5
49 Michigan State 121.88
50 Arizona 127
Is it gaming, or is it that USC is following the lead of the California public universities who take in similar amounts of transfers due to decades old higher education policy in California that is intended to ensure a strong transfer pathway to the universities (USC’s main rival and competitor is UCLA)?
@ucbalumnus, do the UC’s have a guaranteed tranfer program where they deny applicants to the freshmen class (likely because their stats are too weak) but guarantee them a tranfer acceptance if they meet a certain GPA else? USC gives that to all legacy applicants who they deny no matter how weak they are.
It is probably worth mentioning that ARWU is still using Reuters’ old list of highly cited researchers alongside the new one because it is trying to minimize ranking fluctuations (Shanghai Jiao Tong believes stability is the hallmark of a good ranking). However, as someone who graduated from Duke, I am incredibly disappointed by their reluctance to utilize the new list since its adoption would be very beneficial to my alma mater (Duke is ranked 4th on the new list but was significantly lower on the older one).
There is also some bad blood between Shanghai Jiao Tong and Duke (their plans to build a university together fell through) so the conspiracy theorist in me is getting very riled up
@DrGoogle, indeed, Cornell and some other schools (UMich? BU?, etc.) also offer guaranteed tranfer to some who they reject from their freshmen class. None of those schools offer it to all legacy applicants who they reject, though, that I know of, but USC does.
There seems to be little public information about USC’s Trojan Transfer Plan that you are probably referring to, although what little there is indicates that the threshold college GPA to transfer is usually 3.6, though it may be slightly lower for those who do frosh year at some non-US universities. So the legacies with mediocre high school records need to really get their act together at a non-USC college in order to make use of the Trojan Transfer Plan.
There is a minimum GPA requirement so it’s not just because of legacy. My daughter’s have high school friends who were non legacy and had 3.8 GPA from the CSU and University of Arizona and they got in Sophomore year.
So USC made it sound like legacy gives you a tip but in reality it doesn’t matter.
On the one hand, elite colleges emphasize to potential applicants that numbers alone do not tell the whole story about them, hence the need for Holistic Admissions, with all the emphasis on subjective factors such as the essays, rec’s, ECs etc. to further assess the quality of the applicant.
OTOH, these colleges are complete slaves to the numbers that drive their rankings in USNews, a ranking that is strictly numbers based, compiled and computed by a giant computer program each year.
The students coming in are not strictly defined by numbers, but the institutions they attend are. Does anyone not see the irony in that?
Good article by Robert Reich, in reaction to the latest US News Rankings (treated by many in CC as the absolute truth) http://robertreich.org/post/129034050685. I agree with most of the article – we definitely need more credible alternatives that will be used by the public. The example that comes to mind is Motor Trend ratings vs. Consumer Reports ratings for cars.
My conclusion, based on what I see of the US News rankings, if parents/students should use them, they should apply at least a +5 rank correction for any public university – more like +10, to account for the in-built bias, as a starting point. So UC-Berkeley would be around 15 at the minimum, U-Michigan at around 20, and then one can start looking at peer schools.
