US NEWS Ranking, A few surprises

Regarding average class size, note that the average class size is not the same as the average class size of a given student, because the large classes have more students in them.

For example, suppose a college with 100 students has each student take two courses. One has all 100 students, while the other us taught in 10 sections of 10 students each.

Average class size is (100 + 10 * 10) / 11 = 18.2 (rounded). But each student has an average class size of (100 + 10) / 2 = 55.

For percentage of classes under 20 students, that can be misleading in a similar way, since fewer students take those small classes. But also, “classes” may include discussion or recitation sections attached to a big lecture.

@ucbalumnus You’re genius!

Re #35, therefore, at this college, which can report that 91% of their classes enroll fewer than 20 students, only 50% of classes on an individual basis would be experienced at this level.

Wow, that’s one I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: Don’t do what @Silivon did; do your due diligence.

@Silivon, I know SCU well, and can certainly understand why you find it attractive. My son goes to Cal Poly, a similar, off the rankings radar school, with a very good mechanical engineering program.

He was a high achieving HS student and would have been a competitive applicant anywhere, yet he eschewed all the big names. He didn’t want giant classes, with a significant portion of the instruction by graduate students. He put no stock into rank, but rather the things that mattered to him, starting in ME day one, small classes, nearly all, including labs and discussions, taught by instructors with terminal degrees, in a place with good outdoor activities, and last but not least, a “typical college experience.”

I personally find rank to be one of the most destructive forces that has impacted higher education in the last 50 years, second only to the massive escalation in price. It has far too many students applying to far too few schools, because they falsely believe that’s the only way they can succeed.

Class size is not as straight forward as it seems.

  1. It is measured in the fall - so schools (including USC) can offer delayed enrollment programs and/or just schedule bigger classes in the spring to appear better on this metric.
  2. Only one undergraduate needs to be enrolled in a class for it to count toward the metric - so schools with large Phd programs can end up counting a large number (of typically smaller) graduate classes that a very small percentage of undergraduates actually benefit from.
  3. Classes at the top ranked research schools (such as Harvard) can have classes with 700-1000 students which are treated the same as classes with 51 students.
  4. The smaller classes may be associated with unpopular or obscure majors (this is almost true by definition), so they may not be of interest to most students. (More likely at large endowment schools)
  5. The definition of a class is loose enough to result in differential accounting practices between schools as well as allow schools to engage in creative optimizations..
  6. US News does not provide any details on the relative weighting of the various class size ranges, so one cannot really determine how it is biased.
  7. US News does not provide the method used to normalize the class size data before it is combined with data from other categories.

The School’s CDS has more information than the US News ranking data, but it is better to look at actual class sizes in your major(s) of interest.

You can point out problems with any ranking. US News is no better or worse than any other ranking.

Silivon, I’m looking at your other postings, and you seem to have some kind of grudge against USC. No school is perfect for all students.

@eyemgh Your son is very smart. Glad to hear the story.

@CU123 You may be true about Yale and Princeton, but Parchment (which uses real data from high schools in its reports) shows Yale being favored by cross-admits 66% to 34%.

@nrtlax33 Instructional Spending on undergraduates is perhaps one of the most misleading and exploited metrics used in these rankings. I won’t get in the detail unless someone is interested, but a lot of what is actually research can be included in these totals, and this research likely has very little to do with undergraduate education. Graduatle and undergraduate expenditures are comingled (universities would argue they are difficult to separate). Since LACs have very little research and graduate programs, I would argue that a well-funded LAC like Williams would actually be on the upper range of what any university actually “spends” on undergraduates.

I wonder if the OP did an exhaustive survey of all actual USC class sizes in all programs and came up with a number that is much different than the reported 60%. If so, what should the correct percentage be?

I don’t have time to survey class sizes in every USC department. However, I went ahead and looked at a few. By my count, 81% of Fall 2018 Astronomy classes have caps of less than 20 students. 78% of East Asian Languages and Culture classes have caps of less than 20 students. 61% of English classes have caps of less than 20 students. However, only 31% of Biological Sciences classes have caps of less than 20 students. Mind you, I’m counting only the cap numbers. The actual number of enrolled students may be lower than the cap in many cases.

From these counts alone, I have no reason to doubt the USC/USNWR “60%” figure. Am I 100% confident it is correct? No. But even if it is correct, there does appear to be considerable variation in class sizes from department to department (as well as across course levels within departments.) With that variation in mind, one should indeed be cautious about taking reported overall class size distributions at face value (especially at large research universities). If you want a college with consistently small classes, you may want to consider liberal arts colleges (although, even at some LACs, some classes at intro levels or in popular majors may be relatively large.)

As for “discussion or recitation sections attached to a big lecture” (post #35), I’m not sure why we wouldn’t want to count them (if that’s what anyone is suggesting). At the college I attended, lectures typically could be considered complements to the discussion classes (not the other way around). But not every college is the same. There may be legitimate questions about how to count sub-sections, thesis research classes, etc. etc… I don’t think we can be confident that (even absent deliberate fraud) every college is counting them the same way.

By the way, of the 767 Fall 2018 USC classes I surveyed, 80 are capped at 20 students.
If USC really wanted to spike its class size numbers for US News, it should have set those caps at 19 students (because “60%” represents the number of classes with 1-19 students.)

As it stands, 60% isn’t even a very good number, at least not compared to some other highly selective colleges. Examples:
83.70% … Claremon McK
80% … UChicago
78.60% … Northwestern
71% … Pomona
70.10% … Tufts
68.30% … Stanford
67% … Caltech
61.90% … University of Notre Dame
60% … USC
56.70% … UCLA
Source: USNWR (but double-check each CDS if you’re skeptical of that ranking)

Some of these colleges, like USC, post term by term enrollment numbers in their online course listings. So you can go in and see for yourself if class sizes, for the courses/programs that interest you, seem to be well-represented by these overall numbers.

But if these numbers are at all close to reality, then anyone who places a high priority on LAC-like class sizes probably shouldn’t be looking seriously at USC. If you took the USNWR numbers at face value, “60%” probably should have filtered it out, not in.

Q.E.D.

@IzzoOne : I completely agree with your view. Too many clueless folks are looking at rankings and pick a school based on their perceived prestige.

However, it is impossible to ignore the prestige factor. I think parents and students should use multiple rankings as base and seek to strike a balance between good teaching and prestige among other factors which are important to you. I know schools which are trying hard to promote themselves by telling you how many Nobel Prize winners they have. We put those schools at the bottom of our list since it is a clear indication that those schools are not focusing on undergraduate education.

If you/your kids are interested in STEM, you should read https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment to understand the situation in graduate school. Most professors at prestigious schools are recognized by the quality/quantity of their papers. Very few are interested in undergraduate students and they are not rewarded by doing so. Brown is an exception.

I am surprised to find some false data in the Usnews college ranking, which makes the quality of the ranking list suspicious.
I want to post my screenshots here but is not allowed.
Let me use my university (USC) as an example. I do not want to be offensive. Please follow me to do every steps so you can know why the inputs of usnews are a little bit of junk.

  1. Please navigate to https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/university-of-southern-california-1328 . From the class size in that page, you get to know 60% of classes are less than 20 students.
  1. Go to https://classes.usc.edu/term-20183/classes/dso/ . It's a link to display classes. You can see the class sizes there. You can choose any program there to see the actual class size. There is no way the percentage of classes that less than 20 approach to 60%. Most of the classes have more than 20 students.

This is an example. This is why Usnews cannot be trusted.

@nrtlax33 thanks for the info from Times Higher Education, but I am certain their “Instructional Expenses” not only includes graduate expenditures co-mingled with undergraduate expenditures, it also includes some component of research expenditure, which can be huge. The reason is there is accounting guidance from OMB and NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers that lets Universities do exactly that with “Departmental Research”. You can read about how it works in this piece by a former Provost at USC. http://www.changinghighereducation.com/2016/08/the-high-cost-of-funded-research.html

The bottom line is the numbers, particularly for high-research universities can be greatly inflated and have nothing to do with undergraduate education. Not only that, some significant part of the tuition you may be paying for your undergraduate may be funding these graduate and research activities.

For this reason, I would argue the rankings that are reliant on these resource totals are misleading, and are unfair to schools that actually do place a greater priority on undergraduate education.

Take a look at replies #441 and #443 (as they are after the threads were merged) to see how average class size and percentage of classes under a given class size (reported truthfully) can be misleading in terms of the class sizes that a student will encounter at the college.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21708015/#Comment_21708015

UChicago has been trumpeting its high number of affiliated Nobel Prize winners for years.
This is one example of their marketing hype. High-volume direct mail marketing is another.
However, I think you’d be wrong to conclude that they don’t have a strong focus on undergraduate education. Look at their class sizes, which are lower than at some LACs. For years, their Common Core classes (which comprise about 1/3 of the total undergraduate program and are concentrated in the first two years) have been capped at 19 students. Look at the number of truly distinguished professors (yes, including Nobel laureates and other major prize winners) who actually teach undergrads. Look at how they encourage and reward excellence in undergraduate teaching (https://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/35/).

Here are a few comments, apparently from UChicago people, about undergraduate focus there:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1473696-lack-of-undergraduate-focus.html

Were they capped at 19 before Chicago cared as much as it did now about rankings?

I don’t know how often the following scenario would happen: if a restaurant is highly rated by some guidebook, but a very large number of its customers hate its food, who do you believe? If you don’t like the food after you try it, you can join the crowd to give it one star and never go back again. But most people don’t transfer in college. If you don’t like it after you try it, too bad, you are stuck with it. UChicago’s 19-student class limit is another indication that it just wants to please one particular rating agency. Why not 20 students? BTW, if your kid goes to UChicago and develop mental problems, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You did not do your due diligence. Look at the most comprehensive student survey conducted by WSJ/THE to see how UChicago’s students are feeling compared to other schools. I have no doubt those “right” students would definitely like it. Make sure you are the right student before going there.

From https://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/35/

Anyone who has information would like to explain how it works? So it is based on nomination, not by vote.