<p>Hey Guys.</p>
<p>Obviously the US News Rankings mean very little but I'm just curious why Georgetown is so drastically underrated?</p>
<p>Is there something weird about US News' criteria that Georgetown lacks that brings down their ranking?</p>
<p>Just wondering.</p>
<p>Thanks guys,
Mohina</p>
<p>This question always comes up. I think the lower rankings have something to do with relatively low endowment and to a lesser degree, a relatively high acceptance rate. The endowment is low because the school did not invest for many years like other universities. The Acceptance rate, on the other hand, could decrease dramatically if Georgetown gets rid of its application and adopts the standard common application. They are reluctant to do it because they think it will attract frivolous applications but I think a good supplement to the common app would solve that problem. In any case, the ranking seems to be going up, moving 2 seats per year last time I checked. As the endowment goes up, acceptance % goes down (it did this year as more people applied), and the new science building opens, things may improve further. But remember that this is for the University as a whole. Some sections, like the SFS, are ranked as one of the best as they are. Law school is #14 if I’m not mistaken.</p>
<p>Seems to be two big issues. Largest is the endowment or lack there of. Financial aid is quite poor. Something like $900M vs ~ $1.5B for a small LAC like Williams. Also, they just spent a lot of money on new MSB building and now a lot on new science building. Compared with Ivy’s, they are much poorer.</p>
<p>Second issue is the past lack of focus on science. They are not highly regarded in this area. Guess they are trying to address this (and draw better profs) with a snazzy new science center supposed to open next year.</p>
<p>Looks like they are trying to increase undergrad class size by a lot to try and bring in money. They submitted a 10 year plan that stirred up a lot of neighborhood ire by offering a “voluntary” cap of 20,000 students for undergrad without any new housing. Heard they want 2500 more students within a couple years. One attraction of GU is the liberal arts feel but bigger scale than a LAC (7K undergrads vs 2K typical for small LACs). If they push above 10K undergrad, will it feel like the same GU environment? In addition, will it move up the ranks as selectivity drops based upon numbers? </p>
<p>In the end, rankings are very loose guideposts anyway. So much is subjective. Seems like people focus way to much on it. You could tweak the formula used by USN and come up with very different rankings. Then consider what you want to study; a school may be highly ranked but mediocre in a specific area you end up loving. Then did the school ranking really buy you much and is it meaningful to you specifically?</p>
<p>The anomalies in Georgetown’s ranking are threefold. One. where it’s programs are good, they are world class, ahead of everybody else good. SFS is the preeminent program of its kind in the world and is rated that way by the journals in the field and competes legitimately head to head with the top five universities in the country in this area of strength. Two, Georgetown’s selectivity rank is number 12, a full nine places higher than its overall rank and is achieved without any early decision and common application gimmickry. Thirdly, US News actually “dings” Georgetown for its percentage of adjunct faculty many of whom are former heads of state, cabinet members, senators, etc. </p>
<p>Lastly, and this is my personal opinion, Georgetown’s direct competitors have waged a very successful campaign over the past dozen or so years, in exploitng Georgetown’s weak endowment to a view of its financial position that is far worse than it actually is.
Georgetown is one of about 40 schools that is need blind but from the cc boards you would think that it is poorer than most high schools. Georgetown has built a new business school, a new fine arts center, a new student center and new dormitories in the past 10 years, yet one major business publication rated it a “C” for facilities and one college guide descrbed it as having “facilities less than many state schools.” Students and parents actually trust these sources, which is, of course, problematic for Georgetown. I am not saying Georgetown is as rich as its direct competitors but it is not an impoverished institution.</p>
<p>Not to nitpick but the Business School was a complete $75million donation by the Hariri family :)</p>
<p>To clear up a few factual slips:</p>
<p>Looks like they are trying to increase undergrad class size by a lot to try and bring in money. They submitted a 10 year plan that stirred up a lot of neighborhood ire by offering a “voluntary” cap of 20,000 students for undergrad without any new housing.</p>
<p>Definitely not. Under the existing plan, the Full-Time, Traditional
Undergraduate maximum is 6,016 students. The proposed plan changes around some of the definitions: under the new method, the University includes part-time as well as full-time students and has narrowed the definition of undergraduates considered to be “non-traditional:” - only students in non-degree programs, students in the School of Continuing Studies, and students returning for their second degree in nursing will be excluded from the Main Campus Traditional Undergraduate Program Headcount. </p>
<p>The proposed new headcount is 6,675. However, the difference between this and the prior figure of 6,016 is based entirely on changes in definition. Absolutely no growth in traditional undergrads is being proposed, and the overall number is nowhere near 20,000.</p>
<p>See <a href=“https://gushare.georgetown.edu/OfficeOfCommunications/campus_plan/20101230_ExhibitL_UndergraduateMaximum.pdf[/url]”>https://gushare.georgetown.edu/OfficeOfCommunications/campus_plan/20101230_ExhibitL_UndergraduateMaximum.pdf</a></p>
<p>Heard they want 2500 more students within a couple years.</p>
<p>Proposed growth would consist entirely of graduate and School of Continuing Studies students (some of the latter would attend classes at a new location in Dupont Circle, rather than on Main Campus). There is no proposed growth in undergraduates.</p>
<p>The TOTAL Main Campus proposed student cap for all types of students (graduate, undergraduate, second degree nursing, etc.) is now 15,000 - down from the originally proposed 16,133. However, this is really only a decrease of 133, since 1,000 of those are School of Continuing Studies students who will be moved from Main Campus to Dupont Circle.</p>
<p>See [Pre-Hearing</a> Submission](<a href=“Pre-Hearing Submission | PDF | Georgetown (Washington | University”>Pre-Hearing Submission | PDF | Georgetown (Washington | University)</p>
<p>yet one major business publication rated it a “C” for facilities</p>
<p>That was definitely prior to the opening of the Hariri Building.</p>
<p>Not to nitpick but the Business School was a complete $75million donation by the Hariri family</p>
<p>Not quite - the naming gift was $20 million. The remainder came through a combination of direct giving designated for building construction and other sources. The total cost of the building was about $82.5 million.</p>
<p>See [$20</a> Million Gift to Benefit New Business School Building - Georgetown University](<a href=“http://www.georgetown.edu/story/1242664318925.html]$20”>http://www.georgetown.edu/story/1242664318925.html) and [Georgetown</a> University: Business School?s Hariri Building Officially Opens](<a href=“http://explore.georgetown.edu/documents/?DocumentID=44465]Georgetown”>http://explore.georgetown.edu/documents/?DocumentID=44465)</p>
<p>Thanks DZ. Son (and parents…) just decided on GU. Can’t turn it down. Was really worried expansion would kill what is most liked about the school - LAC feel at a mid sized research university. Your info helped with that concern. At GAAP asked the same questions about expansion, but no one knew anything other than news paper info…</p>
<p>I have no doubt that with the MSB bldg and new focus on science with new bldg it will get even harder to get into GU in the future. Not that anyone really cares about rankings, but sure GU will be moving up - very high possibility… </p>
<p>Since you seem quite knowledgeable about GU, what is the plan for the existing science building? Again, asked at GAAP but no one knew anything. Seems like a logical question…</p>
<p>Cheers. Hoya Saxa!</p>
<p>Hoya Saxa, carlsbaddad! Carlsbad, CA, by any chance?</p>
<p>With regard to plans for the Reiss Science Building, Dr. DeGioia described the plan as to “lovingly gut it” and renovate the interior as much as possible. Since the new science building is, in square footage terms, about the same size as Reiss, any significant expansion of the science programs, faculty, etc. will need both spaces. So post-renovation, Reiss would house departmental office space for faculty from the sciences (including math and computer science), some renovated labs to increase overall laboratory space, probably a renovated Blommer Science Library as well.</p>
<p>As to the original question for this thread, there’s usually at least one major thread per admissions cycle on the topic. For my money, I think Dr. DeGioia’s answer explains the situation pretty well. [This</a> interview](<a href=“http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094]This”>http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094) is from January 2010, so the figures might be a bit off, but the overall point holds true:</p>
<p>Hoya: My question goes along in that same vein. I know we all think we’re ranked #1 in the US News & World Report Rankings.</p>
<p>DeGioia: We’re 23.</p>
<p>Hoya: Right, I know. I was wondering what the plan was to continue to increase our ranking?</p>
<p>DeGioia: Truly one of the fundamental ways in which we can increase our ranking is to increase the size of our endowment. That’s the constraint for us. So if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that on some of the scores we rank significantly higher—for example on selectivity for admission, I mean we’re much higher than twenty-third…</p>
<p>What holds us back from being higher in the rankings is our endowment is 73rd in the country. So we compete among the top 25 in the US News & World report but we’re 73rd in endowment size. Now why is our endowment so small? It’s just history. Until 1969, we were literally owned by a group of priests, the community of Jesuits of Georgetown University. They owned the place until 1969 … in 1969 they separately incorporated, leaving behind the university that became the responsibility of a new Board of Directors. Now this happens with all of Catholic higher education in the late 1960s. One school got ahead of that—that was Notre Dame. They did it about 15 years earlier … is my recollection. They began fundraising that much earlier.</p>
<p>Most of us didn’t really get started fundraising until the ’70s and early ’80s. Georgetown has done three fundraising campaigns, one in ‘81, one in ‘88 and one in ‘96 that went to 2003. ‘81 went from ‘81 to roughly ‘86—that was our first real campaign. The second campaign was around the time of our bicentennial. The third one was what we called our third century campaign. I think that history will show that other universities did other campaigns beginning a long time ago. The reason schools have bigger endowments is that they started fundraising a lot earlier than we did.</p>
<p>We’re actually doing pretty well but we got started so much later—our endowment is a billion dollars. Harvard’s endowment this year was 24 billion at the start of the year. I mean, 24 times our size. Yale is at 17 billion. Most of the peers that we compete with are at least five times our endowment size. This is relevant in the context of US News & World Report rankings because they call it different things but one of the terms that they typically use is faculty resources. Well, faculty resources is a proxy for essentially your overall endowment size, or sometimes gift income or the like. There, we do actually reasonably well in terms of how we’re doing now…but the endowment is a legacy of the first 200 years at Georgetown. The goal this 100 years is to use all 100 years to try and close that gap so that when our grandchildren might think about this place, the gap might be…we wont be 73rd. I mean, the gap between schools that are ranked below us…I mean, we’re 73rd and 23rd—there are 50 that have more resources than we do and that’s really what holds us back in US News & World Report because on so many of the other metrics we do very well. And truly, knowing how they keep score, I don’t really have a criticism of where we are with US News.</p>
<p>Now Charlie Deacon will. He’ll say there’s only one reason why they do that ranking. They do it—they’re communicating directly with high school seniors about how they should be thinking in their rankings of the schools. If that’s what they’re doing, then we deserve to be much higher ranked because were in the top ten in terms of undergraduate selectivity—so I don’t disagree with Charlie but the metrics that they use are more encompassing than that. When I look at that, I don’t really have any complaints about being 23rd. That being said, we’re doing everything we can to try to inch our way up. And that’s about fundraising…so the next campaign is absolutely about getting our endowment to go up.</p>
<p>Carlsbad Ca. Great weather this past week:-).</p>
<p>Well, the discussion on endowment is what I expected was the true issue… Also, the lack of a strong science program hurts as well. It draws in money and international prestige. If you look at international surveys, GU fairs terribly. Why? Those surveys focus very heavily on the sciences. I hope in the future GU is able to balance the fantastic humanities programs with equally fantastic science programs. Then they will truly become a powerhouse competing with the best of the Ivy’s and top research universities like Northwestern.</p>
<p>Hoya Saxa!</p>
<p>This is very interesting information. It supports the decision our son made last week to select Georgetown over Northwestern. He applied to and was accepted to the College but has a strong interest in many of the SFS offerings and had even mentioned possibly transferring to SFS in a year based on how his freshman year goes.</p>
<p>Hoya Saxa! Class of 2015</p>
<p>Georgetown Science could certainly improve (and it will), but I don’t think that it is getting the credit it deserves either. Georgetown’s pre-med program is very competitive and good at getting students into medical school.</p>
<p>With regard to US News rankings Georgetown was solidly in the teens prior to 1995, when the methodology changed and put a greater emphasis on Georgetown’s Achilles heel in the US News rankings - $$$$$$$.</p>
<p>Year Ranking
1991 19
1992 19
1993 17
1994 17
1995 25</p>
<p>My son is considering transferring to SFS as well, but wants to wait the full year to see where his interests lie. Hard to say at this age. SFS is very focused, so think it’s best to be in the college unless you’re sure SFS is for you. I’m hoping some good old fashioned Jesuit advising may help too:-).</p>
<p>If anything, networking in the US has become much much more important than it was in the past. Where else in the US can you gain access to incredible connections like you can in DC and GU. Unparalleled. Think your son made the right decision for GU over Northwestern (which is a terrific school). </p>
<p>Hoya Saxa! Hope to see you at a future parent meeting!</p>