<p>Nope, Berkeley is currently ranked 6th in peer assessment while counselors wouldn’t consider it that high. Berkeley will still be rated above its USNEWS rank by counselors, but remember they’re reducing the weight of Peer Assessment to incorporate Counselor Review, so this will likely be a net negative for Berkeley, but as I said they’re likely to drop a little, not too many spots. </p>
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<p>I think people are going to regard berkeley as just as prestige for at least a few more years to come. It takes longer term financial trouble to hurt a school and then after that there’s a time lag before opinions change. If berkeley’s budget keeps getting hit, it’ll be a while before prestige declines.</p>
<p>The Dookies have it rigged for their alma mater to be tied with Harvard and Princeton in the USNWR rankings this year. Apparently they offered admittance and free tuition, room and board to all children of college presidents around the country for the next ten years in order to secure a 5.0 score from each one in the peer assessment part of the rankings. Rumors are that they also pulled a “Notre Dame” on their SAT/ACT reporting - thereby resulting in CR and M 25%-75% ranges of 740-800 for each test after reporting only 29% of the students turning in the SAT’s and exactly 71% turning in the ACT’s, even though they strongly recommended that ALL students turn in both the SAT’s and ACT’s.</p>
<p>the Dookies also claimed that now ALL of their students are Robertson Scholars - even the ones that have been enrolled in the school for years without being in the program.</p>
<p>They further claim that therefore, because all of the above, HYPSM should now be called **Dhypsm<a href=“only%20the%20%22D%22%20is%20allowed%20to%20be%20capitalized”>/B</a> - and if anyone complains about this, “Lesdia” will harrass you for the rest of your life.</p>
<p>Hawkette, of course, will not care about Lesdia’s harrassment and will continue to say that Duke is not complete because its baseball team is not as good as Rice’s - the ultimate well rounded undergraduate education.</p>
<p>JA, the problem isn’t what universities claim or report. In a world where rankings mean everything, they will naturally do their best to project themselves in the most impressive light possible. The problem is that nothing universities report is audited and verified for accuracy and consistancy.</p>
<p>Most high school counselors don’t know much. Look for public schools, especially in big population states, to move up. Private schools will take a hit, especially ones with less name recognition among the general public. Georgetown, Texas, and Florida will move up a couple spots.</p>
<p>concoll makes an insightful point about the ranking impact of including high school counselors as part of the PA scoring. State University defenders may have much to fear from the inclusion of high school counselor opinion at the expense of the views of those within academia. Regionalism will play a MUCH stronger part in this grade and that could hurt schools like UC Berkeley which have small non-California representation.</p>
<p>Outside of California, most high school counselors don’t have much to say about the UCs, including UC Berkeley. Given the very low numbers of OOS students going to any of the UCs, why bother? As a result, most would likely not give the UCs very good scores (if they grade them at all) as compared to schools with a more national distribution of students.</p>
<p>Counterbalancing the potential negative impact of HS counselor opinions in place of academic administrators, state Us will be helped by a weighting boost of the differential expected grad rate/actual grad rate. This is already a 5% weight and IMO gets way too little attention for the meaningful impact that it can have on most publics (usually very positive) and highly selective privates (often negative). </p>
<p>On the matter of yield, this does not belong in the USNWR rankings. Alex’s ED comment is right on not to mention the fact that many non-academic factors will materially influence a college’s yield (eg, its costs/financial aid policies). The winners are the “rich” schools. </p>
<p>JA,
Weak try at inflaming the discussion with your Duke comments. </p>
<p>Btw, are you aware that Dartmouth reports their standardized test data in the same manner as Duke? Same with Amherst and several other highly ranked colleges. </p>
<p>Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath waiting for your or others’ scorching of these historically elite Club Members for following this reporting method.</p>
<p>I think this is a very fair point in general. Lots of you see something ranked in a certain place and then you “know” it’s not very good - when in fact you know nothing about the school in general.</p>
<p>The opinions of high school GCs? What a completely useless metric. Most hs GC don’t know anything beyond the schools within a short radius of their school anyway, unless they are GC at elite privates.</p>
<p>ICalculus-disagree about Columbia. Up until the late 1950s it was probably the second or third most prestigious university in the country. As of the early 1940s, half the Supreme Court and both major Presidential candidates were Columbia Law alumni and the campus was graced by iconic figures like Fermi (the develoment of nuclear fission and the Manhattan project was launched at Columbia), Van Doren and Barzum. Alumni figures with names like Cagney, Gehrig, Ginsburg and Merton dominated culture. Dwight Eisenhower was its President immediately before he assumed the White House. The lead it has in Nobel Prize affilates over all other universities was being built at that time. Then things went South.</p>
<p>Absolutely. Face it, for much of the country, UCLA and UCBerkeley are the only names they even know, a lot of that is due to sports for UCLA and old-hippie associations with Berkeley, and the rest of the UC’s are unknowns. </p>
<p>Which, before the Berkeley people jump down my back, doesn’t make Berkeley not an excellent school.</p>
<p>"The opinions of high school GCs? What a completely useless metric. Most hs GC don’t know anything beyond the schools within a short radius of their school anyway, unless they are GC at elite privates. "</p>
<p>Well I can say that the GC’s at elite publics also know a fair amount about a considerable range of universities. I cannot speak to the GCs at other public high schools.</p>
<p>There are already (unused) high school counselor ratings - why are people speculating on what they would be, or am I missing something? Berkeley gets the same HSC rating as peer evaluation (4.7), while the schools below it get higher HSC ratings, so Berkeley will lose some ground. However, realistically only Georgetown or UVA would pass it because those are the only ones within striking distance, besides CMU, and and CMU would get absolutely hammered by yield.</p>
<p>I can’t help but laugh to see 16 pages of back and forth regarding these ridiculous rankings. Everyone does realizes that movement in the rankings has no connection whatsoever to any real life changes in a given university operations/quality, right?. Consider this: if Harvard were to aquire MIT next year its ranking would DROP. Adding the world best science and engineering faculty/students/facilities would cause the aggregate faculty resources rank, alumni giving rates, financial resources index, student selectivity index, etc. for the combined Harvard/MIT to be lower than those of Harvard alone. In the eyes of US News, aquiring MIT makes Harvard a worse university. </p>
<p>The US News rankings methodology is continually designed and updated with a single goal in mind: producing a ranking that agrees with the existing perceptions of university quality, particularly those held by people in the northeast. HYP will always be the top three regardless of the fact the today more cutting edge academic research takes place at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Caltech and other science and technology focused schools. US News will tweek its methodology to ensure this result and any other movements in the rankings are largely a result of these tweeks, not real changes in the metrics proportedly measured. </p>
<p>Don’t believe me, consider this: in 1998 US News, in response to criticisms that it methodology was stastically unsound, hired a professional statistician to redesign in its ranking process. This statistician made several adjustments, among largest of which were: 1) to incorporate a cost of living index into the faculty resources ranking (so that urban schools would not recieve an automatic boost for paying the higher prevailing wages in high cost of living areas); and 2) to adjust the financial resources index to reflect the economy of scale acheived by large universities (as a university grows it becomes cheaper to educate each additional student, if this is not taken into account smaller schools are artificially rewarded for being less resources efficient). As a result of these changes in the 98/99 rankings Caltech, MIT, Stanford became 1, 3, & 4, Cornell became 6, Berkeley moved up 5 spots, etc. The public response to these new rankings was very negative and sales of US News were hurt badly. The next year they reverted to the old methodology with HYP at the top and sales rose in response.</p>
<p>Its all a game people. A game designed to reward mid-sized, private universities located in urban areas (particularly in the HCOL northeast). Unless everyone thinks that that is the one and only ideal model for a university, then we would all be well served by simply ignoring US News.</p>
yes, because adding the two might not necessarily give a college student the best undergrad experience and education. Harvard’s resources would be less concentrated, their average SAT scores would fall. If you added Tufts (with a few amazing programs) to MIT, MIT’s rankings would drop. Just being a huge university shouldn’t push up rankings for undergrads.</p>
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<p>cutting edge research helps but isn’t the most important factor for a good undergrad education. Stanford, MIT, UCB and Caltech’s research prowess is recognized in peer assessment. Yale, Harvard and Princeton while not known for engineering are certainly top notch for science research.</p>
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<p>this is true, real metrics take a long time to change (they do change however), this doesn’t mean USNews should not continue to hone methodology and to incorporate more variables.</p>
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<p>this I actually buy.</p>
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<p>for many years Dartmouth did exceptionally well, still is doing quite well, not close to urban. Duke too was exceptionally ranked for many years, neither northeast nor urban. Tufts is mid-sized and urban, most people strongly believe it’s under rated by US News.</p>
<p>bottom line: if you read posts in this forum about USNews, you’ll see strong arguments for why every single top 30 school is both over and under rated by US News. I can’t see a clear cut bias in the methodology, criticism about the rankings is not lopsided and there definitely isn’t a single correct methodology.</p>
<p>“criticism about the rankings is not lopsided”
Given that the rankings are adjusted to fit perceptions, and perceptions are largely based on the rankings, it would be truly bizarre if the rankings didn’t conform to perception.</p>