UIIC and UWisconsin - two amazing public schools - are now not included in the Top 10. Thoughts? How will this year’s rankings change? Will public schools finally do better as a whole?
Nice to see a lot of UC schools on the list
Really not too much of a change from last year other than UF moving into the top 10.
More detailed comparison with last year’s ranking –
Top 9 are still in the release lis: Berkeley, UCLA, Virginia, Michigan, UNC Chappel Hill, W&M, Georgia Tech, UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine.
For #10, there was a 4-way tie last year: UC Davis, UC San Diego, UIUC, and Wisconsin. For #14, there was a two-way tie between Penn State. Florida has moved to the next group up, whereas UC Davis, UIUC, and Wisconsin dropped a bit.
Five of the schools are in the South, and only one is in the Midwest. Given that Big 10 schools have long dominated the public university rankings, this is a major flip, albeit one that has been in the making for quite some time due to population growth.
So people here think there is a significant difference between being #10 and say #15 such that being #10 one year and #15 the next is a “major flip”?
I bet budget cuts in WI and IL have a lot to do with it.
To put this in perspective, here are some historical lists:
1997
1University of Virginia21
2University of Michigan at Ann Arbor24
3University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill25
4University of California at Berkeley27
5University of California at Los Angeles31
6College of William and Mary___________33
7University of California at San Diego____34
8University of California at Irvine________37
9University of California at Davis________40
10University of Wisconsin at Madison41
11University of Washington__42
12University of California at Santa Barbara__46
13Georgia Institute of Technology_____48
14University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign_50
2007
1University of California at Berkeley21
2University of Virginia________________24
3University of Michigan at Ann Arbor____24
4University of California at Los Angeles26
5University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill27
6College of William and Mary31
7University of Wisconsin at Madison34
8University of California at San Diego38
8Georgia Institute of Technology______38
10University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign41
11University of Washington42
12University of California at Irvine44
13University of California at Davis47
13University of California at Santa Barbara47
13Pennsylvania State University 47
13University of Florida__47
13University of Texas at Austin____________47
2017
1University of California at Berkeley20
2University of Virginia________________24
2University of California at Los Angeles24
4University of Michigan at Ann Arbor____27
5University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill30
6College of William and Mary32
7Georgia Institute of Technology34
8University of California at Santa Barbara37
9University of California at Irvine_____39
10University of Wisconsin at Madison44
10University of California at San Diego44
10University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign44
10University of California at Davis44
14Pennsylvania State University50
14University of Florida50
16University of Washington_________54
17University of Texas at Austin___________56
The UC system has made a multiyear committment to significantly expand enrollment, starting with a large bump in Fall 2016. The latest USNWR rankings are based on the Fall 2016 entering class, which represents the first phase of that enrollment growth. Most of the growth is coming from in-state students, who have (on average) lower test scores than out-of-state and international applicants.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-dramatically-boost-california-student-enrollment
It may seem like the acceptance rates at top universities fall every year, while the test scores rise every year. But when the upcoming rankings become available in full, you will probably find that the opposite pattern holds for the UC campuses, in comparison to last year’s ranking.
For example, consider UC Davis, which is apparently about to fall out of the USNWR Top 10 Public Universities list. Here are some numbers from the Common Data Set:
- Fall 2015 (used in last year's ranking): 38% acceptance rate, 1070-1340 SAT
- Fall 2016 (used in upcoming ranking): 42% acceptance rate, 1050-1330 SAT
So the acceptance rate rose, the test scores fell – and the USNWR ranking (apparently) dropped. It’s quite possible that all of the UC campuses will show this pattern to some extent.
The UCs are expanding access, which is arguably the right thing for a public university system to do. But accepting more students means lower selectivity, which will hurt them in the USNWR rankings, at least in the short term.
In the long term, demand for spots at UC campuses seems insatiable. It wouldn’t surprise me if UC acceptance rates eventually start falling again.
@guitar321 “UIIC and UWisconsin - two amazing public schools - are now not included in the Top 10. Thoughts? How will this year’s rankings change? Will public schools finally do better as a whole?”
This reflects the ongoing funding issues at both Wisconsin and Illinois. If the state can no longer afford to fund these schools, they should allow them to become private. Keeping them public and not funding them puts them on a long slow slide into irrelevance.
Letting them go private will allow them a lot more autonomy to set their own tuition, rally their vast alumni bases for funding, make decisions that are more efficient and best for the school, and both of these amazing schools would be stronger than ever in a very short time.
I never really appreciated how unique William and Mary is, as a top-flight, non-flagship public LAC/university. It is pretty remarkable that 4 of the top 7 are in southern states, though all 3 of their states (VA, NC, GA) have strong economic centers and a large tech sector.
@TTG Like the Ivies (except Cornell), William and Mary is very old and has a long-developed reputation.
@Corbett The acceptance rate for UCLA, UCSB, and UCI went down a bit this year. Berkeley went up a little bit and UCSD stayed about the same. Davis also looks like it went up a little again.
But it may not be happening yet. For Fall 2017, the acceptance rate at Davis rose again, to 44%.
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses/davis/freshman-profile/index.html
So the acceptance rates have risen over the past few years (from 38% to 42% to 44%). The USNWR rankings assumes a rising acceptance rate is a Bad Thing. It could mean that Davis is becoming less popular.
But Davis isn’t becoming less popular. Number of applications:
Fall 2015: 64,410
Fall 2016: 67,472
Fall 2017: 70,968
There’s an alternative factor that can cause acceptance rates to rise: deliberate enrollment growth. That’s what’s happening at Davis (and other UCs).
If Davis had held the number of admits at 2015 levels, its current acceptance rate would be 35% instead of 44%, and its ranking wouldn’t be slipping. Davis (and other UCs) are currently sacrificing USNWR rank to admit thousands of additional in-state applicants. It’s a tough choice, but probably the right one given the UC’s public mission.
The big bumps in UC acceptance rates were between Fall 2015 and Fall 2016. The rates apparently stabilized between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017, although the rates continued to rise slightly at some campuses.
The point is that applications are hitting record highs across the UC system – yet acceptance rates are more or less stable, or even rising. This is because the UCs are trying hard to increase enrollment to keep up with the record applicant volume.
From the USNWR perspective, this is the “wrong” thing to do. For USNWR ranking purposes, it would be better to keep enrollment stable as applications rise; this would improve the “Selectivity Score”. Private schools like Stanford or USC are happy to do this. But public schools like the UCs have a different mission, which the USNWR ranking criteria do not address.
Perhaps a privatization, but with an explicit trade of some state subsidy for lower in-state tuition and better in-state financial aid for a reserved number of in-state residents, may be an option, if there is any interest in maintaining some level of access for state residents at the privatized “state flagship”. However, it does not seem that IL or WI has that as a priority, so a privatization or semi-privatization is more likely to end up like the Penn State model, where in-state financial aid is poor enough to make it unaffordable for most non-wealthy in-state students.
Even by CC standards this is overly dramatic.
Privatization of the flagship Wisconsin or Illinois campuses would inevitably reduce the access for state residents. If they were privatized, these schools would increase the cost of in-state tuition, or cut back on the number of slots of in-state residents, or both.
It’s hard to see why state residents would go for this deal. It’s not like there are lots of other highly-ranked public universities in Wisconsin or Illinois that they could turn to instead.
Those states have relatively large populations, while the listed universities are not that big as far as state flagships go. The size (in undergraduate students) of the state flagship relative to the state’s population of graduating high school seniors is likely a big factor in its admission selectivity, and hence its USNWR ranking that is heavily based on that. As you probably know, California has a very large population, but UCB is not proportionately large compared to other state flagships in lower population states, so a smaller percentage of California high school seniors will find space at UCB than, for example, the percentage of Arizona high school seniors who will find space at the University of Arizona.
Illinois has struggled through lack of a state budget and admissions scandals, though the admissions scandal is old, at this point.
Wisconsin had highly publicized budget battle with Governor Walker, but that too is in past as most recent state budget actually restores prior funding cuts, and Wisconsin had a successful fundraising campaign, with $150 million raised from Morgridges and others, to fund faculty retention and recruitment. So the “hit” to UW (as a UW parent) is based on past events which – of course – continue to weigh on people’s minds, but the university has managed through it and moved on.
An admitted bias, but I struggle to see how world-class research universities like Illinois and Wisconsin can be considered as “lesser” than Irvine or Santa Barbara. I don’t put much stock in #10 vs. #15, but it sells subscriptions.