The answer is simple: USNWR is (in theory) ranking universities in terms of their undergraduate programs – not in terms of their doctoral research programs. The target audience for the USNWR rankings is (in theory) high school seniors, not prospective PhD candidates.
And UCI and UCSB have better numbers than Illinois or Wisconsin in terms of (perceived) undergraduate-oriented criteria like freshman acceptance rate, freshman test scores, undergraduate class sizes, and graduation rates. That’s also how small schools with relatively few grad students and little research reputation (like Dartmouth or William & Mary) can outscore much larger and better-known “world-class research universities” (which Illinois and Wisconsin indeed are).
There are well-known alternative rankings, like the Times Higher Education Rankings, that are more focused on research reputation. In the Times rankings, Illinois and Wisconsin do top UCI, USCB, Dartmouth, and W&M.
@Midwestmomofboys I think you forget how huge California is and how many elite students it produces.
UCSB, for example, may be only the third or fourth ranked school in the UC system, but it has a much lower admissions rate than UIUC and Wisconsin, and as many Nobel Prizes this century as UIUC and UWisconsin combined.
@Corbett and @ThankYouforHelp My personal view (which US News has declined to incorporate into its methodology . . . ) is the “quality” of the school is largely linked to the research and teaching quality of its faculty. To me, acceptance rate is practically meaningless in determining the quality of the education as it reflects popularity and, in the case of UC schools, size of in state population. Perhaps I should have indicated that the UW News methodology simply doesn’t measure what matters to my family and, of course, each family has to identify its own priorities. As an academic family, one of our priorities was quality of the teaching faculty and that includes the quality of their Ph.D. training. We had more insight into how to weigh that than some other families might, but were also blind in assessing some academic areas. For instance, when my UW kid got interested in Greek archaeology, and mentioned his prof got his Ph.D. from Cinncinnati, it didn’t mean much to us. Then we learned that Cinncinnati is a top program for Greek archaeology – who knew? Not us, apparently. So, UCSB faculty may be mean its “X” department is top 10 in the country – and I respect that. But UW and UIUC are superb institutions and I would hope families don’t think that #10 means something a whole lot more than #12.
“Quality of teaching” is not readily subject to standardized measures, so most attempts to rank colleges use proxy measures (spending, class size, etc.), if they attempt to measure that at all.
USNWR rankings seem to be designed to match popular opinion for known colleges.
I’m always struck by the fact that a couple of spots on any ranking matter to anyone. Take the mythical top 2000 or so colleges/universities, all of which have dedicated faculty, hard-working students, and some sort of campus, often very nice. 2000 is about the same number of students that attend a lot of suburban high schools.
Now say someone developed some sort of methodology to rank all 2000 students at one high school in terms of athleticism. A few, admittedly, might be a young LeBron James, John Elway, Bryce Harper, or Usain Bolt and really excel their peers… But no college shines like Bolt. For the most part, though, is there going to be much difference between #10 and #12? Between #30 and #40? Between #80 and #100? I might even prefer #40 on my basketball team and #30 on my baseball team. #80 might be a very strong long-distance runner and #100 a very strong wrestler. How can I really compare them?
It’s the same with schools. There’s really little difference between schools that are within 10-20 spots, or even 30-40 spots, even if one accepts the validity of the methodology.
It’s HOW you go to school, not WHERE you go. Take UC-Irvine, a school I’ve never visited and know little about. I do know, though, that there are great professors and staff there, and students with great credentials who work very hard and will be very “successful” in life, some who will be more “successful” than peers who graduate from Penn or Johns Hopkins or Wash U, schools ranked a few dozen spots ahead of them in some rankings.
@Midwestmomofboys As a UCSB parent, I’m happy it’s considered in the same ballpark as schools such as Wisconsin and UIUC, which I’ve always considered top academic schools. UCSB is probably under the radar for a lot of the country, and admittedly it was for me too. What I’ve learned the last couple of years is that they have some tremendous world class programs in Physics and Materials to name a few. They have free tutoring for the core undergrad classes and it’s not remedial, it’s where the students who get As and Bs are going. The faculty and staff we’ve encountered are much more helpful and down to earth than what I encountered at Berkeley many years ago. Frankly, the engineering program is a lot harder than I thought it would be and requires the kind of commitment I saw from friends who were engineers at Cal back in the day. When I’ve looked up where the engineering professors are from, it’s a collection of the elite schools in the country - quite impressive. The housing gaurantee there is the best in the UC system - you can live 4 years in university-owned housing. From what we have seen with our son, it’s provided an excellent undergraduate experience and exceeded our expectations. They don’t have football, but they were in the College World Series in 2016 and have most of the highest attendance regular season soccer games.
In this case, maybe USNews is doing exactly what it should and identifying schools that maybe people wouldn’t know about otherwise. Whether it’s a couple of spots ahead or behind Wisconsin and UIUC doesn’t really matter much, but it’s good to be in the same conversation.
My guess is that these UC campuses, as well as UCD, will slide downward from their current positions towards the lower-ranked parts of these ranges. Their selectivity ranks will drop, due to the ongoing UC enrollment growth initiative, which led to higher acceptance rates and lower test scores for Fall 2016. USC, which recently rose past UCLA, could match Berkeley for the first time, or even surpass it.
“As an academic family, one of our priorities was quality of the teaching faculty and that includes the quality of their Ph.D. training.”
@Midwestmomofboys But does the quality of their academic training mean that the professor will be an effective teacher? I know - and have had - several professors who were experts in their field of study, but were not great at teaching material and not great communicators to a large group of undergraduate students in a lecture hall. Especially these days - with all the distractions of electronics - professors need to be engaging to be effective. They need to care about students and pedagogy. Many high research professors are obsessed with their research and their research is really their focus - teaching is something they have to do in order to do it. Unfortunately, that is very hard to measure and quantify during the college process or on these silly ranking lists.
@suzyq7 Agreed, it is difficult to assess, unless anecdotally, and that won’t help high school families make decisions.
But to my professor spouse, if someone didn’t get trained by the best (or at least better) minds in the field, then they aren’t prepared to think and, therefore, be in a position to teach at the highest (or at least higher) level, to undergrads. So training matters. It does not mean those professors are the best at communicating, mentoring, leading etc, but it does mean they are prepared to engage with their discipline at the highest/higher level. We are not a STEM family, so the phenomenon of faculty who only do their lab, and do not teach undergrads at all, is not a fear, since my kids are just trying to get through their distribution requirements in Math and Science.
As I noted, every family should assess their priorities, and faculty expertise is one of ours. I get frustrated that acceptance rate is considered a significant metric precisely because it encourages the Chicago etc. phenomenon of jacking up numbers to reduce the acceptance rate. Chicago was a superb school twenty years ago when the acceptance rate was much higher, and it is still a superb school now when the acceptance rate is much lower. The false message to some who don’t dig beneath the simple rankings, is that Chicago is “better” now because more students apply.
But I am delighted to hear that Santa Barbara is such a wonderful place. The tight job market in academics has meant that talented faculty are everywhere, not just at a handful of “elite,” mostly private schools. Combine that faculty strength with a thoughtful administration which is strategic about the structure and process of the student experience, and a student will be brilliantly served by their undergraduate institution.
Selectivity: The University of California could easily massage its selectivity numbers by changing the admission process. It’s a blatantly manipulable statistic, and I am glad that certain schools are operating to maximize their value to their constituencies, rather than please USNW.
When looking at college rankings, you need to consider a variety of sources. Don’t fret about whether a school is #7 vs #17, but rather see if a school can hold up across multiple (biased, subjective) ranking systems. Here are two highly divergent ways of looking at a college:
Bottom line: You can’t educate undergrads, win Nobels, and surf all at the same place–unless you’re at UCSB! (Or UCSD, Irvine, UCLA, or USC.) If you’re in-state and not getting much financial aid, the UCs are a great deal, as well.
And I would say that if you’re in-state in Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington, etc. it probably makes sense to attend the excellent colleges in those states. At some level, the college has to be “good enough”–then it’s a matter of what the student does with the opportunity, not whether the school is #7 or #17 (or #170) on someone’s arbitrary ranking grid.
I have to chime in to say that I totally disagree with this:
“But to my professor spouse, if someone didn’t get trained by the best (or at least better) minds in the field, then they aren’t prepared to think and, therefore, be in a position to teach at the highest (or at least higher) level, to undergrads. So training matters. It does not mean those professors are the best at communicating, mentoring, leading etc, but it does mean they are prepared to engage with their discipline at the highest/higher level”
Of course your spouse is entitled to his/her opinion, but IMHO choosing an undergraduate institution based on this sort of thing is nonsense, and I wanted to at least express my dissent in case someone would come away with the idea that we professor-types agree on this sort of thing
Cheers,
vanvalen (tenured faculty at a pretty-darn-‘good’ school, trained by arguably the best minds in my field, still knows that some of my non-tenure track, less fancy-pants-CV colleagues can teach circles around me, and probably many of the faculty at the community college down the road too).
Totally agree with vanvalen’s comment. When I was going to college, several of the CS professors in my school got their PhDs from Caltech. They were terrible teachers. A couple of the best college professors I ever had only held Masters degrees. They weren’t focused on research. They were focused on teaching, and they were very good at it.
I’ve had plenty of professors who really knew their field and were probably great at doing research, but they couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag.
It seems to me that access for lower income instate students and general financial aid for instate students should be factored into public universities’ rankings, alongside class sizes* , graduation rates, etc.
while UWisconsin successfully raised money to retain faculty, it could be that the intro undergraduate classes got the short end of the stick after the budget cuts, with classes larger than 40 and larger than 100 increasing. This happened at UIUC too.
As for research, yes if you look at the Times rankings, which are research based, American public universities are now overcome by quite a few public universities in other countries, with Asia making the fastest strides - if you compare the first rankings to this year’s for some American publics the “slide” is very real. Basically countries that invest heavily into higher education at all levels see the fastest rise. The universities “pushed out” tend to be Universities where public investment has not kept level or been increased.
@vanvalen – I’m not worried that folks would interpret my statement about a factor that was meaningful/useful in my family as some universal endorsement of that approach by all academic families. A glance at the threads on “schools that went up or down” or “the dumbest reason a kid refused to consider a school” illustrates that families make distinctions among schools based on a whole lot of factors. Those threads are interesting, and amusing, because we chuckle about how some factor that turned someone else off, or on, would have mattered not a bit to us.
My point about quality of faculty training was that “top” faculty can be found teaching at all kinds of schools because of how tight the job market is, and that the distinction between 8, 10 and 25 is not meaningful in terms of the “education” in the classroom. “Top” faculty can be anywhere.
@Midwestmomofboys You said: " I get frustrated that acceptance rate is considered a significant metric precisely because it encourages the Chicago etc. phenomenon of jacking up numbers to reduce the acceptance rate. Chicago was a superb school twenty years ago when the acceptance rate was much higher, and it is still a superb school now when the acceptance rate is much lower. The false message to some who don’t dig beneath the simple rankings, is that Chicago is “better” now because more students apply."
Yes, academically UChicago was superb before and it is superb now. The primary reason that UChicago’s acceptance rate has dropped is because it put a couple billion dollars into its dorms, dining halls, athletic facilities, student activities, career counseling, etc. It used to be a place where you would get a great education but a grim quality of life, and now is is a place where you get a great education with a great quality of life. So top applicants are flocking to it now when they stayed away before. Moreover, in the past few decades all of the elite urban schools have done well, because city life has become more popular among students. A few decades ago, Columbia, UPenn and Johns Hopkins all accepted about two thirds of their applicants.
Anyhow, acceptance rate isn’t actually a “significant metric” in the rankings. It is 1.25% of the US News formula. UChicago didn’t affect its US News ranking by “jacking up numbers” that only affect one one-hundredth of that ranking.
I have to say that I roundly disagree with this. I have a PhD myself, from a top 10-15 program in my field, and I work as a researcher in industry (but have also taught college classes). I have lots of friends who are professors. I don’t necessarily disagree that those who attended top programs are better prepared to think at a higher level, maybe, than students who attended lower-ranked programs (although I think that has at least as much to do with the fact that top PhD programs can select undergraduate students who are already thinking and performing at higher levels as it does with the training in these programs).
But being able to think at the highest levels doesn’t necessarily translate into communicating, mentoring, and teaching, and I think those are absolutely vital for good teaching to undergrads. I don’t quite understand the logic of “well, he may not be a good teacher, but man can he think!” Simply thinking deep thoughts doesn’t help stuff the knowledge into the students’ brains.
And that’s true of both STEM professors and humanities and social science professors - there are plenty of humanities and social science professors who are such great thinkers that the university basically pays them to teach one or two graduate-level classes and spend the rest of their time thinking and writing in their offices, unfettered by undergraduates. There are lots of great thinkers whose idea of teaching is to get up and ramble in front of the class for 50 minutes.
I also think there’s a real danger in students selecting a college for some narrow field of specialty, particularly when college students change their mind about their interests all the time and the actual act of going to college may change that. I think it’s better to choose for strengths across a variety of fields and overall quality.
Why rank public vs public. What does that mean ? Why separate these out from privates ?
I can see ranking within state, for those who can only afford in state tuition,
but if you are looking nationally, the costs go up and one should consider private school in that case.