US News to Nondorf: Drop Dead

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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@Cue7 , would you ever entertain the thought that a different conclusion could be drawn from the disparity between UChicago’s rank and its endowment: viz. that a huge endowment is not the necessary condition of a great University? That disparity could be telling us that Chicago can be successful in its own terms rather than forever trying and failing to be HYSP.

Look, no one would deny that a larger endowment for the U of C would be a good thing. I merely make the modest point that the pathways to a great University are more diverse than that; that your rigid Marxist-turned-upside-down analysis leaves out way too much. I am more inclined as a Weberian to see a cultural preference lurking behind all our pretense of dispassionate analysis. You are frank to indicate a preference for wealthy students, wealthy alumni, and wealthy universities. That’s how you rank universities. I see wealth as neither inherently good nor inherently bad. I want to know what’s happening inside universities - as I do individuals. That’s how I rank them. More importantly, that’s why people are drawn to them.

Great wealth can be a blessing, but it can also be a burden. Kids who come from modest wealth can accomplish much, very often much more than those born to it. They can be good, wise, happy, in a plethora of ways. There is no single invariable formula for success in the lives of all us multitudinous idiosyncratic human beings. If there’s room in our world for so many qualitative judgments of almost everything else, why must there be only one model for our elite educational institutions?

We will see whether your predictions of the future failure of your alma mater hold true. You have been making those predictions virtually since you left the place two decades ago. They have not so far panned out. Permabears are eventually right, however. As Gibbon described when we read him in HUM 2 and Wesrern Civ, all things great decay and fall. Why not the University of Chicago? Come to think of it, why not Harvard? Why not Stanford? In the end we will all be dead, a famous man once said. He was right.

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TLDR Summary: To be blunt, none of these matter if our measure of a great university is to be top 1, 2 or 3 in USNews because it has a bias that no amount of money can change.

Details:

Why are we accepting USNews’ redefinition of what a great university is hook, line and sinker? I submit that UChicago’s deficiency is not because it has lower pell grant population, or lower 7 year graduation rate or no engineering school or wahatever you may think of. Its true deficiency is that it has no pull on whoever is cooking the books at USNews.

The reason why UChicago is not number one in USNews is the same reason why Caltech was only number one once in 2000 and Stanford has never again been number one since 1988: USNews cooks the books

It was so obvious in 2000 that Caltech will repeat as number one so they immediately changed the ranking criteria.

Even Stanford was a victim to this. Back in the 80s, Stanford was #1 thrice but only because it came to a point that the public thought it ridiculous that it was being ignored. So the news rag gave it a nod. After 3 rankings though, USNews again changed their methodology to put their favorites on top and drop Stanford to number 6. Since then, Stanford’s average ranking was 5

Let me repeat: If any school dislodges or gets close to dislodging one of 3 schools from #1, they WILL change their criteria to something that will catapult one of the 3 to number one, and preferably all of the 3 to the top 3.

That same cooking of books has happened over and over again. Sometimes they don’t even wait for anyone to dislodge their favorites; they preemptively change the criteria before anyone gets too close.

USNews is not an objective arbiter of who is the best. While its tiers (top 10, 20, 30) may be acceptably accurate, its clear as day that USNews has a fetish/addiction to three schools that it refuses give up.

Didn’t their first MBA ranking have Princeton as number 1 even though the school does not have a graduate business school?

To conclude: Let this all be viewed with the right perspective. Dont forget that UChicago’s “slide” is due to USNews manipulation of the criteria. It was not due to something bad that happened at UChicago or a marginal improvement at other schools relative to UChicago. That UChicago could not defend its number 3 spot from HYP is not the fault of UChicago’s endowment or its quality of education or its student body’s scores or intellect or its faculty or its facilities or its spending … it is because USNews cooked the books and will always cook the books to make sure that its list will have an East Coast elite at the top 3, and no school, not the Great California Schools, much less the Great Midwestern School, really stand a chance against their bias.

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Year to year consistency is important. So is choosing metrics that are not easy for the various institutions to manipulate. Pells, admit rates, yields, even guidance counselor ratings are all relatively easy to tweak by the admissions department. So even if US News continued to use the same metrics year-over-year, schools will work to game the system.

On the other hand, some metrics are very hard to tweak short-term. Examples are quantifiable measures for faculty quality or research, or (normalized) numbers of alums in influential positions in industry. One can argue with the relative weighting given to these measures, but as long as they are consistent year over year, then any change is going to be a genuine strengthening or weakening of the institution in that category.

Such measures are also more in line with the primary purpose of a research university which is, of course, to provide cutting-edge solutions to big problems. Graduating everyone in four years is important, as is increasing outreach to and access for under-served groups. But those things compliment the mission - they don’t substitute for it.

Finally, the easier it is to change the metric, the more likely is the ranking company to allow social pressure or “correctness” to dictate what’s important and what is not. For instance, selectivity used to be important - now it’s not. Some day, UChicago might surge back to third place simply because US News decided to tweak the metrics to reward test optional schools.

So I guess my own TLDR on this topic would be: Get rid of any metrics having to do with the Admissions office, and focus on how well the university does what 99.9% of matriculants expect it to do.