North Carolina is remarkably well represented in the undergraduate teaching category. With 4 colleges in the university and LAC categories, it outperforms every state except Minnesota (also 4). </p>
<h1>1 Davidson (LACs)</h1>
<h1>1 Elon (Regional-South)</h1>
<h1>8 Duke (Universities)</h1>
<h1>13 UNC (Universities)</h1>
<h1>13 Wake (Universities)</h1>
<p>In fact, Elon in particular performed extremely well. It made the following USNWR lists of “outstanding examples of academic programs that are believed to lead to student success”:
[ul][<em>]First year seminars
[</em>]Internships
[<em>]Senior capstone
[</em>]Undergraduate research
[<em>]Learning communities
[</em>]Study abroad
[*]Service learning[/ul]The only category it failed to obtain is writing in the disciplines. No other college seems to have made more than 2 or 3 of the lists. No wonder Elon is becoming such a hot college!</p>
<p>Is the percentage of faculty who are full time reported in a different manner as all other faculty related criteria? It wouldn’t make sense for U Chicago and Columbia to report relatively lower percentages of full time faculty if they could easily be inflated along with the resources devoted to faculty category, as some seem to suggest.</p>
<p>Kind of like how my high school Chemistry teacher curved tests. The best person(s) get 100 and it all goes down from there.</p>
<p>(And no, getting everything wrong intentionally doesn’t work. He knows if you’re doing it and only an idiot would take the risk that everyone else is doing the same thing they are.)</p>
<p>Not sure why you’re surprised. UCLA’s been ranked in the top 25 for at least 15 years in the ranking’s history, including the initial year it was ranked by the magazine. Neither it nor Berkeley have been strongly affected by the budget cuts. UCSD, on the other hand, is now tied with UC Davis (THAT’S got to hurt.)</p>
<p>Michigan’s been more or less at the same rank for several years. I think it’s just another one of those schools that doesn’t play the US NEWS game. Stanford is another one, which i believe contributes to its rank.</p>
<p>With regard to PA score, i think its ridiculous that UCLA’s score is lower than UVA and Michigans. Yet i did smirk when i saw it ranked above others (<em>cough</em> Georgetown <em>cough</em>)</p>
<p>beyphy is correct in his statement that UCLA and Cal have been least affected by budget cuts. When people understand this and finally accept reality, it will make for less surprising events. Ya sure, call us both biased, but the University of California is not about to let its two flagship campuses get hit hard by recession and lose respect and prestige. Sure, library hours got cut by about 5 hours on weekends/summers and free tutoring got some of its hours cut, but if that’s the only thing that’s happening during the recession, that’s basically nothing. Count the fact that UCLA is building a $100+ million Eye and Genetics research center, renovating football and basketball facilities, building a state of the art on campus hotel and conference center, as well as building a new engineering research building and you wouldn’t really think anything even slightly stagnant is actually going on (all that is somewhere to the tune of ~$.5 billion in infrastructure investment in less than a decade during “the recession”). There is just no reason that the government wouldn’t prioritize the growth of the two most important public schools in the country in needy times. When people understand that, it will all start to make sense.</p>
<p>On a side note, ya UCSD is in deep *****. As much as I don’t want them to take UCLA and Cal money and allocate it to UCSD, it’s a bad day when the Tritons are ranked the same as UC Davis and get professors stolen by USC left and right.</p>
<p>Brown lacks first-rate professional schools and departments, and peer-assessment, a heavily weighted measure, is biased toward these factors.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>I don’t understand why Dartmouth ranks among the top ten UGs. Besides being a fertile breeding ground for WASP financiers, it does not compare to its T10 peers.</p>
<p>IMO, Northwestern should occupy #10, Cornell #12, and Dartmouth #15.</p>
<p>“Brown lacks first-rate professional schools and departments, and peer-assessment, a heavily weighted measure, is biased toward these factors.”
Brown also doesn’t have the financial resources and the quality of students (measured by SAT) to be in the top 10.</p>
<p>“I don’t understand why Dartmouth ranks among the top ten UGs. Besides being a fertile breeding ground for WASP financiers, it does not compare to its T10 peers.”
Dartmouth is also a top feeder to the top law schools, medical schools, and PhD programs.</p>
<p>At Dartmouth’s graduation last year, no National Anthem, Pledge of Allegiance or God Bless America, just “wow aren’t we great” sound bites. </p>
<p>This was told to me by a WWII vet, who was extremely dissappointed and felt insulted that his years of combat were not acknowledged so that today’s current day students can prosper. I wasn’t there.</p>
<p>I think the US NEWS report rankings will mean less and less over the next few years as folks are just worried about paying for school and more publications have their own rankings. The US News “makes hay while the sun shines” but I really don’t care what they say anymore - schools skew their statiscs by offering “free” or “preferred” applications to increase their #s. etc. </p>
<p>These publications fueled the pursuit of top tier schools, increased construction to make schools more attractive, which increased tuitions (the more expensive the better?)
Why do they print them - as a service to their readers ? No b/c they sell magazines.
Just a few thoughts.</p>
<p>Quote from gold3n, post #68
“That’s unfortunate about USC.** Hopefully now you understand more so than before how meaningless US News rankings are. **”</p>
<p>Quote from gold3n, post #71
"**On a side note, ya UCSD is in deep *******. As much as I don’t want them to take UCLA and Cal money and allocate it to UCSD, it’s a bad day when the Tritons are ranked the same as UC Davis "</p>
<p>yup. Good logic there</p>
<hr>
<p>A bit disappointed that UCSD fell 1 spot, but glad it’s with UC Davis, a great university of its own.
Also, don’t forget: there are academic university rankings out there where UCSD beats both CAL/UCLA and lists where Davis beat UCLA/UCSD.</p>
<p>Just to show, you might not want to put all your marbles on 1 set of rankings.</p>
<p>Xiggi, I was wondering what kind of hidden information you think are in the UofC and Columbia CDSs that might shed more light on the picture? Does it have anything to do with transfer students? Just based on my small world, it seems Columbia accepts a lot, yet they have a 99% freshman retention rate. Do you think they grow their class size after freshman year?</p>
<p>Thanks for the info of PA and HS counselor rating. I believe that undergraduate academic reputation index was calculated, most likely, by summing up these two scores and normalizing the summation to the scale of 100. I just wondering how does this index (list) look like among those elite colleges?</p>
</p>