Niles went to Yale and Cambridge. Fraiser went to Harvard and Oxford… A big distinction.
^^^ Nah, Harvard trumps all. Oxford is superfluous 
In one episode (S5E17), Frasier says Oxford is better than Harvard.
He was just being modest!
He actually said he went to college at Harvard instead of in Cambridge? Clear evidence that the show was fiction!
Thread appears to be winding down, but can’t let this quote go uncontested. Any undergraduate intent on graduate school should make every effort to participate in research and publish their work. Participation in undergraduate research and authorship on a research paper is probably the single most important thing a student can do to boost their chance of admission to graduate school. Heck, these days many * high school* students are co-authors on papers.
Leiden rankings are probably more informative for STEM majors: http://www.leidenranking.com
I learned to like beer in Germany so of course I am a beer snob. Glad to see someone pointed out that one of the reasons Bud tastes so bad is they use rice. Totally off topic, but I remember years ago (early 90s probably) Consumer Reports did a beer rating that put Bud or Miller at the top. They got so much flack that the next year they just put beers on a chart showing their characteristics.
You sure Frasier didn’t go to college “near Boston”?
@dfbdfb, “school in Boston”.
And even for students who don’t head to graduate/professional school, it has all sorts of positive educational outcomes.
Not correct. “Financial resources per student” is purely a measure of spending per student. Endowment is not a factor in the US News ranking, except insofar as it allows some schools to spend more than others. Here’s the US News definition:
I think the Brown entry IS wrong. Amherst is listed with $2,149,202,662 which is the total, not per-student, amount.
Good point, but the same must also be said about Payscale, which is based entirely on self-reported, unverified anecdotal claims about salary. Like Parchment, Payscale is subject to false reporting and even intentional manipulation. E.g., the frat bros at any given school could get together one Sunday afternoon and submit fictitious and inflated salary reports for several thousand equally fictitious alumni, thereby burnishing said school’s image by making it appear that its alumni go on to uncommonly lucrative careers.
^True, but here’s the thing, theres a lot that goes into a publication that is completely beyond the student’s control, and graduate schools know this (at least, MD/PhD programs certainly do). Many graduate programs do not even require publication for awarding a PhD. It’s a topic of debate as to whether it should be a strict requirement for the following reasons:
- What is the person gets scooped? If you spend your entire PhD working on something popular, there is a chance that someone will beat you to the punch. This makes your work unpublishable. Does it invalidate the work that you did though? Do we want to discourage students from pursuing popular topics for fear of being scooped?
- What if a lab is prominent enough that the PI will only publish in Nature/Cell/Science? It’s quite possible to do a fantastic amount of work that could easily get published in a fantastic journal that isn’t one of the big 3. Do we want to discourage students from pursuing those professors because their excellent work may not get published until years later?
- Non-scientific hurdles. This one I can easily speak on from personal experience. I did data analysis on data from a clinical trial (drug had failed, was using answers from the questionnaires they had to fill out for other stuff). My PI was ready to submit not 1, but 2 papers from the work I had done in a single summer. He was extremely impressed with my work, and so one paper I would be 2nd author and the other I would be first author. The clinical trial, sponsored by the VA, got held up because of a senate inquiry into the trial itself. My data, being based on the clinical trial, could not be published until after the main trial had been published. The papers were not published until 5 and 5.5 years after I left, and my name was bumped down the authorship list to 4th and 3rd (with honestly, not enough new work done in my opinion to justify putting residents currently active in the guy’s group at the time ahead of me, the graduate student at another institution who was in his lab 4.5+ years prior)
While this is more in regards to graduate students and hard requirements for PhDs, they still apply to the value of an undergraduate with a paper under their belt.
There are troves and troves of graduate students (and yes, even at the top programs) with no publications under their belts. They had extensive experience and thus could talk in depth about their research as well as good LORs from respected PIs. Those are more important than whether your name can be found on pubmed.
Also, keep in mind, I’m talking about undergraduate research performance relative to graduate student research performance. My whole purpose for making that statement is in regards to the question of the importance of publishing on undergraduate education. A fantastic undergraduate student might contribute to 1 or 2 papers during their 4 years. A PhD student, in that same 4 years, could easily contribute to 3-11 papers (speaking from people I know). Which one would you rather have for 4 years? Unless you value it (which you should, and too much publication weighting would devalue it) it’s simply too detrimental to your productivity to train an undergraduate vs. a graduate student or post-doc.
Additionally, when it comes to middle authorship, people often get very loose with the ethical guidelines as to what constitutes authorship. A ranking that awarded points for undergraduates getting middle authorship would almost certainly make this worse.
Any scientist will tell you about the flaws in the current peer review system, and even worse flaws exist in publication/scientific power ranking systems (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/787.full?rss=1#pageid-content). I’m not convinced necessarily that there’s a better system out there, but the system in place is certainly not perfect, and I would be wary about the effects of undergraduate education if publications received too much weight. Notice my italics. I’m not saying publications are a meaningless metric, only that we should be wary of their drawbacks as we toss them out as a potential metric of undergraduate academia.
Ooops, you are right. I didn’t realize “Adjunct Lager” was a thing (I mean using corn and rice): http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/style/38/
Yes, of course, the US News entry on Brown’s endowment IS obviously wrong, by an order of magnitude… According to NACUBO, Brown’s endowment at the end of 2014 stood at $2,999,749,000, i.e., just shy of $3 billion—not $299,749,000 or just shy of $300 million as US News misreports it. My point is that this error doesn’t affect Brown’s US News ranking in any way, because the size of the endowment is not a factor in the US News ranking formula. “Financial resources” in the US News ranking means spending per student, not endowment per student.
Not for the academic job market, though.
Also, be careful about making field-specific claims and generalizing them. For example, in my field, being scooped doesn’t make something unpublishable (to the extent it’s actually a possibility). Some fields also have a tradition of undergrads doing serious research, so it’s just expected—not necessarily that they’ll have published papers, but that they’ll have been involved in really seriously substantial work. Finally, the number of papers someone might be involved in during their time in a program will vary—in, say, literature, 11 published papers by a PhD student over 5–6 years or so is just crazy talk.
@dfbdfb that’s why in my post that some mom responded to I made it clear I was talking from the perspective of MD/PhD training.
The academic job market, in my field, does not start until after grad school (if you consider post docs to be part of the job market - I personally don’t since they are still making ~40k). I already said that for graduate training, publications are critical.
Your post, in my opinion, only further proves the danger of trying to use publications for ranking.
@iwannabe_Brown—got it. I was reacting to what I thought was you saying undergraduate research products aren’t important/worthwhile generally, not specifically in reference to rankings. Sorry about that.
No worries. To be clear: What I meant is an undergraduate can easily have a very educational research experience without getting a publication by the end and so to use publications as a ranking metric could be detrimental to undergraduate research.
No worries. To be clear: What I meant is an undergraduate can easily have a very educational research experience without getting a publication by the end and so to use publications as a ranking metric could be detrimental to undergraduate research.