USNWR Rankings Adjusted for Teaching Excellence-More Relevant/Reflective for Students

College Search & Selection
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<p>bclintonk,
LOL-you completely don't understand where I am coming from. If I actually thought that the opinions of academics had a lot of impact on and value for those in the for-profit world, then I would care a lot about their opinions. But in the great majority of businesses, they don't. What goes on in academia is, at best, a sideshow to most of American capitalism and business. Businesses care far, far more about the students that they want to hire and how those students can help their companies than about which professor won some obscure faculty award or got published in some unknown academic publication. </p>

<p>My complaint is not that some schools are ranked highly in the world of academia. My complaint is that USNWR assigns 25% of the rankings score to PA scores, a perspective that has low real-world value. PA scores also are the cumulatively unguided viewpoints of unnamed academics when their opinions have little weight in the real world and oftentimes don't mirror the impressions of those in the business community, not to mention the views of the educational consumer (the student/alumnus). </p>

<p>As you are more recently joined to CC, you may not know that I have long advocated the inclusion of business and student/alumni opinions on the quality of the product on offer at America's universities and IMO that these views have every bit as much legitimacy as the views of academics in judging the quality/prestige of a college. As most students will graduate to the for-profit world, I would argue that employer opinions have much greater relevance to their lives and their choice of a college than the (non-standardized and admittedly uninformed) opinions of those in academia. </p>

<p>Please don't misinterpret my comments as a dismissal of academic points of view as I agree that they have some value, and especially so for certain groups of students. Continue to give some weight to the views of academics, but also recognize that there are other stakeholders with equally informed views about colleges, albeit with different priorities about what role colleges should play. </p>

<p>Finally, re my "favorite" colleges, I have written often on a broad variety of colleges. My consistently stated preference is for colleges that can offer the best undergraduate experience including great academics, great social life and great athletic life. Several colleges, spanning the PA spectrum among top colleges, fall into my most commonly identified "favorites," including:</p>

<p>Privates: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest</p>

<p>Publics: UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U Michigan, U North Carolina</p>

<p>My advocacy for any and all of these has virtually nothing to do with their PA score and everything to do with the differentiated college experience that they can offer vs their peer colleges.</p>

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<p>I mostly agree with this, though I'd exclude alums who are not really in a position to judge the quality of the current product and have every incentive to try to retroactively raise the value of their own degree by boosting their school. But current students, by all means, and employers (NOT ONLY businesses but also public sector and public interest sector employers), sure. It'll never happen, though, because it's just too costly for US News to produce that kind of extensive survey data for thousands of schools. Also, I'm not sure how you'd ever choose a representative sample of employers. Note, however, that in the much smaller world of American law schools, US News does include ratings by lawyers and judges in its ranking methodology---a crude proxy for employers, but perhaps more importantly a reflection of the views of established professionals in the field. Finally, note that the opinions of employers and current students are every bit as "subjective" as the PA ratings you regularly criticize. In the case of students the problem is compounded by the fact that very few students are really in a position to make inter-school comparisons; all they can really tell you is how satisfied they are with their own experience, though that's certainly something worth knowing.</p>

<p>As for academia being a "sideshow," you're welcome to that opinion. I happen to think colleges and especially research universities are the most important producers of new knowledge in our world. Always have been, always will be, but in our increasingly knowledge-driven economy, and in a world in which knowledge is expanding exponentially, it's terribly short-sighted to downplay the central role of academia. If the U.S. has a competitive advantage in the global economy of the 21st century, it's in the strength of our colleges and universities, in their capacity to generate new knowledge and to attract and train the best and the brightest, operating as "talent magnets" on a global scale. There are some worrying signs that advantage is eroding a bit, not so much because our colleges and universities are slipping but because others are investing heavily to catch up. Also, growing economic opportunities in rising developing countries like China and India means a lot of talented people who in previous generations would have come here, gotten an education and stayed are now repatriating their talent and expertise to their native lands and competing with us, sometimes quite effectively. I don't begrudge them that. Competition is good for them, and it can be good for us, so long as we choose to invest enough to stay in the game.</p>

<p>Do businesses care about all that? Some do, in fact. Others don't have the luxury of focusing on such large, long-term, and diffuse goals, and are singularly focused on their own bottom line. You're right, they're mainly just looking for talent to plug into their operations. My own view has always been that, except in technical fields like engineering, many businesses don't really even care all that much about the value added by the postsecondary educational process; they're more interested in using selective colleges as a sorting mechanism to help them identify the best and the brightest, who will then get their most important training and skills development on-the-job. If that's right, then the opinions of employers will tell us more about the selectivity of a college than the value of the educational product that's delivered there. But for prospective students anticipating the job search four years hence, how a school is viewed by employers is still valuable information. Though as I said, we won't be seeing that information in US News anytime soon.</p>

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<p>Hawkette--If in fact you believe that PA scores are the "unguided viewpoints of unnamed academics" then why would you use the "Teaching Excellence" survey at all, since it reflects the same unguided viewpoints of unnamed academics. If you were being logical, you would not use either one, rather than replacing one flawed (according to you) bit of data with another.</p>

<p>I think that is what leads many of us to conclude that your biases skew your posts and your judgment. You create these threads that are not very logical and complain bitterly that we don't want to discuss the issues--the reason that I often do not wish to discuss the so-called issues with you is that I think you are creating inaccurate lists that don't make sense. I simply don't accept many of your premises.</p>

<p>Even in this recent post, you have mixed up several different ideas, probably because you don't want to admit that your replacement of PA with Teaching Excellence is irrational (you sort of remind me of a high school debater, or perhaps a presidential candidate, who was taught never to acknowledge a mistake and if someone suggests there's a mistake in your reasoning, try to turn the discussion to another issue). Rather than discussing teaching excellence, now you are saying that it is the opinions of businesses that matter more and that we should include the views of students/businesspeople in our hypothetical survey.</p>

<p>This is an interesting view, but completely different from your initial posts. I personally think that it would not work very well to include employer information. If you think that academics have very little insight about schools and academics, imagine how much less business people would have. They would probably give you information that would still tout some of the Ivies and then include local schools from which they have hired employees. They would have no knowledge of many/most of the schools on the list and even if an individual from Duke were more competent than an individual from Penn, I don't necessarily think that would say much about the schools.</p>

<p>While I know I'm being somewhat naive, I hope that the reason that most students attend college is to learn about areas and viewpoints different than their own, investigate academic areas they might not have considered, meet thought-provoking and intelligent professors, have fun, make lifelong friends and generally mature and grow, not necessarily to pick the school that is most attractive to employers.</p>

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<p>When all else fails Hawk always falls back on those unkown employers who should be ranking colleges. Whatever.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Several colleges, spanning the PA spectrum among top colleges, fall into my most commonly identified "favorites," including:</p>

<p>Privates: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Hawkette: Explain to me again how the athletic, academic, and social life differs at Princeton or Cornell vis-a-vis Northwestern or Georgetown?</p>

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<p>Bclintonk,
I agree with perhaps 95% of what you wrote. In the creation of new knowledge, I don’t dispute that academia plays a role, but IMO much, much more comes out of the private sector, eg, the future of the technology industry, the healthcare industry, etc. is significantly more heavily tied to their own R&D efforts rather than what might be coming out of Stanford or Berkeley. Those colleges and others will have some impact, but it’s not like Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman et al are waiting for academia to create the technologies that will allow their businesses to remain competitive in the future. However, no question that American (and increasingly non-American) universities are graduating the student talent that will provide the solutions and new technologies of tomorrow. To me, teaching/developing them is the most important role that academia can play, but I suspect that you would not value this as greatly as I. And as far as the US keeping its lead or not, I think that much of this will be out of our hands as the emerging economic powers of China, India, and others will increasingly boost their own resources to retain talent and that inexorably will lead to America’s relative decline as other countries/economies catch up.</p>

<p>Midatlmom,
Please stop misrepresenting my posts. As noted earlier (twice), I favor NO subjective opinions for the creation of college rankings. If we are going to have any subjective imputs, I’d prefer that they be directly relevant to the undergraduate students. In that case, that includes employers and the students themselves in addition to the views of academics as they relate to the undergraduate teaching that is provided.</p>

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<p>"Midatlmom,
Please stop misrepresenting my posts. As noted earlier (twice), I favor NO subjective opinions for the creation of college rankings"</p>

<p>You have got to be kidding.</p>

<p>The choice of which objective data is used and how it is used is subjective. Therefore the rankings are subjective.</p>

<p>You can never have anything but subjective rankings, when deciding which schools are best, no matter how much objecitve data is used.</p>

<p>It can't happen.</p>

<p>That last statement is objective.</p>

<p>You can rank schools by objective data such as which schools have the students with highest SAT averages, but that is all the ranking would mean... which schools have students with higher SAT scores than others. Everything else is subjective.</p>

<p>Hawkette, your posts are as subjective as anybody else's.</p>

<p>There is nothing wrong with subjective data. Humans make millions of decisions based on subjective data. We couldn't exist without subjective data.</p>

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<p>Hawkette means NO subjective input as in PA and such. </p>

<p>I wonder why he would mean that and also ask for the inclusion of recent alumni opinions to measure different academic/social standards.</p>

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<p>I know what Hawkette means. The thing is you can use only objective data to rank schools. That's fine. You can pick and choose all the objective data you want and not use subjective data. Any and all opinions about which school is better are still subjective.</p>

<p>It's always subjective. </p>

<p>Using only objective data doesn't make your opinions more valid than anybody else or make your opinions any less subjective than anybody else.</p>

<p>So, complaining about subjective data is meaningless. The rankings are subjective with the subjective data or without the subjective data.</p>

<p>The number 3 ranked school in USNews is not necessarily the number 3 best school with or without subjective data being used.</p>

<p>There can never be a consensus about where schools should rank.</p>

<p>So why say the schools I like are better than the schools you like?</p>

<p>Or imply that because I don't use subjective data and you do, my rankings are right and yours are wrong?</p>

<p>By the way Bourne, my rankings are right and whatever yours are, they are wrong. I'm sure you use some info that I think is irrelevant; therefore, you are wrong. ;)</p>

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<p>^^ That leads to chaos? </p>

<p>Why all these socialistic philosophies about rankings being completely meaningless? Is our morale so lacking?</p>

<p>Edit: Ahh Dstark, that's no fun.</p>

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<p>Hawkette, here is your original post</p>

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<p>If you don't believe that subjective opinions are valid, why would you have bothered to include the Teaching Excellence stats? What is the purpose of replacing one flawed subjective number with another flawed subjective number? And, as Bourne has just stated, why would you ask for the inclusion of alumni and employer opinions, both of which would be highly subjective?</p>

<p>I am not misquoting you--you are trying to use subjective numbers to bolster your own opinions (after all, as you point out, the newly created list is, according to you, more reflective of a better undergraduate experience). </p>

<p>If you truly don't want any subjective measures used, then you would simply eliminate the PA score and run the numbers without these scores (which I'm sure you have done somewhere in your plethora of threads).</p>

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<p>I'm talking production of new basic knowledge in all forms, not just technological innovation which is largely taking what's already known at a basic research level and putting it to new applications. Industry is generally better at the latter, academia at the former, but the basic research piece is the enabler and essential precondition of the technological innovation. Take nanotechnology, for example. We're now seeing an explosion of new technologies in this area coming primarily out of the private sector, but it's been nearly a half-century in the making since the physicist Richard Feynman first described the theoretical possibility of manipulating materials at the scale of individual atoms and molecules in 1959. The development of cluster science and the discovery of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures did not occur until the 1980s, most of it the work of university scientists, though certainly with a contribution from privately sponsored research labs. Once the basic science and basic technologies for manipulating materials at these scales were in place it became much easier for private sector R&D shops to perfect the process technologies and discover or develop new applications. But the fundamental advances in knowledge that made the new technologies possible came primarily from academia.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Finally, re my "favorite" colleges, I have written often on a broad variety of colleges. My consistently stated preference is for colleges that can offer the best undergraduate experience including great academics, great social life and great athletic life. Several colleges, spanning the PA spectrum among top colleges, fall into my most commonly identified "favorites," including:</p>

<p>Privates: Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest</p>

<p>Publics: UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U Michigan, U North Carolina</p>

<p>My advocacy for any and all of these has virtually nothing to do with their PA score and everything to do with the differentiated college experience that they can offer vs their peer colleges.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>If one chooses to attack Hawkette, it should be for her methodology, and not for her opinions. In the past, she HAS documented the reasons why she prefers certain schools over others, and I believe her to be correct that her analysis of the value of the PA is not based on her preferences for certain schools.</p>

<p>For the record, I believe that one can share her conclusions (or most of them at least) about the overweighing of a misleading and manipulated element such as the PA and have a list of favorite schools that is greatly different from hers.</p>

<p>A list that mixes such schools as "Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest, UC Berkeley, U Virginia, UCLA, U Michigan, U North Carolina" HAS to be purely subjective. </p>

<p>A negative opinion on the current (ab)use of the Peer Assessment by the USNews has little to do with subjectivity. The same cannot be said about the assessment of the PA supporters who are simply blinded by the positive impact of said assessment on their favorite public school's rankings. </p>

<p>Voil</p>

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<p>My school scores sufficiently high in this ranking for me to consider it valid.</p>

<p>Isn't that how we all consider these things?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
It'll never happen, though, because it's just too costly for US News to produce that kind of extensive survey data for thousands of schools. Also, I'm not sure how you'd ever choose a representative sample of employers.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>A couple good points in there ... There would be too much of bias towards mainstream businesses hiring for mainstream positions. How is Goldman Sachs' rating of Harvard vs Yale vs Princeton for ibanking entry level positions relevant in any way to the architecture major at Cornell or the theater major at Northwestern? At that point, it might as well devolve into ratings / rankings of individual programs.</p>

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<p>Xiggi, </p>

<p>"A negative opinion on the current (ab)use of the Peer Assessment by the USNews has little to do with subjectivity"</p>

<p>Uhh Xiggi, isn't an opinion, by definition, subjective? ;)</p>

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<p>dstark,
In case you missed them, I have recently created several threads suggesting that students should ignore the rankings, focus on the individual data points and make their own judgments about the proper weight for each metric as applied to their own interests. </p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/529917-part-i-ignore-rankings-look-data-retention-graduation-rates.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/529917-part-i-ignore-rankings-look-data-retention-graduation-rates.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/530998-part-ii-ignore-rankings-look-data-graduation-differential.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/530998-part-ii-ignore-rankings-look-data-graduation-differential.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/532084-part-iii-ignore-rankings-look-data-faculty-resources.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/532084-part-iii-ignore-rankings-look-data-faculty-resources.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/533014-part-iv-ignore-rankings-focus-data-financial-resources.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/533014-part-iv-ignore-rankings-focus-data-financial-resources.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/534514-part-v-ignore-rankings-focus-data-alumni-giving.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/534514-part-v-ignore-rankings-focus-data-alumni-giving.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/537654-part-vi-ignore-rankings-focus-data-selectivity.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/537654-part-vi-ignore-rankings-focus-data-selectivity.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>midatlmom,</p>

<p>I don't know how much more explicitly I can state my position on the use of subjective inputs than I already did in posts # 10 and # 40. Please reread and let me know if you need further explanation. </p>

<p>bclintonk,
Of course there is some knowledge being created at the university level (one would hope so with all of the money being spent!), but I hope you would agree that a university's reputation should be far more than what its technical research labs have created, whether now or in the past. I would also ask how much of this research work relates to the undergraduate experience and what is actually means to the matriculating student (and especially to one in a non-technical field).</p>

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<p>Hawkette, I don't disagree with you on everything :)</p>

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<p>Well, it could also be a belief or a conclusion held with confidence, or a judgment based on special knowledge and given by an expert (as in a medical opinion), or represent the prevailing view (as in public opinion), or even a formal statement by a court or other adjudicative body of the legal reasons and principles for the conclusions of the court. </p>

<p>Pick your poison!</p>

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<p>Xiggi, subjective is subjective. </p>

<p>All those poisons are subjective. </p>

<p>No matter how much I think my opinion is factual, it's subjective. You can't change subjective to objective. </p>

<p>If you can, you can become as famous as Feynman.</p>