<p>I'm currently looking around at some schools for a potential transfer. In my research I found UMBC at 6 in Undergraduate education, and while I got a decent idea of how the rankings are made, I'm a little confused about what they actually mean. Is this a reliable figure? Can I actually expect to receive a better education than I'd get at Duke? Also, what does number 1 up and coming school mean?</p>
<p>Overall, in the very cursory research I've done I'm really impressed by this school and I'm definitely going to look into it further. Since I already wrote out this post I wanted to ask about UMBC's English and Political Science/Political Economy programs. Ultimately, wherever I go, I want to double major in English and either PoliSci or Political Econ. I noticed that the hard sciences seem to be UMBC's strong suit. </p>
I am also heavily interested in this. This school has my attention for its undergraduate education rankings/quality. I am having trouble finding any other information about the school. I am from Texas so its hard for me to get 1st hand knowledge.
Going back and reading and such, each school on the list had to have received 7 votes to be able to be on the list. Those are the 10 national schools that received at least 7 votes and they are in the order of how many votes they received, most to least. In other categories like Regional undergraduate rankings and liberal arts college rankings, most of the time there weren’t even 5 schools let alone 10 schools that received 7 votes.
Who took the vote? “College presidents, provosts and admissions deans who participated in the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey were asked to nominate up to 10 schools in their Best Colleges ranking category with a strength in undergraduate teaching.”
Besides that, UMBC has a pretty high freshmen retention rate of 86% and it maintains a 20:1 faculty to student ratio.
Going on ratemyprofessor.com it seems like most people all agree the academics are great and tough, but most people just complain about the social scene and parking.
Not sure how the rankings work, but we’ve been very impressed by the professors we’ve met via the Honors College during our visits. We met with Econ, Stats and CS departments, and all of the professors and division heads loved the kids and teaching. The professors offices were open for students. It was amazing. Every kid we met loved the school. We visited last week. Arrived at noon on a brilliant, sunny day and found to my amazement he library full of students studying. The study rooms were the same way. Kids were enjoying learning. We were told 4500 students live on campus, so there is a large, studious body living on campus.