<p>Well, let me offer a partial defense of RML’s position. While I agree with you that hiring may be mostly regional, the fact is, the Berkeley brand name is indeed one of the most powerful in higher education. Berkeley undergrads do have access to top-line recruiters that students at the vast majority of schools do not enjoy, and the Berkeley brand name can open doors that the average school cannot, if used correctly (hence, one criticism I have of the Berkeley experience is that you’re not taught how to leverage the brand name to maximum effect, and are forced to learn how to do so through trial and error). For example, a Berkeley undergrad does have a chance of landing at the elite consulting and banking firms. Granted, the chance is not as strong as that of students at HYPSM, but still a chance. That’s far more than the students at SouthEast Missouri State can say. </p>
<p>To be sure, I can agree with you that prestige is often times overrated, and that may be a reason to select against Berkeley. But that’s also an argument to select against HYPSM. In short, whatever prestige-oriented reasons may exist to choose HYPSM, the same reasons exist for choosing Berkeley. HYPSM may have non-prestige-oriented advantages over Berkeley, but nevertheless, if prestige is the metric at play, then Berkeley is more desirable than the vast majority of other schools.</p>
<p>So, let me get this right–people do things not because they like to do them, but because it’s “the thing to do”? (post 199)</p>
<p>Sorry, but I’m not buying that argument. Somehow I think people who like baseball play baseball and those who like football play football and those who like soccer play soccer, and so on for tennis, and badminton, and golf, etc.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen a bunch of soccer fans decide they have to go play baseball (or watch it) and not play (or watch) soccer because it’s “the thing to do”.</p>
<p>It’s my belief that people do research (and go into a major) because they are interested in the subject–not because they are motivated by a professor (after they are already in that field of study) to do research in order to improve a grade.</p>
<p>P.S. I do agree with your conclusions in post 200, however.</p>
<p>"Furthermore, subjectivity does not imply unmeasurability. Why even have movie ratings systems such as rottentomatoes at all if movie quality cannot actually be measured? Why even confer Academy Awards if movie artistic quality cannot be measured? Similarly, why have students fill out teaching evaluations, if teaching quality cannot actually be measured? Why offer Distinguished Teaching Awards? Are we simply trying to waste everybody’s time?</p>
<p>When you ask people…You are not measuring movie quality or the quality of teaching quality but opinions about movie quality and and the quality of teaching quality and those are very different things.</p>
<p>If I measure the warmth of the water in a swimming pool by using a thermometer, and it is 80 degrees that is objective. If I ask people whether the water is warm or cool…that is subjective. Not the same thing.</p>
<p>“Uh huh, and if they really cared about research, don’t you think that more of them would pursue PhD degrees, or at least master’s in their field? I guess that weren’t that interested in it.”</p>
<p>Maybe…or maybe they were interested in research but were more interested in something else. Or maybe they found a job where they could do research without a masters or phd.</p>
<p>sakky, the Academy Awards is like USNWR’s PA surveys…insiders voting for insiders… which, in my opinion, is very meaningful and more prestigious. However, it’s often criticized because it doesn’t reflect national audience tastes. Transformers or No Country for Old Men…one is obviously a much more critically acclaimed movie, however, which movie did audiences choose to see more? </p>
<p>Transformers is akin to great teaching awards…mass popularity.
No Country for Old Men is akin to the Academy Awards Best Picture…best when judged among peers in the industry (aka peer assessment).</p>
<p>Ucb,
Weak. Transformers is not the right analogy for great teaching. That’s slighting great teaching. </p>
<p>Great teaching is about a lot more than entertaining. </p>
<p>I think a much better analogy might be something like Slumdog Millionaire, The Lives of Others, Schindler’s List or older movies like My Fair Lady or Lawrence of Arabia or even my fave, Gone with the Wind. All are movies that I think the masses would agree are far more than just great entertainment.</p>
<p>These comments are ironic to the extreme, for precisely the same could be said regarding research-oriented departmental rankings. How do I know that one particular researcher is “better” than another? How do we know that Berkeley’s English department is superior (with respect to research) than is Stanford’s English department, being ranked #1 and #2 respectively according to USNews graduate edition. Heck, how do we even know if Berkeley’s English department is superior to Ball State’s English department? Are we actually going to sit down and read every single research paper and book written by the faculty at Berkeley and Ball State in order to compare the two departments? </p>
<p>I think we can all agree that we are not going to do that. Heck, probably nobody in English academia would actually do that (rather, you would read the literature that is relevant to your particular stream of research, but not the rest.} Instead, we are going to rely on judgments made by other academics to tell us that the Berkeley English department is indeed better than the Ball State English department. But wait - isn’t that just “insiders voting for insiders”? And isn’t that just measuring opinions about departmental quality as opposed to measuring departmental quality itself (if one could indeed measure it at all)? </p>
<p>Granted, it may be a general consensus - which would include myself - that Berkeley’s English department is indeed better than Ball State’s when it comes to research. But wait- what’s this? “Consensus can be wrong”. So maybe Berkeley isn’t actually as good as Ball State after all.</p>
<p>Now to be fair, there are some objective measures within academia to determine whether one researcher, or an entire department in aggregate, truly is more eminent than another. But those measures are few and far between, and are far more subjective than most people think. For example, one might argue that the number of publications in “top journals” serves to determine quality, but that begs the question of who decides exactly which journals are “top journals”. Some have proposed pure citation count, but that connotes the problem that many citations are generated specifically to debunk the article in question. {For example, the Fleischmann & Pons 1989 cold fusion paper is one of the most heavily cited papers in physics history, but many of the citations have served to criticize the paper, and the paper itself has been widely acknowledged as unreliable.} </p>
<p>The upshot is that every single method of assessing the true research quality of a particular department ultimately boils down to a subjective measure made by insiders. We trust that Berkeley’s departments are filled with top researchers because the rankings say so, even though we don’t actually know that for sure. </p>
<p>Yet I find it interesting indeed that when it comes to movies and teaching ratings, everybody has a problem because the ratings are “subjective”, yet nobody ever talks about the subjectivity accorded to departmental research rankings. Personally, I see no reason to believe that movies and teaching ratings are any more subjectively rated than are departmental research rankings. </p>
<p>Heck, I would argue that the opposite is probably true. After all, regular people do watch both good and bad movies and regular people have surely experienced good and bad teaching while in high school. But regular people don’t read academic papers, and they certainly don’t have the wherewithal to judge which academic papers are good and which are bad. So if Battlefield Earth were to win Best Picture or some terrible teacher nonetheless won the Distinguished Teaching Award, people would know something was amiss. But if a terrible academic department was nevertheless ranked #1, nobody outside academia would know that there was a problem.</p>
<p>Oh come on now, Calcruzer. Surely you can understand the power of social marketing, especially of the transformative kind. Heck, the entire marketing industry is predicated on convincing people to want things they don’t really need. </p>
<p>Let me give you some examples. Be perfectly honest: why did most smokers take up the habit in the first place? I think we can all agree that they did so not because they made a rational individual cost/benefit analysis to start smoking. Rather they usually do so because of peer pressure and a desire to appear “cool”. Tobacco companies have incited those forces for decades by marketing a ‘cool’ Marlboro Man-esque image. </p>
<p>Similarly, why is beer so popular? Let’s be perfectly honest, the taste of beer is disgusting. {If the goal is simply to get drunk for cheap, the alcopops such as Smirnoff’s Ice are a far more taste-friendly way to do so.} Beer is popular because of social tradition - i.e. the trope of “going out for a beer with the guys from work” (nobody says they’re going out for an alcopop with the guys) - and because of the heavy marketing that reinforces beer’s image. If I drink beer, I instantly become the coolest guy in the world and numerous bikini models appear out of thin air, or at least that’s the message that the beer commercials convey. Heck, the typical college experience is replete with times of heavy drinking not because students rationally want to, but simply because others around them are doing so. {In business schools, the culture of heavy drinking and carousing is not only magnified, but also euphemized as “networking”.} </p>
<p>Let’s take the example back to sports. You say that “people who like baseball play baseball and those who like football play football and those who like soccer play soccer”. Really? So then exactly why is it that soccer is so much more popular in other countries than it is in the United States? Culturally speaking, the US is basically an offshoot extension of European, and specifically British, culture, yet soccer is far far more popular in the UK than it is in the US. Is it simply that people in the rest of the world just happen to enjoy soccer and Americans anomalously happen to not enjoy soccer? Conversely why is it that basketball is far more popular in the US than in the rest of the world? Or does it have to do with the differential mass marketing that backs each of the sports amongst the different regions of the world? </p>
<p>Kobe Bryant, who grew up as a young boy in Italy, has freely admitted that if he had stayed in Italy, he would have probably tried to become a professional soccer player than a basketball player, and in fact, wanted to play for AC Milan. But when his family moved back to the United States, he quickly realized that soccer was not popular, so he devoted his energies to basketball. Patrick Ewing grew up in Jamaica where he played cricket and soccer, and didn’t play basketball until high school after his family moved to the United States. Hakeem Olajuwon spent much of his childhood in Nigeria playing soccer, and never played a single game of basketball until his teens when he noticed a local tournament and decided to enter (and hence, if that tournament had never existed at all, the world might have been deprived of one of the greatest basketball players of all time.) </p>
<p>The point is that we have to appreciate the social and cultural forces - often times mediated by marketing - to push people towards behavior that they might not otherwise engage in. When an activity is tagged as “cool”, more people will want to do it. Put another way, why do companies even bother to market themselves at all, if marketing doesn’t actually shape people’s desires? Are they simply throwing money away stupidly? The NBA has been engaged in a long-running campaign to market itself internationally, i.e. encouraging youth teams, developing co-branding opportunities, etc. in an effort to expand the popularity of the game. Similarly, MLS and FIFA have been actively trying to promote the popularity of soccer in the United States. Why bother if marketing doesn’t work, because people will just play/watch the sport they like, regardless of external forces?</p>
<p>So, in other words, relatively speaking, they weren’t that interested in research. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Or maybe not. Perusing the list of jobs obtained by Berkeley graduates, I don’t exactly see a high percentage of research jobs - certainly nothing near the 52% figure cited previously, even after including students headed for masters/PhD programs. Do you? </p>
<p>I would argue that Transformers wasn’t even a true measure of actual taste, entertainment, or popularity. Not exactly. For example - professional movie critics aside - I suspect even most regular people who went to see Transformers would agree that it wasn’t really a ‘great’ movie. The movie therefore didn’t match people’s tastes, at least from a post-hoc standpoint. </p>
<p>So why did so many people see the movie? Simple: marketing. Hasbro, Paramount, and Dreamworks collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars in promoting the movie and developing marketing tie-ins through merchandising, all in an effort to convince people to watch the movie. They did so rationally, knowing that heavy marketing can indeed spur the masses to buy tickets. Movie-going is also heavily influenced by social popularity: people who consider themselves to be trendy (i.e. teens) will watch a certain movie just because they know ‘everybody else’ in their peer group has seen it too, they’ll be talking about and making references to the movie, and they need to be privy to the social conversation.</p>
<p>So, in the research of a typical English academic, what exactly is being ‘discovered’ anyway, and how do you measure it? Is there an objective method to measure whether somebody’s research on the feminist interpretations of Elizabethan poetry is ‘better’ or ‘more important’ than somebody else’s research on the role of moral discourse in the works of Chaucer? </p>
<p>If no reliable method exists, then the inescapable conclusion is that there is no way to ‘prove’ that Berkeley’s English department truly is better than Ball State’s. Any such assessment would necessarily have to be a subjective valuation conducted by insiders that hopefully reaches a consensus (but, like you said, the consensus could be wrong). Such an erroneous insider consensus would be even more likely to escape detection than it would in the case of movies for, as I said, regular people actually do watch movies. But practically nobody outside academia actually reads English research. {Heck, most people don’t even read the original literary works that the research is based upon, and hence wouldn’t be able to understand the research.} If the English academic community collectively decided to anoint a terrible department with the #1 ranking, nobody would know. </p>
<p>Even the rankings of science accomplishments boil down to a matter of subjectivity. For example, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was conferred to researchers who discovered telomeres. Important? Sure. But was that really more important than the discoveries of the numerous other contenders for the prize, such as stem cells, or vesicle transport? Maybe, maybe not, who knows? Many of important advances in science were instigated by the development of new scientific tools, usually of better measuring techniques. For example, if one researcher develops a new method of spectroscopy, and another researcher than takes that method to discover a new element, how do you objectively divide the credit? More importantly, every scientist builds off the work of others, so how do you objectively assess the contribution of any single researcher within the literature stream? </p>
<p>The upshot is that, at the end of the day, departmental rankings are subjective measures - in the nonsciences especially, but in the sciences also. There is no way to reliably and objectively rank-order all of the physics departments in the country. People might believe that Berkeley’s physics department is better than UCLA’s, but it’s impossible to objectively “know” that for sure.</p>
<p>“Even the rankings of science accomplishments boil down to a matter of subjectivity. For example, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was conferred to researchers who discovered telomeres. Important? Sure. But was that really more important than the discoveries of the numerous other contenders for the prize, such as stem cells, or vesicle transport? Maybe, maybe not, who knows? Many of important advances in science were instigated by the development of new scientific tools, usually of better measuring techniques. For example, if one researcher develops a new method of spectroscopy, and another researcher than takes that method to discover a new element, how do you objectively divide the credit? More importantly, every scientist builds off the work of others, so how do you objectively assess the contribution of any single researcher within the literature stream?” </p>
<p>The upshot is that, at the end of the day, departmental rankings are subjective measures - in the nonsciences especially, but in the sciences also. There is no way to reliably and objectively rank-order all of the physics departments in the country. People might believe that Berkeley’s physics department is better than UCLA’s, but it’s impossible to objectively “know” that for sure."</p>
<p>Rankings are subjective.</p>
<p>And subjective isn’t necessarily bad. We just have to remember that our rankings may be wrong for other people. What we value, what I value, other people may not. </p>
<p>We make decisions based on subjective input all the time. The way we use objective data can be subjective. </p>
<p>And if enough people believe something, without knowing for sure, it can lead to real results. If enough people believe Harvard is the best, Harvard will get more students wanting to go to the school. More professors wanting to teach at the school. More research dollars thrown at the school. More credibility for the research done at Harvard. More money going towards Harvard’s endowment. </p>
<p>And the belief that Harvard knows how to be fiscally prudent with its money…well almost.</p>
<p>I think post #216 is one of your better written posts.</p>
<p>And I would contend that the current rankings are wrong for the vast majority of undergrads. Most undergrads care far more about teaching quality than about research eminence, yet the current rankings say nothing about the former. If anything, the two qualities are almost certainly inversely related (at the top ranked research universities).</p>
<p>*Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate – 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,…</p>
<p>…“I think these two trends – to do more and more research and less academic engagement on the freshman level – are not unrelated,”</p>
<p>…“The incentives are obvious. If you’re a professor whose future depends on the amount of pages you produce, then all those hours you spend talking to freshmen about their majors, about their ideas, about their summer reading … really paying attention to these wayward 18-year-olds who are fresh out of high school, you’re hurting yourself,"</p>
<p>… in a research-oriented world, the undergraduate classroom is a throwaway in all too many places."*</p>
<p>Sounds like a post I could have made, and indeed, I probably have. In other words, you agree with me that high prestige universities are leveraging network effects in a self-fulfilling prophecy, regardless of the ability of the underlying system to deliver what (most) people actually want. If Microsoft produces a mediocre operating system, but everybody thinks it will dominate the industry anyway, then people install that OS, which then encourages software and peripheral vendors to design products compatible with that OS, which encourages still more people to install that OS, and so forth. </p>
<p>Yet if that is the underlying game, students considering Berkeley (or, to be fair, other top research universities) at least should understand the rules of that game. They should not consider Berkeley (or its competitors) for high quality teaching, as they probably won’t get it. Greater consideration should therefore be placed on issues of branding, networking opportunities with other students, and access to top recruiters. Whether a Berkeley English professor will write the next great expository on the deconstruction of English Renaissance Theater simply does not matter to most undergrads, even the English majors. Only a small fraction of English majors pursue graduate school, and even of those that do, only a few actually pursue grad school in English - many others pursuing ‘grad school’ in the form of law or med school (or, apparently in one case, a Harvard MBA). </p>