Sadly, for the credibility of the USNews rankings, Stanford will never achieve the #1 ranking using the current methodology, even though Stanford will continue to be the most selective university in the US and have the highest yield. Oddly, selectivity and yield are minimalized in the USNews methodology. For example, USNews considers selectivity and yield to be far less important than “alumni giving.”
@prof99 and Stanford’s alumni giving is not that great if I remember correctly… .Princeton is one of the better schools for that in terms of percentage of alumni that give each year.
In terms of fund raising which is the gold standard by which universities are really compared (as opposed to alumni giving) Stanford is the top fund raising university in the country having raised 1.6 billion last year more than Harvard and Yale combined… and has been the top fund raising school 10 of the last 11 years…
but of course US News has their own agenda and will continually tweak it so the world looks just right to them:)
@prof99 Just took a cursory look at the link you provided and from I read the 6-year not the 4-year graduation rate is used in the calculation. This would not put Stanford at a material disadvantage. Does anyone know if Stanford doesn’t actually respond to the survey request for information as was claimed above? That could be a factor in their not having a better ranking. I could see this being the case especially after their recent decision not to post any early admissions stats which I think is a disservice to anyone who applied early and would have liked to have known how many students applied and were accepted, deferred, or rejected.
And to finish my point, I imagine Princeton’s relatively unglamorous location might have something to do with its cross-admit struggles with the rest of the HYPSM crew. Especially in light of how much they are centered on the undergraduate.
A school’s location, of course, having nothing at all to do with the quality of education offered, could be said to impact the overall experience. I get that.
Obviously, Stanford would be a great school anywhere, for sure, but its location has it vying with Harvard for most apps, lowest admit % and highest yield. If you want HYPSM on the East Coast, you have multiple options; in California, one. Stanford has that advantage over the rest.
Please take a look at Gerhard Casper’s letter to US News
http://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html
The story is Stanford stopped participating at that point. I assume that is still true but I could be wrong.
I wish Common Data Set graduation rate info excludes students on athletic scholarship, just like it is excluded for Financial aid. ( " Number of students in line a who had no financial need and who were awarded non-need-based scholarship or grant aid (excluding those who were awarded athletic awards and tuition benefits)")
Again, the point here is not the ranking itself but the impact on cost of attending (hidden?) due to delayed graduation.
@prezbucky I just had a follow-up question on your last post. Does Princeton have low cross admit success with each of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT? Thanks
That’s the impression I have anyway, though i’m not sure how a school would ascertain the other schools to which a student was admitted. Is there a sort of database where all students and their acceptances are logged and stored?
I don’t know how accurate this site is, but you can check out cross-admit stats here:
http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php
@multiverse7 Actually they blend 80/20 the six-year graduation and one year retention rates.
Then how about this “mumbo-jumbo” about their devising their own US News “predicted” graduation rate:
"Graduation rate performance (7.5 percent): This indicator of added value shows the effect of the college’s programs and policies on the graduation rate of students after controlling for spending and student characteristics, such as test scores and the proportion receiving Pell Grants. U.S. News measures the difference between a school’s six-year graduation rate for the class that entered in 2009 and the rate U.S. News had predicted for the class.
If the school’s actual graduation rate for the 2009 entering class is higher than the rate U.S. News predicted for that same class, then the college is enhancing achievement, or overperforming. If a school’s actual graduation rate is lower than the U.S. News prediction, then it is underperforming."
^^ Thanks
@prezbucky there are many rationalizations I hear about Stanford… the sun… it’s in Cali… only school. etc
Actually it’s a lot more than that… Stanford was initially surrounded by orchards and became the first university to start an industrial park (a model copied the world over most recently at Cambridge) and actively engaged industry partnerships… due to forward thinking from Stanford professors and admin… today the Stanford Industrial park located on the Stanford campus occupies 800 acres and employs over 10k housing such tech icons as HP, Varian and Tesla.
There are many great places for a university… yet Stanford sets itself apart by creating the ecosystem now known as Silicon Valley which is frankly the envy of the world. And yes Stanford has benefited immensely from the wealth created in the area… leading all universities in fund raising year after year… pouring resources into the engineering quad, bio-x… and new biotech initiatives along with interdisciplinary studies involving humanities.
these are some of the main reasons IMO why Stanford is now the most selective university in the US.
I might add that Berkeley, Caltech and UCLA are often ranked higher than most ivies including Yale and Princeton in global rankings so I would argue that Stanford is not the only school out west.
Global rankings like ARWU tend to focus more on research output and awards than on things that directly impact the quality of undergraduate academics.
My alma mater, UW-Madison, is ranked ahead of Dartmouth and Brown on most of these global rankings as well. Does that mean it provides a better undergraduate education than Brown or Dartmouth?
I’ve seen UW ranked in the teens and 20s in these global rankings. Yet we’re in the 40s in the US News National U ranking. How can that be? The rankings measure different factors.
Most folks on this site are focused on undergraduate academic quality. Global rankings aren’t the best at measuring it.
One other thing:
When I say “Ivies” I’m talking about top-notch private universities; you won’t hear me (often) lumping UCLA/Berkley/UVA/Michigan in with HYPSM and other elite private U’s because they are different types of schools with different priorities, per-student budgets, etc. So when I don’t mention UCLA or Berkeley as among the Ivies in CA, that’s why. It doesn’t mean I don’t think they are impressive.
@prezbucky global rankings are actually more important IMO then other rankings that claim to rank undergrad experience… let’s get real most profs are busy gunning for a Nobel prize…member of national academy of sciences… Most classes are taught by TAs and grad students using the same text book across most universities. So I cast a very skeptical eye toward’s rankings that claim to measure these factors.
sorry I disagree with you… Berkeley, Caltech and UCLA are top notch universities… Caltech and Berkeley’s engineering programs are some of the best in the world which no ivy can match. Full Stop.
“3) Poor pre-major advising (almost non existent at Stanford)”
@CA94309 -My son is enrolled here and I can honestly say that Stanford has an embarrassment of advisors. They have a faculty member that lives by their dorm. They have a separate dorm advisor. They have advisors for their advisors. They have a pre-major advisor but I will say that the advisor won’t try to steer them into a certain field but allows student to choose what they like. I wish I had a fraction of these advisors at UNC-Chapel Hill back in the day. If its poor then I believe the students aren’t being aggressive enough to seek it out.
Again, I didn’t say that Berkeley and UCLA aren’t top-notch; I said they aren’t private and when i’m talking about Ivies, I am talking about elite private universities.
And if professors are gunning for Nobels, then they probably either don’t teach undergrads or (if they do…) don’t have much time to spend with their students outside the classroom. It’s why awards are excellent for the rep of the university and for the greater good, but they don’t do much for the undergrads in terms of teaching quality. The global rankings are far more applicable to global brand and grad/PhD programs than they are to the quality of undergrad teaching and experience.
how do any rankings measure undergrad teaching and experience? so far on this board we discussed grad rate which favors schools without strong athletic programs… alumni giving… which has no bearing on undergrad teaching at all.
most classes are taught by TA’s and Grad students using the same text book across universities…organic chem is going to be the same for the most part across unis… it’s the research opportunities that are different… and where schools like Caltech and Berkeley are going to shine.
Btw, Caltech is private and has the highest SAT scores of any uni in the US… it is without question an elite university along with Berkeley and UCLA IMO.
It’s an old saw that undergrad teaching is better at smaller unis and LACs than it is at large, research universities. I don’t buy into that. I have substantial first-hand experience (although some is dated) at 4 of the 6 “so-called” super brand unis–all large major research universities. For example at Berkeley, in my time there in the 70s and 80s, Nobelists and soon to be Nobelists (Czeslaw Milosz and Luis and Walter Alvarez) regularly taught UGs, and post 2010 Saul Perlmutter and Alex Filippenko were still teaching UGs, and those are just the cases I know of personally. But at Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge I was often both delighted and surprised at the accessibility of distinguished senior faculty to all students. Also at MIT the line between UG and Grad is often erased.
At Berkeley there was its own old saw: better to sit 100 feet from genius than to sit 10 feet from mediocrity.
Thanks for the link to the US News College ranking methodology. If I remember correct US News was not sharing the methodology until recently and also it was keeping on tweaking its method. Looks like it is sharing the methodology only in the last few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.News%26_World_Report_Best_Colleges_Ranking
“A 2014 study published in Research in Higher Education removed the mystique of the U.S. News ranking process by producing a ranking model that faithfully recreated U.S. News outcomes and quantified the inherent “noise” in the rankings for all nationally ranked universities.”
But I am glad it is sharing its secret, finally.
In general, I think one should take college rankings with a pinch of salt because it is not absolute and can be easily manipulated by changing the formula.
In any case, graduation rate is an important factor for undergraduate college ranking. IMO the main goal of a good university should be to match the curriculum to the admit pool and graduate them to be productive citizens. If the universities fail to graduate the students on time they fail in their mission. But I agree, the graduation rate of athlete pool distorts the graduation rate of the main stream student body.
@sbballer, No doubt Cal, Caltech are good universities academically, but student experience could very different when compared to medium sized universities. The two are ‘good value for money’ if you pay from your pocket for the college expenses, but for students on FA, medium sized private universities are the best choice.
@NosyCaliParent,
I am not sure if you meant to say “I can honestly say that Stanford has an embarrassment of advisors.” But based on what you mentioned, the support structure at Stanford is better than many large public universities and I don’t think lack of advising is a cause for low graduation rate.
I think we need ‘non-athlete’ 4y graduation rates to make any meaningful comparison.
Thanks everyone for chipping in with their take on this matter.
@CA94309 : 3) Poor pre-major advising (almost non existent at Stanford)
Wait. I took that to mean, as @NosyCaliparent points out when enumerating the types and presence of advisors at Stanford, the near-to- * almost non existent* problem of “poor pre-major advising.”
I thought my daughter was alternately going to burst into song with her Pre-Major Advisor, or seriously let the advisor know their phone contact was going to end abruptly if the advisor yet again politely reminded her of what is recommended for freshman to take on (in terms of course load) in their first semester. The ‘relationship’ became a curious dance, with one of them leading and then the other, if the look on my daughter’s face and the tones of her responses were any indication.
She told me she will have continued contact with that advisor, as well as others, for time immemorial (just joking) - every quarter depending on the role of the advisor.
I don’t get this obsession that four years is the universally correct time to graduate. Not three years; not five years, but exactly four years. Who arbitrarily established this as the criteria for all students.
I previously posted many activities students voluntarily choose to do while at Stanford in addition to the courses for their major. It is as though doing anything other than the exact minimum amount to obtain a degree while in college should be shunned and is somehow a negative. I don’t agree with that thinking at all.
@googledrone, Most financial aids stop after 4 years and that means students on FA will have to pay a lot from their pocket. If one can graduate in less than 4 years, great! ( BTW 4y graduation rate means less than or equal to 4y) There is a reason why it is generally called 4 year colleges and it matters a lot to most people. But nothing stops one from exploring after 4 years with post-graduate programs, if one chooses. It is sad if the universities take all that much money but can’t deliver. I am not saying Stanford falls under that category since we don’t have data to confirm one way or the other.
@Waiting2exhale, I think CA94309 meant to say “advising is non-existent” as the cause for the delay in graduating by “3) Poor pre-major advising (almost non existent at Stanford)” but I can see why one can also see the other way