<p>I know that rankings should not play a huge factor in college decisions, but I was just wondering why Georgetown has a consistently lower rank in US News than its peer colleges. I believe that Georgetown is a much more prestigious school than what its rank shows.</p>
<p>There are a number of factors that go into the US News rankings, and Georgetown is at something of a disadvantage in a number of them, getting hurt the most in the peer assessment, faculty resources, and financial resources categories.</p>
<p>Georgetown is hurt by the fact that it is strong across less categories than many of its peers. While it is an undisputed heavyweight in some areas, particularly international relations, some of its programs, particularly in the sciences are weaker than those at peer schools, and it lacks other programs entirely (e.g., engineering) this leads to a lower peer assessment score than many people feel Georgetown deserves.</p>
<p>In the faculty resources category, Georgetown gets tripped up because it uses a lot of adjunct faculty. Normally, it’s a bad sign to have a lot of adjuncts because they tend to be less qualified than regular faculty, poorly paid, and just used to plug holes. At Georgetown, however, many of the adjuncts are people who have impressive jobs during the day and then teach a class at Georgetown, but are eminently qualified (unlike your normal adjunct). I’ve had courses with adjunct professors who worked at high levels of the State Department, DoD, and CIA. All of them were fabulous, but this is something of an exception.</p>
<p>In terms of financial resources, the fact is that Georgetown is a poor school, with the lowest endowment of any school in the US News top 30. Why, you might ask, is this so? The answer is Georgetown’s Jesuit heritage, as the Jesuits have always been suspicious of raising funds for endowments, historically preferring to spend money as it was donated, rather than stockpiling it (which is considered poor stewardship). Eventually, Georgetown realized it needed to start building and endowment, but by that point schools like Harvard already had multi-billion dollars endowments, so Georgetown has struggled to catch up.</p>
<p>^ahhh very logical :D</p>
<p>In general, the US News rankings are a bit skewed. There are a lot of colleges that don’t even consider them legitimate because of the “reputational survey” counts for 25% of the ranking but is effectively a popularity contest where colleges and universities have to rank their peers subjectively without information.</p>
<p>[Criticism</a> of college and university rankings (2007 United States) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_college_and_university_rankings_(2007_United_States)]Criticism”>Criticism of college and university rankings (North America) - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>The US News rankings can be entertaining and somewhat useful, but take them with a grain of salt when considering colleges, and, more importantly, be sure to make your own decision regardless of what a magazine says about it.</p>
<p>The lack of an engineering department is the most damaging thing about Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, which is one rank above it at this point, has a very reputable engineering program and Notre Dame, at 20, has an engineering department and a business program that is slightly higher ranked than Georgetown.</p>
<p>Georgetown is one of those schools where if you’re not in a particular line of studies (in this case, international studies), people wonder why you went there. That’s why International Business is such a popular concentration in MSB (along with Finance, which makes sense because GTown is on the east coast).</p>
<p>Also think about quality of education and job placement… it’s tough for me to comment on quality of education of all the schools ranked above Georgetown in US News, but I certainly have my doubts about some of them (remain unnamed)… but I can tell you Georgetown job placement is great, especially for finance (particularly for Wall Street)…</p>
<p>I have to agree with most of these comments.
USNWR rankings are only useful up to a point, and must be taken with a grain of salt. They are not based on junk science, but neither are they in any way absolute or infallible.
Many schools are ranked below where you might think they belong relative to other institutions , and GU is one of them. For example, in my opinion GU is a better school than Emory or Vanderbilt (both of which are fine institutions), and probably as good as Cornell (except for those disciplines that Cornell has but GU doesn’t, like engineering). There are a number of schools that should probably be ranked higher, and GU is just one of them (Tufts, another of my alma maters, comes to mind as an example). But ultimately you should look at the general grouping in which a school is ranked, rather than its specific ranking, and GU is in fine company… and for very good reasons.</p>
<p>The real anomaly with Georgetown and US News is that one of its undergraduate schools is independently rated at a level which is on a par or higher than the very top (1 to 5 level) institutions. None of the institutions at the 10 to 25 level have a similar circumstance and this creates a problem for anyone evaluating the overall undergraduate institutional rating of the school.</p>
<p>^ Haas, Berkeley’s business school, has an undergraduate program that is in the top 10 I believe.</p>
<p>The top 5 universities do not have undergraduate schools in business so Haas would not be ahead of any of them.</p>
<p>[Here’s</a> Georgetown’s president’s explanation, which I think is pretty much on the money:](<a href=“http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094]Here’s”>http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/01/25/on-the-record-with-john-degioia-a-full-transcript-of-the-presidents-meeting-with-student-press/#more-13094)</p>
<p>Hoya: My question goes along in that same vein. I know we all think we’re ranked #1 in the US News & World Report Rankings.</p>
<p>DeGoia: We’re 23.</p>
<p>Hoya: Right, I know. I was wondering what the plan was to continue to increase our ranking?</p>
<p>DeGioia: Truly one of the fundamental ways in which we can increase our ranking is to increase the size of our endowment. That’s the constraint for us. So if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that on some of the scores we rank significantly higher—for example on selectivity for admission, I mean we’re much higher than twenty-third…</p>
<p>What holds us back from being higher in the rankings is our endowment is 73rd in the country. So we compete among the top 25 in the US News & World report but we’re 73rd in endowment size. Now why is our endowment so small? It’s just history. Until 1969, we were literally owned by a group of priests, the community of Jesuits of Georgetown University. They owned the place until 1969 … in 1969 they separately incorporated, leaving behind the university that became the responsibility of a new Board of Directors. Now this happens with all of Catholic higher education in the late 1960s. One school got ahead of that—that was Notre Dame. They did it about 15 years earlier … is my recollection. They began fundraising that much earlier.</p>
<p>Most of us didn’t really get started fundraising until the ’70s and early ’80s. Georgetown has done three fundraising campaigns, one in ‘81, one in ‘88 and one in ‘96 that went to 2003. ‘81 went from ‘81 to roughly ‘86—that was our first real campaign. The second campaign was around the time of our bicentennial. The third one was what we called our third century campaign. I think that history will show that other universities did other campaigns beginning a long time ago. The reason schools have bigger endowments is that they started fundraising a lot earlier than we did.</p>
<p>We’re actually doing pretty well but we got started so much later—our endowment is a billion dollars. Harvard’s endowment this year was 24 billion at the start of the year. I mean, 24 times our size. Yale is at 17 billion. Most of the peers that we compete with are at least five times our endowment size. This is relevant in the context of US News & World Report rankings because they call it different things but one of the terms that they typically use is faculty resources. Well, faculty resources is a proxy for essentially your overall endowment size, or sometimes gift income or the like. There, we do actually reasonably well in terms of how we’re doing now…but the endowment is a legacy of the first 200 years at Georgetown. The goal this 100 years is to use all 100 years to try and close that gap so that when our grandchildren might think about this place, the gap might be…we wont be 73rd. I mean, the gap between schools that are ranked below us…I mean, we’re 73rd and 23rd—there are 50 that have more resources than we do and that’s really what holds us back in US News & World Report because on so many of the other metrics we do very well. And truly, knowing how they keep score, I don’t really have a criticism of where we are with US News.</p>
<p>Now Charlie Deacon will. He’ll say there’s only one reason why they do that ranking. They do it—they’re communicating directly with high school seniors about how they should be thinking in their rankings of the schools. If that’s what they’re doing, then we deserve to be much higher ranked because were in the top ten in terms of undergraduate selectivity—so I don’t disagree with Charlie but the metrics that they use are more encompassing than that. When I look at that, I don’t really have any complaints about being 23rd. That being said, we’re doing everything we can to try to inch our way up. And that’s about fundraising…so the next campaign is absolutely about getting our endowment to go up.</p>
<p>Fascinating read. Thanks for posting, dzleprechaun!</p>