Why is Georgetown so under ranked?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Georgetown University
1

<p>I'm a student in the McDonough School of Business and I don't understand why our undergraduate business school and university as a whole are so under ranked everywhere. Undergrad students here get great recruitment from big NY banks (we place next to Wharton at Goldman Sachs) and other top jobs, the university is a top five feeder school to Wharton's MBA program and the #11 feeder school to HBS. There are so many wealthy New Englanders at Georgtown allowing for great connections and networking. Yet we lag behind schools such as Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, WashU, UChicago and Northwestern in the rankings. Those are all great schools, but they lag behind us in job and grad school placement (at least in business, not sure about other fields) -- which are arguably most important. The only reasons I can see for Georgetown's under ranked status are low endowments and a higher than elite acceptance rate (we're not on the Common App). Are ranking methodologies very flawed or am I missing something?</p>

2

<p>First, I would say that a consistent top 20-25 ranking is hardly anything to be ashamed of. Georgetown consistently ranks as one of the top US universities by almost any measure, and some have ranked it higher than that.</p>

<p>Second, as you point out, the two things that consistently “hurt” its ranking (if you want to call it that) are its relatively low endowment (especially compared to the Ivies) and its admit rate. The admissions rate, as we all know, is easily gamed by artificially inflating the application numbers. Georgetown could do this by moving to the Common Application, which it has chosen not to do. The admissions office estimates that GU would easily receive another 10,000 applications by going to the CA. Personally, I applaud them for their stance and hope they never submit to the pressures of the statistics and ranking game.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I have to admit that the endowment issue has always been puzzling to me; I’ve never quite understood why the school has not been able to grow it commensurate with the university’s standing. I believe it should be 3x to 4x it’s current size. </p>

<p>Third, as an alumnus of MSB, I can only say that a degree from Georgetown has helped me in my career; in fact, doors have opened for me because of it. The alumni network is strong in the majority of US cities and you will find opportunities through it (though don’t rely on it exclusively!).</p>

<p>Last, college is all about fit rather than ranking. You are better off flourishing at Georgetown than being miserable at one of the other named schools. The minute I stepped onto the GU campus I knew it was the place for me and never looked back. You are in an amazing place; enjoy it, take advantage of the school’s resources, and know that you are receiving a great education at a world class institution. </p>

3

<p>I think the ranking of McDonough undergrad is the height of ridiculousness when one considers its placement record at the highest prestige financial jobs and in the top MBA programs. I went to Columbia Business School for grad school and Georgetown was the fourth most represented school in the class-at a program that is close to half Ivy League and Stanford when the 40% international contingent is deducted from the total first year enrollment. There is no question that it is at least a top 10 school but the rankings need to reflect it and McDonough’s Dean has his work cut out for him.</p>

4

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<ol>
<li>I don’t see how the presence of many wealthy New Englanders should increase its ranking. It’s a good thing that’s not the criteria used by rankings. Otherwise, every school would have the incentive to get as many wealthy New Englanders as they can. That would be unfair, wouldn’t it?</li>
<li>GT does not place better than Northwestern/UChicago in consulting and GT’s placement in Silicon Valley is virtually non-existent. These days, the most competitive jobs are in tech companies, not “big banks”. </li>
<li>As for “feeding” to HBS and Wharton, how do you know it’s not because more GT alums apply to those schools? After all, most other peers don’t even have undergrad biz programs and likely have LESS business-oriented students.</li>
<li>I don’t know why its business school is ranked lower than you wanted. But its college ranking is hurt by its relatively low peer assessment score, which is largely based on faculty contributions to their fields, such as publishing highly cited/high impact research papers and conducting cutting edge research. </li>
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5

<p>fluffypillow83</p>

<p>The ranking is based on different factors ( depending on which organization you are referring to). You can find some top 50 globally ranked Ameican colleges that are not even ranked in the top 100 in the USA! </p>

<p>If the job placement and recruitment are great for Georgetown students that means based on these recruiters, Georgetown is highly ranked! </p>

<p>Another important fact that really hurts Georgetown’s ranking is the acceptance rate. Gerogetown has a much higher acceptance rate than many others schools( ex, Stanford, Brown, Columbia) whose applicants have similar stats ( GPA SATs etc). This is partly the result of Gerogetown conservative admission requirement:-

  1. Non Common App 2 Part Application
  2. Three SAT2 subject tests
  3. Personal Interview
    Many applicants simply do not want to spare the extra time in doing the application during the very busy senior year.
    If Georgetown can change their application requirement 1) & 2) , easily they can maybe double the number of applicants, and the acceptance rate can easily go down to a single digit( from about 16% :class of 2018)</p>

<p>I guess GEORGETOWN is unique, and they prefer to see application from students who will spend extra effort for their application.</p>

6

<p>All rankings are limited by their methodology. The USNWR is heavily weighted by wealth and reputation (most of which was generated 100 years ago). GU reputation is strong but their endowment is anemic compared to its peers. Alumni need to get off their wallets and come up with another 3-4 billion. World rankings are heavily weighted by research and GU needs to ramp up graduate programs if it wants to move up these rankings.
All-in-all # 20 out of 3700 colleges and universities is pretty good but the other top 20’s aren’t going to fall. </p>

7

<p>Interesting to note that Poets and Quants has the top MBA feeder schools ranks from the Business Week Survey at its website and Georgetown ranks number 5. Also the sub rating has Georgetown ranked 1st for Finance. Georgetown just has to market itself so as to put the whole package together and get better recruiter and academic scores and it will have its true rating reflected in the next survey.</p>

8

<p>Dad082 hits the nail square on the head with his comments. To add a couple of things
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<p>As you will no doubt hear if you ever listen to a fundraising pitch by Jack DeGioia or Bart Moore, Georgetown did not seriously start fundraising in a systematic way until the late 1970s/early 1980s. There simply had been no ‘culture of philanthropy’ at the school, going back to the days when it almost went bankrupt trying to build Healy Hall around the turn of the century. There had been ad hoc fundraising for specific projects, like Riggs Library or McDonough Gym, but no framework for sustained donations and endowment building. You can thank Tim Healy for recognizing that this would not do and dragging Georgetown into the era of modern college fundraising (whether the particulars of that era are a good or bad thing more broadly, e.g. for society as a whole, is a separate question).</p>

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<p>Citation, please? I’ve never seen a ranking where Georgetown’s peer assessment score serves to its detriment. Endowment and resources, yes. Admit rate, yes. But not peer assessment.</p>

9

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<p>Easier said than done. Not that I entirely disagree, but it’s worth keeping a couple of points in mind.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>In terms of undergraduate alumni who go on to make a lot of money, Georgetown alumni are seemingly concentrated in finance and law. Both of those fields got hit pretty hard by the 2008 economic crash. Even in the face of that, Georgetown was able to sustain and even slightly increase donations, where some schools saw massive dropoffs (anyone remember how Harvard, of all places, had to lay people off?). Still, the tech/entrepreneur set is less well-represented, which is a disadvantage compared to peers.</p></li>
<li><p>The institution very much thinks of itself as undergraduate-focused, with graduate programs as a crucial but nonetheless secondary priority. You can see that in the major gaps in master’s programs - there are basically 0 chemistry masters students, for instance. It’s all PhDs and undergrads. </p></li>
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<p>At the same time, with traditional undergraduate numbers operating under a District-imposed hard cap, any growth in enrollment will have to come in the graduate population. We’re seeing that now, although the primary emphasis most recently has been in professional graduate education with the School of Continuing Studies and their new “Georgetown Downtown” home. It doesn’t boost the rankings the way that strong liberal arts & sciences grad programs might, but it does serve an important function.</p>

<ol>
<li>Space constraints are a huge issue. Georgetown’s campus is very space-constrained, and the kinds of graduate programs that tend to make the highest impact on reputation and money (hard sciences that lead to tech commercialization and patents) require a lot of space. Regents Hall is a great investment in that direction, but it’s not much bigger than Reiss, which will have to be gutted sooner rather than later. There have been some definitive advances in this area: the new Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology that accompanied the new building, as well as continued great interdisciplinary work together with the Medical Center in cognitive science. There’s a lot of playing catchup, though, and Georgetown’s lack of general public reputation in the sciences makes it that much more of an uphill climb.</li>
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10

<p>Below facts are quoted from Wikepedia:</p>

<p>The Fiske Guide to Colleges states that “only Stanford and a handful of Ivy League schools are tougher to get into than Georgetown.”</p>

<p>94% of students accepted for the class of 2014 were in the top 10% of their class and had SAT scores ranging from 660–760 in Critical Reading, and 670–770 in Math.[87] Georgetown accepts both the SAT and ACT, though does not consider the writing portion of either.</p>

<p>Twelve current or former heads of state are alumni. Former President of the United States Bill Clinton is a 1968 graduate of the School of Foreign Service, and others include Laura Chinchilla, current President of Costa Rica, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former President of the Philippines, Saad Hariri, former Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Alfredo Cristiani former President of El Salvador.[219][220][221] Six alumni serve in the United States Senate, and thirteen in the House of Representatives. Current congressional alumni include Dick Durbin, Senate majority whip, and Steny Hoyer, House minority whip.[222] Governors include Pat Quinn of Illinois, John Lynch of New Hampshire, and Luis Fortuño, of Puerto Rico.[223] On the U.S. Supreme Court, alumni include current Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and former Chief Justice Edward Douglass White.[218]</p>

<p>King Felipe VI of Spain, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud of the Saudi Arabia royal family, and Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark are among the royals who attended Georgetown.[224] Besides numerous members of the senior diplomatic corps, graduates have also headed military organizations on both the domestic and international level, such as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former National Security Advisor General James L. Jones.[225] Notable alumni in business include Patricia Russo, former Alcatel-Lucent CEO, William J. Doyle of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, and Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals, Wizards, and Mystics franchises and former America Online executive.[226][227] Leonsis is among four other undergraduate alumni who own professional sports teams, making Georgetown the most popular undergraduate university for major North American sports franchise owners.[228] Actor Bradley Cooper, People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 2011, is also a Georgetown graduate.</p>

<p>What else can you ask for from a University?</p>

<p>It is also common to have waitlisted or rejected highly qualified Georgetown SFS applicants ended up at HYP, due to th every limited spots of the School of Foreign Service.</p>

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<p>Fluffypillow83,</p>

<p>When discussing Georgetown’s “low” ranking, you ask: “Are ranking methodologies very flawed or am I missing something?”</p>

<p>The answer is quite simple: the US News ranking does not take finance/consulting/law outcomes into account. Rather, this ranking focuses a lot on institutional wealth and peer assessment (e.g. what others think about a particular college). Note, selectivity isn’t that important a part of the ranking, at least in terms of pure acceptance rate at a college (average SATs matter, but Gtown and most of its peers all have great SAT averages). Currently, schools like Chicago or Columbia, Hopkins, Stanford, etc. have considerably stronger academic reputations (e.g. from the perspective of academics) than Georgetown. This may be because, while Georgetown has long cultivated strong outcomes for business/law, the school’s academic clout/research plan/faculty prominence doesn’t match what you get at the other schools I mentioned. Outcomes in the business/law world is only one small part of a school’s general strength. </p>

<p>Please also keep in mind, the metric you present (business/law outcomes) is exceedingly narrow. If there was a ranking just for this, Wharton, Georgetown, Princeton, Harvard, Williams etc. would rank extremely highly, but schools like MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon (very tech focused), Chicago, Swarthmore, Hopkins, etc. would fall considerably. </p>

<p>Relatedly, if you broaden “business/law outcomes” to include generally strong exit opportunities, guess what? All the usual suspects perform just fine, but particularly excel in different areas. Here’s an article and chart that provides good analysis: <a href=“Why Elite College Students Pursue Finance Jobs”>Why Elite College Students Pursue Finance Jobs. </p>

<p>As you can see, some schools really focus on finance/consulting (like Wharton skewing some of UPenn’s numbers), others focus on med school/grad school (at hopkins, almost 50% of a class goes on to med school or grad school). Moreover at MIT and Chicago, lots of students go to grad school. These placement numbers don’t tell me that one school is “better” than another. Rather, schools attract certain sorts of students who are predisposed to certain types of industries. Certainly at Wharton, that’s business/consulting. It looks like Georgetown focuses on business and law. At Hopkins, med school seems more prominent. </p>

<p>If you are to judge a school based on its finance/consulting/law outcomes, sure, Georgetown is great. If you consider institutional wealth, academic reputation, and you broaden out your definition of “outcomes,” I imagine the rankings would look very much like what you see in US News. </p>

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<p>Shorter answer. Yes, the methologies are flawed in ways that can hurt schools like Georgetown.</p>

<p>I agree outcomes should have more weight, but you cannot look at one part of the school and only go by those achievements. Undergrad rankings are by the whole University in most cases.</p>

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<p>Torveaux summed up what I said quite nicely! The link I provided above (<a href=“Why Elite College Students Pursue Finance Jobs”>Why Elite College Students Pursue Finance Jobs) is worth reviewing as well, though.</p>

<p>As Torveaux and I both say - looking just at business/law outcomes is much, much too narrow! Institutional wealth, academic rep, research opportunities, outcomes across industries, etc. are all important.</p>

<p>(I think, though, if US News actually created a ranking where it assessed all these factors, that ranking would STILL look similar to what they already have. Georgetown’s relative lack of institutional wealth and a “weaker” academic reputation would still hurt its standing.) </p>

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<p>Please reference post # 9 and the following statement from another poster that “it is also common to have waitlisted or rejected highly qualified Georgetown SFS applicants ended up at HYP, due to th every limited spots of the School of Foreign Service.”</p>

<p>Frankly, it is remarkable that the SFS, which has a track record of alumni achievement which arguably, makes it the world’s foremost leadership academy of the past 50 years, doesn’t have an admission profile of 5000-6000+ applicants per year and a 70% plus yield rate. </p>

1 Like
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<p>I’m a MSB student and our school does particularly well in banking and consulting recruitment. We get many kids into Goldman, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Credit Suisse, BAML, Citi, Mckinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture etc.The strength of Georgetown is in the social sciences whereas our math and science department is not as strong. We are known for producing lawyers, businessmen, diplomats, lobbyists etc. That is why we get knocked down the rankings into the 20th spot for US News.</p>

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<p>I know that there are two big factors that kept most of our family members from even applying to Georgetown (despite an uncle who taught there):</p>

<ul>
<li>lack of strong science (and no engineering). Despite the proximity to Tech companies in Northern Virginia. It is really hard to imagine attending a school where that is not an option. Georgetown seemed more narrow than most of its peer schools with its focus on public policy, business etc.</li>
<li>lack of strong Catholic identity. Notre Dame, Holy Cross etc. are more clearly Catholic - not that they are against non-Catholics, but visiting Notre Dame you sense that they have leveraged unique advantages by trying to emphasize their faith and how it can help the University (the focus on service - great subsidized service projects after graduation, the outreach, even the infamous "parietals’ seem to help make them proud, and celebrate their intellectual heritage). Georgetown seemed more ambivalent in its identity when I last was on campus.</li>
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<p>There is a large pool of applicants who would more strongly consider Georgetown if its Catholic identify were stronger, and it had more science/engineering.</p>

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