This is directly from the UF website: (as of fall 2021)
Undergraduate:41,180
Graduate: 16,017
Professional: 3,915
Total: 61,112
As for class size and online classes: I’m basing my response on talking to numerous parents whose children go there. These kids love the school, but have complained about very large classes and many classes being taught online.
I think U Washington shoots itself in the foot because it puts great effort into bringing in underrepresented groups/low SES students who might need extra supports — or certainly a clear path to graduation — and then presents the obstacles of large numbers of capacity-constrained majors. Students must survive intro level courses with a high GPA and submit a sufficiently strong application for admission to major years AFTER successfully getting into UW itself. Along with paying to live in a high-cost area.
I imagine many students are prevented from graduating because they cannot gain entry to the program of choice, cannot afford to live in Seattle, or both.
Which is a shame because UW has a boatload of research dollars and a lot to offer. I am not sure they are offering it in the way that best serves its state’s citizens.
Of course wealth is not necessarily totally independent of things like reputation.
To me it is basically impossible to tease out which of these mutually-reinforcing things “came first”. Harvard has something like a 387 year history at this point. It got to having the largest endowment in the world through a long sequence of ever-evolving strategies. All of it matters, all of it contributes to the rest, and all of it is part of a very deliberate plan to keep it going for the next 387 years.
That was precisely my point. CMU and Hopkins are not outliers among other highly selective private colleges in the top 1% by family income. They are outliers in the 60th to 99th range by family income.
And the charts at the NYT don’t really capture what that means to the overall student body because they are normed to high test scores. If you looked at their actual student bodies without norming, that probably covers something like the middle 70% of their student body, maybe more. This is based on tables published in the Chetty study, where something like 16% of students total were in the 0-60 range, and another 16% in the top 1%, but again CMU and JHU specifically appear to have more than the average share in that range.
So the median student at these colleges by family income is inside the range where CMU and Hopkins are outliers. Indeed, probably a student at the 25th is still well within that range. And so on.
Yes they are. As per USNWR:
Salary data was adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities indexes, published in December 2021.
I agree with all that 100%. Even back in the stone ages when I was there, the process you describe applied to many majors, including the business school. I also looked up tuition, and UW is outrageously more expensive than Florida: over $12,000 more for OOS students and about double for in-state. That’s a lot.
I’ve been to both and like them both. I lean towards UW for a variety of reasons, but it does have its drawbacks.
Like I said earlier - I did the math and it checks out. But I do think there was a data entry error which, if corrected, would result in Middlebury and Wesleyan switching spots. Not to worry; I’m working on it.
Like ‘ugly’ red square that makes me think of Russia….and horrific traffic.
Traffic is bad. I’ve never thought of Red Square as ugly, and of course from said place are some of the best views you’re going to find on any campus, anywhere.
On campus beauty in general, I’ll ride with UW any day of the week.
Huh. I wonder what is not include in the common data set: https://data-apps.ir.aa.ufl.edu/public/cds/CDS_2022-2023_UFMAIN_Post.pdf
This is what I see on their website: UF Profile – Institutional Planning and Research. Looks like 34K undergrads in person and then 5K students enrolled in their fully online program.
Yes Mt Rainer. My son liked. I wasn’t a fan. Getting back to Tacoma - where we were staying. Nightmare (mainly to interstate).
I don’t think anyone out West is saying UF is 29 and UW is whatever lower - I’ll go UF.
Both are fine schools and historically likely more think UW.
If you mean the NYT charts at Explore How Income Influences Attendance at 139 Top Colleges - The New York Times , they provide information both with and without normalization to scores. However, the Chetty study isn’t in the databases that WSJ has stated they are using, so I very much doubt that WSJ is using information from this study or income about percentile groups, regardless of the specific percentiles
They are also many colleges whos stat adjustments do not mesh well with the Chetty study. There is a loose correlation, but are also many exceptions. For example, a comparison of the WSJ graduation score and 6 year graduation for the top 10 ranked WSJ colleges is below. Babson is arguably the most SES diverse college in the top 10 list, yet it seems to have a severe penalty on the grad score. Among Ivy+ colleges in the top 10, MIT is arguably the most SES diverse, yet it is one with the most severe penalty. Amherst gets the biggest boost, yet it is not the most SES diverse college on the list.
Colleges that Get Boost
Amherst – 97 grad score, 92-95% grad rate, depending on year
Colleges that are Penalized
CMC – 83 grad score, 93% grad rate
Babson – 84 grad score, 92% grad rate
MIT – 93 grad score, 96% grad rate
Colleges that are Largely Unchanged
Yale – 97 score, 97% grad rate
Princeton – 99 grad score, 98% grad rate
Columbia – 98 grad score, 97% grad rate
Harvard – 98 grad score, 97% grad rate
Penn – 97 grad score, 98% grad rate
Stanford – 94 grad score, 95% grad rate
I agree with everything but the last sentence. We’re talking about different animals entirely. Everybody ranks everything, otherwise we’d not be able to make a decision. It’s how people’s minds work. But a person knows that they don’t have the time and, at least in the past, the access to all the information needed, and so they turn to people who they think are “professionals”.
These “professionals” are the people who, for the past 45 years or so, have been claiming to have the ability to accurately rank all colleges.
People understand that their own rankings are based on subjective factors, while the assume that the rankings provided to them “professionals” are objective. This is especially true when the company which produces the rankings are well respected for other things that are related to the rankings.
The entire point of commercials is to make you overspend, and any adult should know that.
However, when talking about health issues in food advertising, it depends on two things - whoa are they targeting, and whether they are telling the truth.
Filling children’s programs with ads telling them that if their parents don’t buy them Twinkies, they (the kids) will not be happy and the parents are bad parents, is a problem. That is because we know that almost no kid is unable to make informed decisions, and that these ads are taking advantage of this inability.
When we get to adults, it’s about “truth in advertising”. If adults are buying cigarettes because the ads told them that the cigarettes were healthy, that is a problem. If an ad for cakes with lots of sugar and fat says “eating our cake will help you lose weight”, that’s a problem. If an ad shows a person eating a giant bowl of ice cream, and the ad says “a serving of this ice cream has only 100 calories”, but “a serving” is 1/8th of the bowl advertised, that’s a problem.
SImilarly, a ranking system which claims to tell you which college is the best financial deal, while using knowingly using a methodology that does not produce these results, is also a problem. A college which advertises it’s methodology to one demographic, but the entire methodology is based on data from a very different methodology, that is very definitely an issue of truth in advertising
Correct. But the patterns are consistent.
Per the NYT chart, MIT is also in the high group 60-99, actually higher than Hopkins and CMU 60-80, tied with them 80-90, and tied for with Hopkins and just after CMU 90-99.
They then dive off top 1%, but again that 60-99 range is going to make up the vast bulk of the middle of their class.
I recognize this is just a single factor and not a replication of the WSJ’s model. But I don’t think it is a coincidence these colleges are skewing higher in the broad middle of their classes.
Amherst is not the lowest, but also not in the high group, and is ranked consistently lower than JHU, MIT, and CMU in the 60-99 range.
Adding not-normalized numbers for MIT and Amherst.
MIT/Amherst
Bottom 20 4%/5%
20-40 4%/8%
40-60 9%/11%
60-80 16%/12%
80-90 17%/12%
90-99 42%/36%
Top 1 8%/17%
0-60 and Top 1, Amherst has higher percentages than MIT.
60-99 (the middle 75% of MIT’s class), MIT has higher percentages than Amherst.
CMU and JHU:
Bottom 20 3%/3%
20-40 4%/4%
40-60 9%/8%
60-80 16%/15%
80-90 17%/17%
90-99 43%/41%
Top 1 8%/12%
Very similar to MIT, not so much Amherst.
I find it interesting that so many people take issue with rankings, particularly when a more universally-acclaimed school is ranked lower than a less universally-acclaimed school. To me, that’s the fun or even the value of different rankings and methodologies. Some rankings are fairly well ingrained in us (whether because they were trying to confirm our own ideas or that’s how they honestly got their results).
But when a ranking offers some “surprises” it makes me want to take a closer look at those surprises. What made this school perform so well with this methodology? What is special about this school? I might even go so far to say that my preference is for rankings with surprises because it shows that there’s some different thinking going on and that different thinking might be valid/worthwhile to know about.
So no, there’s no be-all, end-all ranking. But any ranking that can make me see a school in a different light than I normally see it has value to me.
I’ve been to both Red Squares, the one in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) and the one at UW. I never really thought they looked alike.
When I was living in Seattle in the late '80s, UW used to jokingly advertise its campus architecture as “Gothic, Brutalist and Prison-Inspired.” I remember that because it was so true.
So are we going to have this exchange all over again in 5 days on a new topic?
Or can we just change the name of the topic to “College Rankings” and keep going when USN comes out Monday? Seems a lot more efficient.
