Alexandre

Why would a university that does not superscore report superscores in their class profile? And you have not answered my question reguarding your claim. Do private universities include transfer admissions statistics in their profiles?

xiggi

Knowledge is different from speculation. You believe that USNews favors private schools. The reality is that the metrics chosen by USNews happen to reflect greater resources and greater selectivity. Awarding more points to a school that spends more money on the teaching of undergraduates is NOT an expression of favoritism. Neither is rewarding schools that do not rely on huge classrooms to sardine their hordes of students. It does reward a "better" experience, which translates in a better school.

When it comes to favoritism, Morse and his goons are pretty clear that they introduced additional metrics that are highly subjective and were absolutely meant to LEVEL the playing field by capturing "intangibles." And metrics that non verifiable, not measurable, and .... as we know subject to the most abject type of ignorance, lack of interest, and gamesmanship.

xiggi

Why would a school obfuscate a substantial portion of their admitted FRESHMEN students? Not transfer students!

Why would a school guesstimates *read grossly overestimate* the percentage of students who rank in the top ten percent?

And the why should be asked to the officials at Cal, because that is exactly what they do, and with the duplicitous assistance of Morse, who has refuse to acknowledge the strategies.

And, by the way, the why reporting superscores when they do not use it for admissions? Would a "because" they can just what they want and get away with it" be a reasonable answer? In the meantime, a comparative analysis of the non superscored ACT versus the superscored SAT shows that the argument is quite the canard. An entirely quacking canard!

xiggi

Oh, faculty. That ever so-loosely defined term that encompasses so many different vocations. The dedicated and the sinecure addict. The present and the voyager. The teacher and the researcher. The one who loves teaching and the one who considers the UG a nuisance.

Top public do indeed have their share of well-populated ivory towers. And well-populated auditoriums for those massive lectures that look so good on ... paper!

xiggi

Which obviously explains why we leave all countries (safe and except Luxemburg and perhaps Switzerland) in the dust when it comes to spending and rate of growth of the spending.

If we really love to cut public education, we really are incredibly poor lovers. Our education system has been a bottomless pit, and in the K-12 an amazing failure, considering the resources spent.

UCBChemEGrad

Xiggi, USNWR rankings do not attempt to carve out spending and resources exclusively for undergrads...they have a term called "financial resources" which includes research...including medical research.

xiggi

If you say so, UCB! Do you happen to think that Morse designed that part of the methodology, so he could favor the schools with large medical schools.

If that were not the case, how large of a change would that mean in the rankings of Cal, just to name one?

UCBChemEGrad

Tis true, xig. UCLA's financial resources ranking is higher than Cal's...only big reason I can think why that is is medical research spending. Don't know how big of a bump schools like Cal, MIT, Princeton and Caltech would get if Morse carved out med research funding.

xiggi

I believe you.

Fickle

Ha! You really think the US focuses more on education than most other developed countries? That's the first time I've heard that, honestly.

Higher Education Funding Cut by $89 Billion Over 10 Years in Obama Budget - Bloomberg
http://www.ijbssnet.com/journals/Vol...il_2012/21.pdf
Public spending on education, total (% of government expenditure) | Data | Table

And I shouldn't really even have to find articles to prove my point. Where have you been living these past few years?

I'm also going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you realize the American population is much larger than that of all European countries, and thus we will obviously spend "more."

xiggi

Well, living under a rock helps one being sheltered from the dismal reality around us, and perhaps also insulates one from ... poor statistics.

When one is presented a table of spending on education that lists plenty of countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Mali, or Burundi among the leaders, he or she should spend time understanding what is actually measured.

Using the wealth of a country as a denominator will show how a country allocates its resources. Obviously, a very poor nation (and developing) will have ratio of spending on basic items and probably a high level of foreign aid to support such spending.

When it comes to comparing the spending of nations on education, a better indicator is the spending per capita. Here's a simple graph that shows a number of OECD nations:

K-12 Spending Per Student in the OECD | Mercatus

Complete tables are, of course, available, but quoting a 500 pages report is not needed in a forum such as CC.

As far as cutting in the federal budgets, it might not be unwise to ascertain the impact of federal funding on the national education spending. For instance, could one imagine a ZERO budget for the Department of Education by 2020? Surprisingly, that might not create as many waves as one could imagine. Something that never escaped to the President Clinton and his "education" VP as they never increased the budget for the ED during the eight years they sat in their throne.

Back to under rock!

Fickle

I believe we're talking about college-level education here, as this is College Confidential. So I don't see why you're quoting stats for K-12. So much for good statistics.

I admit, maybe that 3rd link proves inconclusive. So... that just invalidates everything else I wrote, correct?

I don't believe $89 billion over 10 years is an insignificant figure. That's for higher education, btw, not for K-12 which is irrelevant to this topic.

43 states out of 50 have cut their spending on higher education since 2008. That further proves my original point. When times get tough, what do politicians do? Cut funding to education.

Would you rather be in a school that's constantly held hostage by politicians? In fact, from your previous posts, you seem to agree with my stance that private > public in general. I do not understand why you are so fixed on my statement that Americans have a tendency to cut their education spending. One does not need to go far to find proof of this.

drax12

ModernMan, #99, you're ventured out of your depth again. In what way is USC, outside of Cal Tech, SoCal's leading university?

As compared to UCLA, USC is extremely poor in STEM. We're talking undergrad BS to PHD production, not your mega-grad engineering programs that educate only foreigners. UCLA sends far more BA's and BS's to medicine, law, MBA's and grad programs in general, adjusted for undergrad size, ~ 1:1.5.

So as others are debating, it certainly depends on what USC is superior. Not STEM, not pre-professions, not graduates entering the workforce, as manifest by a great deal of your 1,200 BS Business Administration grads not finding work five months out of graduation.

drax12

I think you’ve borrowed the bold from xiggi. The problem with using unsuperscored, best-per=sitting SAT’s for admission, and later reporting superscores for IPEDS or the CDS would be that this would take an extra calculation, if mulitiple scores were reported, which often they are not. There is no administrative body at any university that would perform this calculation for best-foot-forward purposes. Because cost of doing such would override the benefit in their doing such, especially since their derived benefit of showing higher in this USN's variable would be negligible as a public-u bureaucrat, uhh, administrator.

The difference between unsuper and superscored SAT’s is definitely a material amount. Add that UCLA and the UC’s, and perphaps UMich, will report multiple scores per student. Because UCLA shows the specific number of students who scored within specific intervals of SAT and ACT scores, instead of just reporting %’s, we know that UCLA reports all scores the student has reported for admission purposes. If %’s are only used, who knows if the scores reported would be one best-foot-forward score per student, and in fact, I have to believe that private u's report only one best score per student, whether that be the ACT or SAT.

Someone sent me the url of the following high-school student's youtube, which at 4:17 shows the difference in scores in admittance to UCLA and UC v. NYU. This student, and I hope she doesn’t mind me linking her tube video, scored 2050 for UCLA and 2130 for NYU. The average difference between admitted students to a u may not have this large a difference, but a lot of this will depend on wealth: the more wealthy students can afford to retake and reprep; whereas those of poorer background cannot do either because of limited funds. Public u’s will for economic diversity sake want to take those who show forth potential if not in mature SAT or ACT scores.

Re, point one, if you are referring to spring admits of frosh at Cal – and I am normally not a huge defender of Cal because that would be both UCBs’ and RML’s jobs – the U does this for “logistical” reasons of taking students in and housing them. There is a difference in stats between regular fall and spring admits, but it doesn’t do this to bypass reporting standards.

Re point two, there are many u’s that overreport the top-decile statistic, besides many hss that don’t report this statistic. For UC standards, a general class-rank is obtained by pooling all CA hs grads and figuring class rank for them based off of this. So someone from Gunn HS in Palo Alto could have a 3.87/4.60 gpa and have a class rank within taht school of 80th %-ile, but for statewide purposes, have a definite top-decile rank. The infusion of local context, or top-% students at specific hss has complicated the matter of admittance at UC.

And wrt transfer students bypassing statistical measures, you have to remember, too, that CA wants all of its u’s within its boundary to incorporate transfer students within their admissions, as part of the three-tier college system with the state. Again, not to bypass reporting, but to be within state mandates: ccs feeding both UC and CSU systems. Not only do students have second chances, but it balances out classes between lower and upperclassmen. It really is a great public-college system.

xiggi

Why they report erroneous numbers is not relevant; the fact that they DO is! The school could adjust the statistics for the USNews surveys. What is also relevant is that Morse accepts the numbers, fully knowing they are inflated and do misrepresent the selectivity of the school.

Not much to argue about that!