LACtransferhopes

i appreciate leiter's methodology for ranking universities, it's interesting and he makes valid points about the flaws in USNWR rankings, but i can't necessarily appreciate his assertion that even the top LAC's should be considered amongst the #4 peer category. admitted students at WAS who considered the schools a match/reach probably considered a school like Case Western a safety/match, or even Carnegie Mellon and Rice to be such schools (Peer Group 3). of course, me saying this is all very anecdotal, but just look at admitted student profiles. doesn't this ranking place too much emphasis on peer respect of faculty? the only thing that evaluates admitted students is SAT scores in leiter's rankings (which is ridiculous).
i admit i didn't read the whole thing (sorry, i'm really lazy/tired right now), and i do have a bias, but i don't think it's quite appropriate. Oberlin isn't on the same level as Williams and U Wisconsin isn't on the same level as Williams either.

indiejimmy

news flash: these rankings are meaningless.

Georgetown is #16 on WSJ's feeder ranking for top grad schools, and it is listed beneath Case Western and a whole host of less prestigious, inferior schools here. what's more important--having "superior" faculty for an undergraduate education or getting into Harvard Law School?

honestly, if anyone actually uses this crap to make a decision about where to go, I'd be really shocked. academic reputation, alumni networks, student body, career services, student life, and a whole bunch of other factors should be used to determine where the best school is for a given student, not simply the number of faculty members who seem to be "distinguished"--honestly, what do i care if my organic chem teacher is a nobel prize-winning researcher? it doesn't affect my class at all!

Oh, and I'm sure Notre Dame's faculty are just lagging way behind Ohio State, right, you know, since ND has only won like 8 Fulbright Humanities awards for faculty in the past few years (more than any other university).

prospies- ignore this crap. it will save you a lot of time and worry.

lfecollegeguy

Uh, NO student considers Carnegie Mellon or Rice a safety. And the Top LACs are overrated.

LACtransferhopes

"Top LACs are overrated"
expound. and i thought MY post was too anecdotal.
what, did they all reject you?

i can tell you this: for the quality of students that attend Swarthmore (where i'm headed this fall), not a single person i work with, nor anyone i have told about my new college, has heard of it except if they once lived in the philly area, let alone thought highly of it. and i live only two hours from the school!

and i definitely know a few students who placed Carnegie Mellon and Rice and schools of similar calbier in their match-safety zone when applying. and they were right; they were accepted but are now heading to Brown, Amherst, and Stanford. for those kids, that type of school really is a safety-match.

LACtransferhopes

i should add that these kids (two females, one male) were basically admissions-perfect: two are URMs, all had nearly perfect SATs and 4.00 GPAs and meaningful ecs they devoted lots of time to. really just brilliant kids. but seriously, if they weren't admitted to Rice there'd be something weird going on.
oh and yes, one really did pick that "overrated" Amherst above Princeton and Yale.

basically, indiejimmy is right. disregard statistic rankings, prospective students. rankings are meaningless. pick the school that seems to be around your intellectual level, has a great program for your major, and has the environment you feel most comfortable in. and that's all that matters, not bickering over which school is better due to a 1 percentage point lead in some (often highly subjective) category.

i'm annoyed. i'm not coming back to this thread.

sh60614

[[Oh, and I'm sure Notre Dame's faculty are just lagging way behind Ohio State, right, you know, since ND has only won like 8 Fulbright Humanities awards for faculty in the past few years (more than any other university).]]

Actually Notre Dame's faculty is lagging way behind that of Ohio State and all the rest of the Big Ten schools. ND's own faculty senate recognized this when they voted 34-2 to join the Big Ten in order join the Big Ten's academic consortium.

All of the Big Ten schools are long standing AAU members (Ohio State since 1916). Notre Dame has never been invited to join.

Also, Notre Dame's faculty is FAR from leading the nation in Fulbright Scholars. Ohio State's faculty won 8 last year alone as compared to 2 at Notre Dame. Over the course of this decade, the numbers are 53 for Ohio State as opposed to 17 for Notre Dame.

U.S. Scholar Directory

As far as Guggenheim Scholars go, Ohio State had 3 this year tied with Harvard and among the top 15 universities in the country. Notre Dame had NONE. Over the last ten years, Ohio State has had twice as many as Notre Dame (16-8).

Guggenheim Foundation 2008 Fellows

National Academy Members? Notre Dame has ZERO members of the National Academy of Sciences on faculty. Ohio State has 10. Notre Dame has ZERO. Ohio State also has 10 members of the National Academy of Engineering on faculty. Notre Dame has 2.

National Academy of Sciences:

Home Page

Notre Dame is a very, very selective undergraduate college. I don't dispute that. And while they may have built up their law and business schools to "middle of the Big Ten level" over the last decade, Notre Dame is still a weak school in terms of faculty quality, Ph.D programs and research. That's why Notre Dame's own faculty wanted so badly to join the Big Ten's Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Too bad for them, that they were overruled in favor of what was best for the football team. Again, Notre Dame is very hard to get into. The reality, however, is that once you are in Notre Dame you will NOT be exposed to as high a caliber of faculty as you would be at Ohio State or any other Big Ten university. Prospective students need to take this into consideration and decide what is most important to them.

barrons

I heart Brian Leiter.

bclintonk

arcadia.
I did check out your related thread and what I found there was a slightly bizarre model that, over one year's data, roughly correlated with USN's PA score using a complex algorithm that weighed several factors, most prominently selectivity. The creator of the model made no assertion that it represented "corrected" PA score, only that that model more or less predicted PA scores across the data set. The biggest variance came with the top publics, whose PA scores were consistently high but whose scores in the model came out lower due to the prominent role of selectivity in the model. To my mind, thatr's a defect in the model, not an indication that the top publics' PA scores are too high.

Therefore it is not at all surprising that your "recalculation" or "correction" of PA scores by substituting a model so reliant on selectivity would have the effect of downgrading the top publics (high PA scores and lower selectivity) and upgrading those highly selective privates that have comparatively lower PA scores. Essentially it just says "disregard PA scores, what matters is selectivity. Period."

But isn't that almost the definition of "overrated"---very popular, highly selective schools that are assumed to be good because they're so popular and selective, when in fact they are not quite so highly regarded by their peers?

kyledavid80

Some (rather misinformed) students consider Rice a safety. I do think, though, that CMU can be considered a safety for some.

yeoldstudent

Although I loved my college experience, I thought the University of Colorado would be much more academically challenging. I felt the students in the business school didn't really care about academics and there was very little class participation. With that said, I still loved my experience, but the undergrad business program is not the place for someone looking for a real academic challenge.

indiejimmy

From your statements preceding this, you seem to imply that faculty quality can be measured by the quality of a university's Ph.D. programs and research. But what about undergraduate teaching? I'm fairly certain that at most LAC's, very little research takes place, as faculty are most concerned with educating the undergraduates rather than making breakthrough discoveries in their respective fields. I think that you are neglecting this key element of assessing faculty quality, since it is crucial to how students perform on tests like the MCAT and GMAT and reveals itself in medical school acceptance rates and elite graduate school placement, not to mention job placement upon graduation. ND excels in these areas and is one of the few select schools that is heavily recruited for IB (or so I've been told by some other CC members).

I said Fulbright Scholars in the humanities over the past few years.

indiejimmy

I'm gonna come clean on this one. I got waitlisted. But at least they paid for my app fee...

lfecollegeguy

Depends on what school, but even for HSS, CMU can be at best be considered a match. For SCS/Engineering/Tepper, its simply not true the school can be called such.


To LACtransfer: Glad you got into Swarth from PSU but with your grammar and lack of understanding of Top Privates, I don't see how your anecdotes of how certain people got into a certain school means anything. I know people who got into Brown that were not accepted into UVA instate.

B77

FYI, the CCAP rankings of national universities as published by Forbes.com is inaccurate as to CCAP's actual ranking of SMU. Forbes.com lists SMU as 13 when, in fact, it's ranked by CCAP as 43. Take a look at CCAP's own list at the bottom of its own home page:The Center for College Affordability and Productivity. As you will see, the top 20 schools now begin with Harvard and end with Brandeis. BTW, I confirmed the accuracy of the CCAP-published list by email with CCAP

college9

Muskingum and Hiram are both underrated