barrons

Times Higher Education - Shanghai Jiao Tong university rankings revealed

UCBChemEGrad

Academic Ranking of World Universities | ARWU | First World University Ranking | Shanghai Ranking

Top schools unchanged from 2011 rankings.

barrons

Yes, the way the world rates US/Int schools is not important to undergrads.

UCBChemEGrad

^ Yeah, and these factors don't have any determination in college search and selection...

Just another data point for a question like:
"What university has the best program in X?"

beyphy

i.e. the top 16 are the same.

The first change from 2011 to 2012 is that johns hopkins eclipses UCSF for the 17th spot. (from 18th last year.)

UCBChemEGrad

^ Well, UCSF is just Cal's medical school while JHU is a full fledged university.

docfreedaddy

The rankings are useful to undergraduate education. The criteria are 100% focused upon the emphasis a university focuses upon faculty research. They provide an excellent inverse relationship to a university's commitment to undergraduate teaching. "Publish or perish" is alive and well with undergraduate education being the poor stepchild at most leading research universities.

What is needed is a ranking of LAC and universities with parameters related to education quality and outcome as some have proposed and begun to implement:

http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/surveys.htm


http://www.amazon.com/Academically-A.../dp/0226028550

snarlatron

Excellent point. I wish that more here would pause amid the rankings frenzy to consider this.

Ucberkeley017

Any one want to edit my personal statement will do the same

g0ld3n

You're absolutely hilarious. So then please explain why USC has been declining in commitment to undergraduate teaching since it has been consistently rising in these very rankings. It was ranked 50th in 2008 and has moved up to 46; I wouldn't be surprised if it kept rising faster than UCLA, but go ahead and tell me how that shows it is declining in undergraduate teaching instead. That's not a rhetorical question/request, go ahead, humor me. Also, Harvard's obviously at the top of this list, go ahead and tell me how this shows it is king of the "publish or perish" undergraduate teaching mentality.

Or better yet, if you can't come up with a coherent response, please tell me how I am just insecure of USC's rise and feel extremely threatened.

I actually do enjoy your posts a lot because you legitimately believe I am scared or threatened of USC or I am secretly a fan of USC deep down (which I really am to be honest; besides the rivalry, I am an LA native so there is no reason for me to hate on USC except in a decently competitive but friendly rivalry way). But I really think it's high time you just admit that whenever rankings make USC look really bad (Forbes, ARWU - basically anything not USNews) you actually want to somehow convince yourself that USC's poor performance on those rankings only proves how good of an undergraduate university it is. Pretty humorous. If you don't want to admit that, you can instead humor us in a different way and try to defend what I quoted from you and really put on a show.

But really, honestly, if you just admit that post was really horribly worded and you didn't actually mean in a literal way that the inverse of those rankings prove undergraduate quality, there's a small chance that you can actually save face.

Source:
University of Southern California

docfreedaddy

gOld3n,

Mine is obviously a provocatively worded comment meant to capture your attention which it did. I regret I can't take credit for the theses. Rather it is the result of a systematic body of educational research with references I provided for you. Below is a quote regarding a review of one of the references:

"As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list".

I suggest you issue your critique to the various authors. I'd be curious to know their response to you.

g0ld3n

^This is the exact type of response I was looking for. Thank you docfreedaddy.

phantasmagoric

Why does this always end up in the graduate forum? While many of the measures are more correlated with grad school, so are many of the measures in US News...

No. There are plenty of universities that are a) not committed to undergraduate teaching, and b) not very good at research, though they are focused on it - e.g. Boston University. In such cases, they are lower-ranked in the ARWU, among others, but that doesn't mean they're committed to undergraduate teaching. Furthermore, there are those who are very strong in research and are committed to undergraduate teaching, e.g. Princeton. To varying degrees, the same is true of most top privates. It tends to be less true among public research universities, where undergraduate teaching is often marginalized, relative to grad studies, and graduate research is emphasized. (This isn't to say that their undergrad divisions are poor, just that in comparison to top private schools, they tend to have less emphasis on undergrad.)

So these rankings don't provide an indication of undergraduate teaching, as much as some would like.

So you're admitting to trolling/baiting other posters?

docfreedaddy

See # 7 above. What has been lacking is a focus on cc and the undergraduate education discussion in general on the existing metrics for actually assessing undergraduate teaching outcome.