Does the relative size of a department indicate quality?

College Search & Lists
51

<p>monydad-
For undergrad biology, I tried lumping together SAT scores and enrollments from widely diverse units just to see what would happen, this time with some large publics that have lots of diversity in the curriculum. My data again came from IPEDS COOL website. I then compared the ranking with the US News ranking for grad programs in biological sciences. (I know this is a very crude validation.) The US News rank is in parenthesis (the rank within this list alone, not the published rank.)</p>

<p>I used total undergraduate enrollment and the overall average SAT 75th percentile for the entire university. The department index was number of biology bachelors degrees awarded.</p>

<h2>BIOLOGY</h2>

<p>myrank usnewsgradrank college qualityscore

  1. (4) UCLA 46
  2. (1) Berkeley 45
  3. (10) UC Irvine 39
  4. (2) Wisconsin 32
  5. (4) U Washington 28
  6. (16) UC Santa Barbara 25
  7. (6) U Illinois 22
  8. (8) UT Austin 22
  9. (3) U Michigan 18
  10. (7) U Colorado 17
  11. (10) UVA 15
  12. (15) Ohio State 15
  13. (19) U Missouri 15
  14. (13) Indiana U 14
  15. (8) U Minnesota 13
  16. (14) Penn State 13
  17. (18) USC 12
  18. (16) U of Utah 9
  19. (10) Purdue 6</p>

<p>There are a few big differences between my rank and US News, but only 6 of the 19 ranks differed by more than 3. It certainly isn’t perfect agreement but it is pretty good confirmation that this method has some merit even when numbers are used loosely.</p>