I think that the Forbes ranking might heavily penalize schools like Hopkins, Chicago, Caltech, and Georgia Tech that have reputations for being incredibly rigorous. I think that a lot of what Forbes is trying to do is pick the schools that the students are the “happiest” with. I think that objectively those schools offer phenomenal educations and I know people who have graduated from those institutions and gone on to lead incredibly successful lives, but I also know of people who have gone to those schools and were very unhappy with the competition and high-stress lifestyle of the schools as well.
I don’t necessarily think that’s a fair criticism of those schools for a ranking, but I think it’s something students should take into consideration. Someone prone to testing anxiety probably shouldn’t go to a top state-school engineering program like GT, and someone who wants to only go to parties and take easy classes shouldn’t go to Caltech. It also could be why Harvey Mudd (despite being one of the best LACs and engineering schools in general) was hammered in the LAC rankings.
JHU, WashU, and GTech just don’t do very well in Forbes “American Leaders” ranking (successful people in business, government, non-profits, arts, media, and sciences), which is the biggest component in Forbes. Not sure about Caltech. Again, it could be that when a huge chunk of the student body with the most potential at JHU, WashU, and Emory enter med school, they don’t contribute as much to those other fields. Possibly true for all those engineers at Caltech and GTech as well. UChicago does fine in that ranking. Arguably, they are higher in USNews because they have gamed more heavily than peers in recent years (Chicago use to sit around 10-15 in USNews, which is about where Forbes has them among RU’s).
Slight Hijack: Using @xiggi 's methodology, of consulting the financial statements for LACs and RUs for evidence of research dollars, I have to say there is some support for his contention that it tends to be a “footnote” for some LACs. Here is the amount spent on research (however it may be defined) as a percentage of the entire budget of the top 6 LACs in the Forbes poll:
The real surprise here is Pomona which reports only a fraction of the research dollars that fellow consortium member CMC does, especially since CMC does not have STEM facilities of its own. I’m guessing a lot of the latter research money is coming from Robert Kravis, a CMC alumnus, or his foundation.
*Williams combines research support with its “Instructional” budget, apparently as a part of faculty compensation.
^ Well, Circuitrider, I appreciate the additional comment and I’d like to add a few more.
If you check what I wrote earlier, please note that I included a small caveat with the qualifier “real LACs.” While some might disagree, the focus at such schools is not to be research institutions. Some might disagree because among the LACs there are a few exceptions in the form of hybrid products with a reasonably large graduate programs, very large LACs a la Smith or Wesleyan, and some that have a pre-professional angle.
Without having spent much time looking at the budgets at numerous LACs (I really only looked at CMC and Wesleyan for good measure) I think that both schools fall in a separate category. You are obviously familiar with research at Wesleyan, and I believe that the higher figure at CMC is a direct result of the very dynamic research institutes at CMC that fund numerous self-directed projects of students and faculty. Such institutes are an integral part of the education at CMC and I think that the school is considering the funding (direct or through donor) an essential part of its … different offering.
Again, I happen to think that schools that are part of consortia are able to have a slightly different focus and uses of resources than the rural and isolated LACs.
@PurpleTitan I feel like you’re cherry picking data points.
In 2012, Forbes ranked Chicago 4. Now on Forbes, Chicago is ranked 20, and last year it was ranked 24. Duke is ranked 22 this year and was, in prior years, ranked at 104. This is at best, inconsistent. At worst, it is laughable. Brown above MIT? Come on.
Meanwhile the US News rankings have had little movement since 1983. The public universities rankings have deteriorated greatly, but this is also because they’ve been so heavily defunded by local state senates. Meanwhile, Chicago was ranked 6 in 1983, and is now ranked 4, in a three way tie, which really suggests a position of 4 - 6. So there has hardly been any movement in the rankings, except to show some brutal realities where universities like Illinois and Michigan have been attacked by their state governments. There is little wonder why people pay little heed to Forbes.
@neweducation, actually, the public research U’s dropped a lot because USNews changed their methodology drastically between when they started ranking and now.
Between 1983 and the present day, Chicago was ranked below 10 10 times. So, Chicago was in the range you suggest for only 1/3 of the rankings. For most of the rest of the time, Chicago was (IMO properly) ranked between 5-10. Between this and Duke’s often far too low ranking, I’m pretty sure that the Forbes ranking has a few more iterations to go through before it will make sense.
Talk about playing with numbers, @kaarboer. UChicago has been ranked between 9-15 inclusive by USNews for 21 out of 29 years. It is only in the past few years (when UChicago started heavily gaming USNews) and a couple years at the very beginning (when USNews used a completely different methodology) when UChicago has consistently been above 9th.
I think your understanding of the University of Michigan’s finances is flawed. Michigan has the 9th largest endowment of any school, public or private, at just over $10 billion. It was weaned away from substantial legislative appropriations a generation or more ago, beginning in the 1970s when the U.S. auto industry was in a deep crisis, leaving a huge adverse impact on the State of Michigan’s tax revenues. State appropriations to the university never really recovered–they now stand at less than 5% of the university’s total operating budget-- so the university had to find other ways to fund itself. Together with the University of Virginia, Michigan has over the last 30-40 years pioneered a public/private hybrid model, building up a huge endowment, building its research capacity to the point that it now has total research expenditures of $1.3 billion annually, most of it externally funded (second only to Johns Hopkins, a special case because JHU gets to count the Applied Physics Laboratory, a very large research lab generously funded by DOD and NASA but administered by JHU), and increasing the percentage of OOS and international students in its student body, most of them full-pays at tuition rates similar to those charged by elite private colleges and universities. Recent entering classes at Michigan have been a shade over 40% OOS and international. As a consequence, notwithstanding relatively paltry contributions from the state, the University of Michigan’s finances have never been in better shape. It is one of a handful of public universities that meets 100% of need for 100% of state residents with demonstrated need, and it is now committed to a goal of meeting 100% of need for OOS students as well, something it will be able to accomplish once it completes its current $4 billion capital campaign—the largest in the history of public higher education—which will further swell the size of its endowment. As of November, 2014, one year into the capital campaign, the university had raised $2.5 billion in new gifts and pledges, well on its way to meeting or exceeding its ambitious goal.
Not to pick on Illinois, but the contrast is striking. At $2.3 billion, the University of Illinois’ system-wide endowment is less than 1/4 the size of Michigan’s, for a 3-campus system with 60% more students than the University of Michigan. UIUC meets full need for only 10.8% of its students with demonstrated need, according to its latest Common Data Set. and on average only 64% of need is met. These are markers of a much more resource-constrained environment.
There are many reasons public universities don’t do as well as privates in the US News rankings, not least because those rankings reward a high cost-per-student educational model which punishes publics for the economies of scale they can achieve. Note also that the metrics US News uses have been revised repeatedly since the 1980s. But the suggestion that the University of Michigan has fallen in the US News rankings because of state budget cuts and faltering finances is just wildly off-base; nothing could be further from the truth.
Both lists assign arbitrary weights to criteria in a way that is unlikely to align well with what you or I value, giving the list little meaning. For example, if you were deciding what makes the best college, I doubt you’d say it’s 18% 6-year graduation rate, 7.5% rate my professor score, 7% highest faculty salary, etc. When you make minor adjustments to these weightings, you’ll get a very different list. With some weightings, Brown will be above MIT. With others MIT will be above Brown.
I’d suggest focusing on whatever criteria is important to you, rather than the weightings that USNWR, Forbes, or some other website chooses. I particularly dislike both of these rankings because they do not make it easy to see the individual subscores that show how the ranking was derived (not free at USNWR). When I was deciding on colleges, I made my own weighted rankings that included things like available major selection, section of country, size of student body, and various other criteria that are not used in typical rankings. As I recall my rankings came out something like below. I’m sure many on this site would say it’s ridiculous to rank Cornell above Harvard, but if you are planning a career in engineering and live in upstate NY, then it makes more sense.
~1. Stanford (~tie)
~1. MIT (~tie)
3. Cornell
4. Princeton
5. Brown
I’ve checked out the methodology; I think we’re looking at this all wrong. It isn’t so much a measure of the academic strength of an institution (though it does include a metric for that, it has a relatively small weight). It’s focused on the relative dollar value an institution gives to a student. Consider the high percentages given to Payscale, “student satisfaction”, and student debt (combined, 60% of the ranking). Those are crude metrics for relative achievement based on price (where price is both financial and in relative happiness), with achievement getting just enough of a rating to ensure that the fastest criticism of the rankings (HYPS lower than expected) can be avoided.
All in all, it’s a better ranking that should be used along with the US News and CWUR rankings to get a better picture of the entire situation.
I’m still waiting on a ranking that lets me weigh the factors I consider important and ignore those I don’t, but that’s a ways off I expect.
I think the list is plausible at a high level in that the schools listed at the top are all great schools, but as noted above the weighting used may not match what a particular student values.
I think in particular that one rank ordering including LACs and research universities is an apples to oranges comparison. Certainly some will find Pomona and Williams to be better for their needs than Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard (as the rank ordering would indicate), but it’s ranking two very different kinds of institutions.
I don’t disagree with this, but US News is equally arbitrary in dividing all the top schools into only 2 kinds, “national universities” (their own label, most would say “research universities”) and LACs. Applying the same logic, one could just as easily say that some will find Yale or Chicago to be better for their needs than MIT or Caltech (as the rank ordering would indicate), but it’s ranking two very different kinds of institutions. A classics or art history major would be poorly served at MIT or Caltech, neither of which offers a major in either of those disciplines, but an engineering major would be equally poorly served at Chicago which doesn’t offer engineering, and arguably better served at MIT or Caltech than at Yale which offers engineering, but with a program that is not nearly so highly regarded as MIT’s or Caltech’s.
Yes, that’s right. I think the whole business of rank ordering is a lot simpler for graduate and professional programs than it is for undergraduate institutions.
