How To Succeed in the USN&WR Rankings - Without Really Trying

<p>Colleges, wondering what you can do to get your USN&WR ranking scores up? How to pass by your peer schools and be a true campus hero? Well, look no further, we’re here to help. The key factors to improving the perception that your school has improved are: </p>

<p>Peer Rankings (25 percent). Believe it or not, worthless nonsense about what how some dude who has never set foot on your campus scores your college matters and this bit of fluff is the highest percentage of all ranking categories. You don’t need to be a math wiz to want to improve this baby. What to do? Simple, extort leaders at other schools. Rather than plead with them to join their own little group of ‘I’ll think you are great if you’ll think I’m great’ cronies, simply give them an offer they can’t refuse. After all, it would be a shame if that picture of the topless underage girl sitting in the lap of some college president were to be leaked to the press, wouldn’t it? For just some chump change out of the college’s discretionary fund, this will be the best investment your college ever made. </p>

<p>Student selectivity (15 percent). This is not the highest percentage but a category that can really help pull your school up over peer schools. If you are a good public university wanting to look like you are a top 50 school, get your state to pass a law that the school can only take kids that are in the top 10 percent of their class. If you are a good private school, pass over better kids at better schools to take students that are in the top 10 percent of their chump high school classes. Now to cover up the fact that you are passing on better students make the SAT/ACT optional (except for merit scholarships). This means that only kids with really good scores will report them and your college should be upfront about what scores you do care about to ‘help’ these kids decide whether to submit their scores. Ya see, being helpful is helpful. Now, as you are going to optional score reporting, only accept one of the two services, either SAT or ACT as USN&WR will only consider test scores of the service that the majority of kids report to that school. This will ensure that you don’t lose precious top scores. Also, offer OOS and minority students to apply free to your school. Admissions is roughly a fixed cost so you can do this without it costing much, after all, it’s not like you really need to read these applications. Simply reject most of these kids and this will improve your applications to admit ratio and make it look like a bunch of kids really wanting to go there but are not getting in. </p>

<p>Retention Rate (20 percent). Not much you can do here without real work but by taking those mediocre kids that still were in the top ten percent of their class (see Student Selectivity), this will help retention rate as these kids aren’t going anywhere else so they will help both your freshman retention rate and 6 year graduation rate. </p>

<p>Faculty Resources (20 percent). Piece of cake. In their infinite wisdom, USN&WR has decided that paying faculty more means students have a better education. Fortunately this is both salary and benefits. You decide that benefits will include the faculties’ ability to ‘suggest’ what the college should spend their operating budget. Oh, and you include 60 percent of their salary as the value of that ‘benefit’ when reporting to USN&WR and 0 when reporting to the IRS. The other major factor is class sizes fewer than 20 students and those greater than 50 students. Simply put in a bunch of small classes that few kids can actually get into and avoid >50 classes like the plague. Remember it’s better to have one class of 500 kids than 5 classes of 100. You have to love the stupidity of USN&WR, they’re the best. </p>

<p>Financial Resources (10 percent). See Faculty Resources above. Paying added ‘benefits’ to faculty counts here too as instruction spending counts in the per-student educational spending number. Doubt benefit … whoot!</p>

<p>Alumni Giving (5 percent). Not to worry, now that you’ve gamed the system, alums pleased with their schools improved rankings will be throwing money at you. It’s all good.</p>

<p>After you sort through this list a bit, you can look more closely at the schools that most closely match you interests. Rice has a good baseball team, but you’d have to check whether it offers Swedish.</p>

<p>Alumni giving: </p>

<p>Take a donation from a student of $30 and divide it into a 5 year donation of $6/year to make sure that student is counted every year</p>

<p>“Also, offer OOS and minority students to apply free to your school. Admissions is roughly a fixed cost so you can do this without it costing much, after all, it’s not like you really need to read these applications. Simply reject most of these kids and this will improve your applications to admit ratio and make it look like a bunch of kids really wanting to go there but are not getting in.” </p>

<p>This is where the “Priority Applications” come in. What a gimmick!</p>

<p>U.S. News Rankings Through the Years: [U.S&lt;/a&gt;. News Rankings Through the Years](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/]U.S”>http://chronicle.com/stats/usnews/)</p>

<p>Interactive Game: “How to win the [USNews ranking] Game” [How</a> to win the game](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v53/i38/usnews/game/]How”>http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v53/i38/usnews/game/)</p>

<p>Institutional snapshots of 17 years of U.S. News rankings: [Institutional</a> snapshots of 17 years of U.S. News rankings](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v53/i38/usnews/snapshots/]Institutional”>http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v53/i38/usnews/snapshots/)</p>

<p>Ranking Profiles of Schools that manipulate USNews Ranking: [The</a> Chronicle: 5/25/2007: Ranking Profiles](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01502.htm#washington]The”>http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i38/38a01502.htm#washington)</p>

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<p>Believe it or not, the technique of asking industry leaders to rate their competitors is a commonly accepted practice.</p>

<p>I don’t need to be the Ford CEO in order to give a 0 to GM (LOL) and and maybe a 2 to Chrysler-Fiat (■■■■■) on a scale from 1 to 5…</p>

<p>There are only two options right? Marginal (1), Adequate (2), Above average (3), Strong (4), and Distinguished (5)</p>

<p>Are you telling me that CEO’s cannot distinguish between a 4 or a 5… There is only two options… There isn’t a 4.567 option that I know of … :slight_smile: It’s like dummy proof.</p>

<p>Exactly correct Phead. PA should account for an even higher percentage at USNWR.</p>

<p>the only exception would probably be LAC, Masters, and Baccalaureate schools because very few people know about the “quality” of them. The only reason I think Williams and Amherst is good is because of their selectivity. I have no clue what any of their graduates do in the real world.</p>

<p>rjkofnovi, but then again, you could intentionally give all your competitors low grades just as Clemson does haha</p>

<p>^ If we go by the “honesty policy” (■■■■■) and hope that the educators at universities abide by it (■■■■■, how hypocritical)…</p>

<p>The Clemson case is an outlier that can be weeded out by taking a sufficiently large sample size and getting a very good response rate (USNews has 42% to 63% response rate, considered by this Yale Dean to be “a very very good response rate for a mail in survey”)</p>

<p>One of the reasons why PA exist to measure intangibles and to help bolster the Public universities… The fact that there is no public in the top 20 just makes me cringe…Fundamentally, the rankings were geared so that HYP always ranks at the top. Once asked “How do you know the ranking methology is correct?” The USNews editor replied: "… Because Harvard, Yale, Princeton always ends up at the top 3 :slight_smile: " So fundamentally, it favors endowment rich and highly selective private schools. </p>

<p>PA should account for more so that publics like UCB, UMich, and UCLA can get a boast :)</p>

<p>Berkeley and Michigan used to be in the top ten before the numbers were skewed to favor privates. The biggest losers in this race according to the original USNWR ratings is Wisconsin and UIUC. Totally underrated currently at USNWR.</p>

<p>Re the PA scores for the US auto companies, a year ago, the CEOs of Ford, GM, and Chrysler would’ve been members of the Mutual Admiration Club. 4s and 5s all around. What a great bunch of managers and what a wonderful research operation they’ve got! I mean, they invented the car. They MUST be the smartest, most well-informed people in the industry. Yeaaaaaaaaa! </p>

<p>Meanwhile, those unenlightened foreigners, many of which manufacture in Southern states with antiquated labor laws and uneducated workforces (and they probably even watch Fox News!!), would be lucky to get 3s. </p>

<p>Yessiree, that PA scoring sure is infallible. And if anyone among the Great Unwashed dares challenge the dominant Establishment thinking that we can’t ever allow to change or evolve, we’ll crush him/her by dropping one of those Hummers on 'em. </p>

<p>Any parallels to the current Higher Education industry are purely intentional.</p>

<p>Totally agree Hawkette.</p>

<p>Top universities will try to avoid ranking wars but giving each other 5’s and 4’s. Then, everyone stays happy :slight_smile: I believe that top universities are collaborating behind the scenes like this all the time. :slight_smile: A Mutual Admiration Group (MAG) coined by Hawkette :slight_smile: Back on topic…</p>

<p>Did anyone see the interactive game video on how to game the USNews rankings :slight_smile: Neat huh?</p>

<p>haha yes I did, I want to play someone in Monopoly now
that was pretty cool though</p>

<p>A few more:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Jack up tuition and recycle 100% of the additional revenue into increased financial aid, thus keeping the net cost to students and the net revenue to the college constant. This will produce a higher nominal through-put of money, higher nominal “expenditures,” and therefore higher expenditures per student, which will boost your “financial resources” score.</p></li>
<li><p>Target merit aid (and for that matter, need-based grants to the extent you have discretion in how they’re allocated) not to the most highly qualified admits, but to those just above your target 75th and 25th percentile SAT scores. Why waste a lot of money trying to lure an applicant with 1600 SAT CR + M who you’re probably going to lose to Harvard anyway, when you have a better chance at nailing down the kid with the 1420 SATs who will do just as much to get your 75th percentile SAT CR + M over 1400—and who will be much more grateful for the attention and the aid award?</p></li>
<li><p>Cut the size of your freshman class by 20% and fill those empty seats with an equal number of transfer students. That will allow you to be more “selective” at the freshman level, with a lower admit rate and higher median SATs and class rank, and the beauty part is, the transfer students’ SATs and class rank don’t count in the U.S. News rankings! Brilliant! You can actually more toward a more mediocre student body, while looking like you’re doing just the opposite! And it won’t cost you a dime because the lost tuition revenue from a smaller freshman class will be matched dollar-for-dollar by new transfers—indeed, you might even save a little on FA because many schools don’t promise to meet 100% of need for transfers. No adverse effect on student-faculty ratios, either!</p></li>
<li><p>Break up that 100-person lecture class taught by a full professor (with discussion subsections led by TAs) into 6 small classes each capped at 19 students, including one “honors” section taught by the professor (who will be grateful to have a small class and only the best students) and 5 regular sections taught by TAs. This will give you one less “large” class and 6 new “small” classes (the discussions subsections of the large lecture didn’t count as “classes” but if you eliminate the lecture you can count each small 19-person section, most now taught entirely by the TA, as a “class”). No matter that 80% of the students no longer have any contact with the professor and are instead taught by grad students; that apparently doesn’t figure into the US News rankings. If you want to carry it a step further, you could re-designate the TAs as “instructors” or “lecturers” and list them as part-time “faculty.” This will hurt you a little in the the part of the rankings that credits you for a higher percentage of full-time faculty (5% of “faculty resources” score); but that’s more than compensated by your improved student-faculty ratio (TAs don’t count as “faculty” for this purpose but part-time “instructors” or “lecturers” do; this factor represents 5% of "faculty resources score), enhanced percentage of “small” classes (30% of “faculty resources” score), and reduced percentage of “large” classes (10% of “faculty resources” score). </p></li>
<li><p>Create a two-track faculty system. Boost the salaries and benefits of tenured and tenure-track professors, give them a generous sabbatical leave policy, and minimize their undergraduate teaching load. This will allow you to retain and attract big-name “stars” in the academic world, probably the single most important thing you can do to boost your PA score (25% of total US News ranking); and the more you pay them, the more it also boosts your average faculty compensation, which counts for a whopping 35% of your “faculty resources” score, which in turn counts for 20% of your total US News ranking. No matter that these big stars don’t actually teach undergraduates; nothing in the US News rankings measures whether they’re the ones doing the teaching, and the administrators at other schools filling out the PA surveys are not going to bother to check whether the big stars at their peer institutions are teaching undergrads or not.</p></li>
<li><p>Then who’s going to teach the undergrads? Well, a lower caste of lower-paid and untenured “adjuncts,” “instructors,” and “lecturers,” most part-time, some full-time, whom you can hire far more cheaply than a big name in the field; in fact, you can easily pick up 6 or 7 part-timers at modest pay and few if any fringe benefits for the price of one full professor, and have each part-times teach 2 classes per year for a total of 12-14 small classes per year, as opposed to the 3 max you’d get out of a full professor. Won’t this bring down your average faculty compensation? Well, no; U.S. News calculates “faculty compensation” on the basis of “average faculty pay and benefits” paid to “full-time assistant, associate, and full professors”—the part-time adjuncts, instructors, and lecturers just don’t figure into the calculation (indeed, given this definition it’s not even clear that a full-time non-tenure track “lecturer” counts for purposes of determining average faculty compensation, but I’d say probably not). Yet the school gets to count each part-timer as 1/3 of a faculty member for purposes of determining its student-faculty ratio, so the 6 part-timers you hired for the price of one full professor count as 2 faculty in the s-f ratio! Brilliant! With a chronic oversupply of Ph.D.s in many fields, many of these people will be grateful for the work, and if you pay them on a “piecework” per-course basis they’ll happily carry even larger teaching loads. No matter that they’re not the top people in their field, or that they’re a high-turnover group of academic migrant workers. This is just a numbers game. U.S. News has no way of measuring the quality of instruction in the classroom; consequently, the ruthless college administrator need not worry about it, at least not nearly as much as she needs to worry about the numbers.</p></li>
</ul>

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<p>This is a bunch of bull. I happen to know a lot of people in various parts of the automotive industry. The CEOs of these companies have known since the 1970s they were in trouble and were getting their butts kicked on a lot of different levels by foreign competition, especially the Japanese. That’s why long before the current economic downturn, Ford went out and raised over $20 billion to build up a war chest to carry it through an aggressive transformation plan even in the event of a sharp economic downturn—one of the main reasons Ford has not taken a dime of federal bailout money, and why Ford has actually gained market share primarily at GM’s and Toyota’s expense over past several months. </p>

<p>A year ago the CEOs at Ford and GM had no respect for Chrysler and would probably have given it a “1.” Outside the Chrysler family, few people in the automotive industry have had much respect for Chrysler—though a lot of people had hoped that Daimler, with a well-deserved reputation for quality engineering and quality products, would turn things around at Chrysler instead of treating it like an unwanted step-child as it did. But Ford and GM both knew perfectly well their own operations were bloated and inefficient, and they could see it in each other, too. My guess is Ford and GM would have each given themselves a “3” and the other a “2,” and both would have given Toyota a “4.” 9toyota’s far from perfect, too). </p>

<p>In various ways, Ford and GM have both been trying to emulate and/or partner with top Japanese automakers for at least a couple of decades now, setting their Japanese rivals as the benchmark. That’s the way it works in any industry–including higher education.</p>

<p>Ford in particular has bet heavily on a “product-driven” transformation based on “best-in-class” engineering principles—in each vehicle class, doing meticulous comparative benchmarking of all the components, systems, features, and design elements of all its competitors’ vehicles, and seeking to emulate, match, or surpass the “best-in-class” in every single element. They also pay extremely close attention to independent product quality and reliability surveys and feed that information back into their engineering and manufacturing processes. As a consequence they’ve moved well up towards the top of the charts in independent surveys of product quality. (Reminds me an awful lot of the way the best colleges and universities approach their own institutional goals, objectives, and strategic redesigns).</p>

<p>Whether Ford’s transformation succeeds or not remains to be seen—among other things they’re fighting the burden of “legacy costs” and generalized consumer perceptions that now lump all U.S. automakers together indiscriminately under a generally negative label. That’s a lot to overcome. But the assertion that these companies, and Ford in particular, have been sitting back, fat, lazy, and self-satisfied, is plainly just flat wrong.</p>

<p>Wow, Hawkette, well said. You’re my hero. This PA stuff has gotta go.</p>

<p>Regarding the PA of the auto industry, Fortune magazine conducts a survey of most admired companies. This is the auto industry ranking for 2009, ranked by industry insiders (a.k.a. peers):</p>

<p>Most Admired
Company Industry Overall score
1 BMW 6.50
2 Toyota Motor 6.25
3 Honda Motor 5.99
4 Volkswagen 5.22
5 Nissan Motor 5.17
6 Daimler 5.00
7 General Motors 4.73
8 Renault 4.57 </p>

<p><a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/2009/industries/43.html[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/2009/industries/43.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Hawkette, your little rant doesn’t jive.</p>

<p>“The only reason I think Williams and Amherst is good is because of their selectivity. I have no clue what any of their graduates do in the real world.”</p>

<p>Amherst and Williams are good is not because of their selectivity, it is because they are academically super.</p>

<p>Each of them has a long list of outstanding graduates and are more impressive than some of the ivies.</p>

<p>[List</a> of Amherst College people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amherst_College_people]List”>List of Amherst College people - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>[List</a> of Williams College people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Williams_College_people]List”>List of Williams College people - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>There’s lots of ways to game the system and no doubt a number of colleges
have had some success. But long term trends are hard to change. Single
sex female colleges continue to slide in the rankings. And money always talks,
just look at the LAC list and compare it to endownments.</p>

<p>I want to very strongly agree with bclintonk’s comments on transfer students. Some schools invite literally thousands of students to join their school via this route. Goodness knows what their statistical caliber is, but I think it’s a safe bet that they are not as strong as the enrolled freshmen class for whom statistics are publicly reported and rankings are created. </p>

<p>Here are the numbers of transfer students into the schools ranked in the USNWR Top 50 National Universities:</p>

<h1>of Transfer Students , School</h1>

<p>3321 , UCLA
2128 , U Texas
2036 , UC Berkeley
1875 , UC Davis
1742 , UCSD
1706 , U Florida
1448 , UC Irvine
1345 , U Washington
1276 , U Wisconsin
1273 , UC Santa Barbara
1116 , USC
866 , U Illinois
793 , U North Carolina
779 , U Michigan
736 , NYU
590 , U Virginia
571 , Cornell
380 , Georgia Tech
366 , Penn State
227 , Georgetown
215 , Tulane
197 , U Penn
192 , W&M
190 , Northwestern
171 , Notre Dame
149 , Boston Coll
126 , Vanderbilt
102 , U Rochester
93 , Wash U
92 , Rensselaer
82 , Emory
81 , Columbia
70 , Lehigh
57 , Case Western
56 , Rice
55 , Brown
45 , Wake Forest
44 , Carnegie Mellon
41 , U Chicago
34 , Brandeis
28 , Yale
27 , Tufts
26 , Johns Hopkins
23 , Dartmouth
20 , Stanford
15 , MIT
6 , Caltech
0 , Princeton
na , Harvard
na , Duke
na , Yeshiva</p>

<p>As for the US automakers, their long-running insularity, stupidity and arrogance has finally caught up with them and they’re where they belong…sold, restructuring, or in bankruptcy. Talk about a completely braindead group of companies. Probably the largest collection of untalented managers in all of corporate America.</p>

<p>No, that would be Wall Street. Several times they have lead us straight into economic calamities and Trillions in losses. The auto guys are pikers.</p>