<p>It is pointless to debate with you golden boy, because you lack integrity. I am going to keep your post because it shows have morally ambiguous you are. You actually think it is ok for a university to fudge numbers. The whole point of measuring a s:f ratio is to establish how many students the faculty who teaches undergrads are engaged in teaching/advising. That includes graduate students as they take much of the time of faculty. If Michigan used the same method to measure student:faculty ratio, its ratio would be 11:1, not 15:1. But omitting graduate students from the calculation is misleading as they exhaust much of the faculty’s time and energy. Regardless of where you stand, it is clear that Cal, Michigan, UVa etc… do not measure their student to faculty ratios the same was as the majority of private universities (with the exception of Brown and MIT). So comparing their ratios is pointless.</p>
<p>“Are you seriously contesting that splitting a 2 hour lecture with 150 students into 3 sections of 50 students for the same 2 hour span is not beneficial to the student? That is utterly preposterous!”</p>
<p>I most certainly am contesting it. A class with 40 or 50 students is not going to be intimate. Once a class has more than 15 or 20 students, the professor can no longer approach students individually. Furthermore, whether in a setting of 50 students or 150 students, that professor must still teach 150 students. There is no way that professor can provide the students, whether 50 at a time or all of them at once, with the individual attention you profess exists in such a scenario.</p>
<p>“It would take more than a few misrepresentations in the CDS to lift those 5 publics into the top 20.”</p>
<p>It would indeed. But there are not simply a few. Private universities seem to lie about admissions data as well. Until an audit is carried out on all universities, private and public, selectivity data is no longer a reliable variable. And do not get me started with financial resources. The accounting loopholes used by many private universities are simply ghastly! And alumni donating rates? Possibly the most laughable variable available. Adjusted for fairness, accuracy and consistency, I have no doubt that Cal would be ranked between #6 and #9 and Michigan between #10 and #17.</p>
<p>“Whether you like it or not, universities like Wash U, Rice, CMU, Georgetown, and Vanderbilt attract stronger students than all those schools besides Berkeley.”</p>
<p>Michigan and UVa have similar student quality as Cal. And most elite private universities, including the ones you listed above, do not have significantly stronger student bodies. Again, until the numbers are properly audited for accuracy and consistency, we cannot truly discuss this topic.</p>
<p>“It may not be fair but there’s not much you or I can do to change the infatuation with private universities that middle-class adults and their children have in the U.S.A. No one sees a UNC degree as being on par with Wash U.”</p>
<p>I am not sure how you came to that conclusion. I find this comment rather pathetic actually. I would say that a degree from UNC is as respected as a degree from WUSTL by many Americans, and on average, certainly by Americans with the power to accept applicants from those institutions into graduate school or to hire graduates from those institutions into the workplace. I do agree, however, that to some middle class folks who are not knowledgeable about universities and therefore depend entirely on the USNWR for information, WUSTL would be considered better than UNC, but only slightly. But the majority of highly educated people would not distinguish between UNC and WUSTL.</p>