Prestige WhOres

theloneranger
Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:15:33 +0000

One thing to remember is that UT is excellent in many specialties. Your employer is not going to care about the school’s prestige as a whole if it is well known in the field you are being hired for. A&M does not have the greatest reputation, but any O&G company would love to have an Aggie petroleum engineering graduate–perhaps only Longhorn PE grads are higher in demand.

UT’s ranking in the Times fell because the Times stopped counting UTMB and UT Southwestern’s research in the ranking for UT. When you consider that UT is ranked as highly as they are without any medical school, the ranking is outstanding.

As for the US News rankings, they are designed to place Harvard and Yale and Princeton on the top every year. That’s why the authors claim they work. They use criteria that these schools are successful at.

UT can never be successful at that criteria. Our alumni base is drastically different than Harvard’s, and while our wealthiest alumni can afford to give just as much if not more, we have a lot more alumni. We simply cannot afford or justify the expense of having classes with tiny student-teacher ratios. It is not economical for the state of Texas to pay 50 people to teach 500 kids the same material when one can do the job. The state also has to serve a much larger population than Harvard as it does not exist to be selective and to serve only the very top of the world, it exists to serve as many residents of the state of Texas as it can.

UT is incredibly successful at its mission. If there were a seperate criteria which ranked large state schools, UT would come out at or near the very top.