I’m positive that false data is submitted all the time.
That’s why, if you want to tier/rank, I would do so by graduate outcomes. Maybe consider faculty strength.
Much harder to game or lie about.
Harder to lie about faculty strength? Hasn’t that been the easiest tool to lie and manipulate at the august USNews? The peer assessment has been a blunt instrument for blatant misrepresentation or cynical cronyism.
As far as graduate outcomes, how do you measure that without arbitrary rules? How do you compare a school such as UTEP (UT in El Paso – the darling of the Mother Teresa ranking) that accepts 99 percent of its students and graduates a tiny fraction of them despite mediocre requirements to a school such as Caltech or Harvey Mudd?
Bob Morse tried to quantify that metric (expected graduation rate) and ended up ranking Harvey Mudd as dead last in the category. And yes that is the same Harvey Mudd that just got heralded by Princeton Review.
All in all, what are graduate outcomes? Just as about every element that forms a ranking: a subjective that is hard to define and is bound to please nobody, except the … fans of the schools that fare well in that precise one!
@xiggi, you don’t have to rely on schools to provide you for info on faculty strength.
Third-parties do so as well (think ARWU).
Third-parties have also collected data on how many alums got in to elite professional schools, achieved noteworthy positions in society, won prestigious student awards, and gotten PhD’s: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1682986-ivy-equivalents-p3.html
You may call the criteria biased, but you can’t call them subjective.
Haha. PT, going from the USNews PA to the ARWU is none other than a choice between Scylla and Charybdis.
For all its publicity, the ARWU remains a narrow and biased measurement produced by some pseudo-scientists in Asia. To accept its results as a proxy for the strength of faculty, you have to accept that this strength is measured by the faulty yardstick of publishing in a narrow band of publications and some voodoo methodology. And, accept that this metric which focuses mostly on graduate research at research universities is indicative of the dedication to … teaching undergraduates.
I believe that relying on faulty and misleading criteria that are chosen to deliver the preordained results is a good example of subjectivity. And that one is especially devious when masquerading as a scientific exercise.
@xiggi, you can all any methodology “voodoo methodology”, just as you can call any criteria “faulty and misleading” (and if those are not subjective terms, I don’t know what are). In any case, yes, a ranking that purports to rank research strength would be ranking research strength, not dedication to teaching undergrads. Each person has to decide for themselves what matters to them.
Each person is also entitled to their own opinions, though I find those arguments that rely on using sneering emotional terms (“voodoo”, “pseudo”) to be offputting; in part because I find there to be a correlation between those who appeal to base emotions and weak arguments.
I enjoy snark as much as the next guy (and perhaps more), but Judge Learned Hand’s counsel to avoid such “anodynes to the pains of reasoning” comes to mind.
No, it’s not - law school rankings are in trouble over that right now. It’s not uncommon for law schools to offer their unemployed new graduates a 6-month job at the law school to boost the number of graduates who are technically employed, since employment rates are a factor in the law school rankings. Of course, the employment ends right after the period for which it’s important (so it’s “graduates employed 9 months after graduation,” it’s a 9-month position.)
@juillet, that’s why I don’t look at school-reported (or short term) alumni outcomes (you can take a look at the link I posted).
Getting your grads in to elite professional schools or PhD programs, winning Fulbrights/Goldwaters/Rhodes/etc., and getting your alums on to F500 boards, elected to Congress, in to a Big Five orchestra, a Pulitzer Prizes, etc. is much harder to game. And if a school really can do that, then they deserve kudos, because they must have done something to help their alums a lot.
University of Missouri-Kansas City, since it’s annoying to HAVE to click the link if you simply want to get to the heart of the matter.
Thank you. That is annoying, to post something like that and then not reveal exactly what it is.
This is rich. It appears to be attempting to take an intellectual approach when in reality it ignores a valid argument and instead quibbles over a few insignificant choices of words.
@PurpleTitan, your example of a strong 3rd party measure of faculty strength is clearly inadequate. Yes people are entitled to evaluate facts that are important to them, but when so many strong faculties exist at schools other than research universities its pretty clear that publishing success is not necessarily a good measure of teaching strength.
George Washington University should have been ostrasized for out and out lying about being need blind, IMO.
“…since it’s annoying to HAVE to click the link if you simply want to get to the heart of the matter.”
It takes about five seconds for the link to open and to read the first sentence. Yes, five seconds gone from your life forever. How annoying!
@CDH2013, I’m not sure why you are criticizing a ranking that purports to weigh research prowess for not measuring teaching strength when it doesn’t claim to do anything of the sort. You don’t see me claiming that ARWU measures teaching strength either, so I can’t say I understand what your beef is.
Though yes, I could be more clear: ARWU measures faculty strength with regards to research (though I thought that was obvious).
The problem with “teaching strength” is that not only is it hard to measure, but it also is dependent on each individual student (to some kids, teaching strength in an area is correlated with how much on the leading edge of research the faculty are). Some kids need more hand-holding. Some kids do not and would find a diversity of options or strength in a subfield of interest to be most germane to them, etc.
@PurpleTitan - I guess the misunderstanding is that I interpreted your quote (above) to mean that you viewed the ARWU rankings as a measure of teaching strength. If not, I stand corrected.
deleted: see post below:
Here’s another article on the decision to pull the ranking http://poetsandquants.com/2015/02/02/bloch-school-kicked-out-of-ranking/
PurpleTitan, you’re moving the goalposts. This is not about what ARWU does measure correctly or not. It is all about your suggestion that a ranking should be better --or more objective perhaps-- by relying on students’ outcomes and faculty strengths. You also intimated that such elements would be harder to “lie about.”
In response to my comment that the metric used by USNews (a PA) is prone to manipulation and cronyism, you suggested that one could rely a third party such as ARWU for, what I assume, obtaining objective data.
The point remains that the ARWU solely focuses on research universities (and overlooks as large part of the US educational system) and derives its rankings from a set of criteria mostly based on publishing outputs in a chosen set of journals.
The question is … how does this translate to a ranking of best colleges? Are all fields of study created equal in terms of publishing output and metrics?
It seems to me that it’s hardest to successfully lie about objective facts that can be unearthed in an audit, as happened here. Which objective facts are most relevant to educational quality is a different question.