The Academic Ranking of World Universities is Anti-LAC, the Elitists are squirming!

Graduate School
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<p>"Yes, but how else should we determine the Prestige of an institution? "</p>

<p>I would suggest the US News Peer Review scores for that purpose. Prestige is an opinion, in the eyes and heart of the beholder; and the US News Peer Review is a survey of relevant opinions.</p>

<p>However in my personal opinion you can’t eat prestige. Moreover prestige of your last degree will frequently be more relevant than prestige of your first degree. Many students who intend to pursue graduate studies should put most weight on finding an environment most conducive to their academic (and non-academic) success. This will optimize their chances of having a prestigious last degree, at institutions highly rated for graduate studies such as those in your reports. As well as other rewards.</p>

<p>I suppose some seeking measures for undergraduate programs would look to those % future PhD lists, or the Wall Street Journal Feeder School Rankings. I don’t like either, but at least they are measuring actual output of undergraduate institutions themselves and not outputs of grad schools.</p>

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<p>SSobick, your arguments make absolutely no sense. The international recognition of one’s undergraduate degree is basically irrelevant to most American college grads. Sure, international recognition may be based on research output (though note that this is not a study measuring international prestige, but a study measuring research output in a narrow range of fields. The fact that a study measuring research output puts institutions with a lot of it at the top doesn’t prove anything about how much research affects international prestige). International recognition, however, does not affect how American grad schools admit students, nor does it affect how American businesses hire graduates. </p>

<p>You talk about how American LACs will decrease in relevance. But their research output hasn’t been falling. If these rankings came out 50 years ago, Amherst still would not have appeared on them. So what evidence do you have that their relevance is decreasing. Is research more important to relevance than it was 25 or 50 years ago?

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<p>Again, how do these rankings prove that LACs are a thing of the past? They fare no differently in these rankings than they would have 20 years ago. You have no evidence that faculty research is becoming a more important indicator of the value of an undergrad degree. You simply assert it. </p>

<p>The US is hardly the only country where colleges produce prestige degrees without being major research institutions. Where do you think the best French students go to school? The University of Paris, top-ranked French university on the SJT rankings? Hardly. The prestige schools in France are the Grandes Ecoles, which produce the leaders of French society in almost every area, but will will not do well on a ranking of research output. Every single French winner of the Fields medal (8 in total) attended the Ecole Normale Superieure, as did Nobel Prize Winners in Physics and Literature, as did 6 Prime Ministers of France and one President. Where is it on your precious ranking? 83rd. Lower than Brown, one of those non-research intensive Ivies for which you have such disdain. And it is the only Grande Ecole to appear in the rankings. What about the Institut d’</p>

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<p>Since I am a social scientist (psychologist), do a great deal of research and consistently write and obtain grants in six figures, I must have a liberal arts bias, mustn’t I? </p>

<p>Let’s take a look at Ssobick’s assertions to date, shall we, to see what sort of education he has.</p>

<p>First, there is the assertion that the Chinese ranking “prove” (his/her words) something. Being the researcher that I am, I would look for some sort of validation in a multivariate analysis of factors predicting educational excellence against a set of benchmarks. Unfortunately, there are no fundamentally sound benchmarks. Thus, there can be no statistically valid relationship until such benchmarks are determined if, in fact, they ever can be. Even if we could prove a relationship, it wouldn’t be causality.</p>

<p>He next says that “It’s very easy to engage Professors if a student at a Research University actually bothers to put in the initiative (but keep in mind this is at the better Research Universities, I can not be sure of what it is like at Tier 3 or Tier 4 National Universities).” How do you suppose Ssobick knows this? Do you suppose he’s done research of student opinion or, better, actual observation of student/professor interaction at all first and second tier research institutions? And what are these tiers to which he refers? The only publication I know that uses the word “tier” is US News, and Ssobick claims to reject US News’ rankings. Why would he use them, then, in an attempt to … well … I don’t know what he’s attempting by using that term, really.</p>

<p>Here’s another statement: "As far as the International Rankings, these have strong validity in my opinion. " In one post, the rankings are proof, and in another they’re opinion. Which is it?</p>

<p>What’s most disturbing to me, however, is the fac that one insitution I looked into was highly ranked in the Chinese system with only 11 faculty, out of over 2,000, affecting the ranking. Ssobick seems to think that such a small sampling is proof of an institution’s overall position in the educational firmament.</p>

<p>Ssobick actually has a way of thinking that is not conducive to good research. Good researchers are always very, very aware of their biases, and do their best to eliminate the effect of bias from their conclusions. Ssobick takes the opposite tack, having a firm conclusion in mind and then seeking cognitive inputs that support his conclusion, discounting all those that don’t out of hand. In doing so, he violates rules of logic and discourse that have been well known since the fifth century BCE.</p>

<p>He could have learned those rules in liberal arts classes. Too bad.</p>

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<p>Tarhunt: excellent post</p>

<p>I thought I would include a little more about how LACs cannot be reasonably called irrelevant. Lets compare some LACs to some research universities in production of future distinguished academics. Amherst College includes four Nobel Prize winners (Henry Kendall, Edmund Phelps, Harold Varmus, Joseph Stiglitz) among its alumni. How many does SSobick’s beloved University of Florida have (despite being a far larger school)? Two. (Robert Grubbs and Marshall Nirenberg).
Let’s continue. The University of Maryland, College Park (ranked even higher than Florida by SJT), has had one (1) undergraduate alum go on to win the Nobel Prize (Raymond Davis, it also has one graduate alum, but we’re comparing undergrad institutions). Oberlin College (another irrelevant, inferior LAC) has had three (Stanley Cohen, Robert Millikan, Roger Wolcott Sperry).
How is it possible that LACs, with their vastly inferior research qualities manage to produce more future top researchers (in absolute numbers, no less) than far larger research universities that have some of the top research faculty in the world? Could it be that the environment provided by a LAC actually provides an education that is well suited to developing future academics? That all the “hand holding” and “wimpiness” that you sneer at actually has some value? The day that LACs stop producing important alumni, I will be happy to admit that you were right. But I don’t expect to live to see that day.</p>

<p>One final note, I used Nobel Prize winners above because your love for the SJT rankings shows that you must consider them extremely important. I, however consider them of only marginal relevance to a university’s overall strength. So I will include the table I included in another thread showing the top 40 undergraduate schools in per-capita production of future PhDs.
<a href=“Institutional Effectiveness, Research & Assessment :: Swarthmore College”>Institutional Effectiveness, Research & Assessment :: Swarthmore College;
Some research universities do quite well (though, not surprisingly, it is those with a most LAC-like undergraduate environment: Caltech, MIT, Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, etc). But, for the most part, elite LACs are the best producers of future PhDs, the very people who later cause elite research universities to do well in the SJT rankings.</p>

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<p>Svalbard:</p>

<p>Thanks. Off topic, but have you actually been to the Svalbard islands. Wow.</p>

<p>As for lutefisk, here’s a quote from Garrison Keillor:</p>

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<p>svalbardlutefisk: I agree entirely with you that the Chinese ARWU is not a good measure of research output because it is largely based, as you’ve correctly pointed out, on narrow metrics such as Nobel prizes and publications in two journals only (Nature and Science). That is why I referred readers to the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index instead, which is a much broader measure.</p>

<p>On your second argument though, namely that LACs are great because they produce great alumni and send a large percentage of their graduates to PhD programs, I believe a note of caution is necessary. </p>

<p>First of all, the elite LACS produce great alumni in part because they are very selective and recruit some of the best students to begin with. There is no way to tell if the same student would not do as well or better in life had he/she gone to a top research university like MIT or Harvard for his/her undergraduate degree. </p>

<p>Second, one of the reasons why LACs send such a high percentage of their alumni to graduate schools may be simply that the opportunities to get well-paying jobs in industry right after graduation are comparatively lower for LAC graduates than, for example, for an engineering or computer science B.S in a tech-oriented research university. On top of that, by the very nature of their admission policies, some elite LACs tend to have a more academically inclined student body than the typical state university for example. If you compare LACs with elite private research universities that have a student body of similar quality, you will see that the latter perform as well or better than top LACs as graduate school feeders.</p>

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<p>Sadly I haven’t been to Svalbard (my Norwegian travels have been limited to the mainland and the Lofotens). I have eaten lutefisk, though, and Garrison Keillor certainly knows what he’s talking about (though my dad claims to have had lutefisk that tastes good).</p>

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But it’s not just the LACs with the strongest student bodies. Oberlin traditionally does very well, though its selectivity is rated 20th among LACs by US News. Reed also does very well, though US News puts its selectivity at 43rd (admittedly, their numbers may be off, since Reed doesn’t cooperate with the rankings, though the data for admissions stats is publicly available). I think an important thing to note is that the research universities you mentioned as being just as good are Harvard and MIT, not a large public university like Berkeley. The most convincing relationship between PhD production and type of university seems to be that universities and colleges with a lot of undergraduate resources (and good students to begin with) do well. But the correlation is with undergraduate focus and resources, not with the amount of research going on. Berkeley is an amazing research university, but it isn’t even in the top 40 in future PhD production, whereas Duke, still a research university (but much weaker in that regard than Berkeley) is.
I think another point here is that SSobick isn’t merely claiming that LACs are no better than research universities at undergraduate education, he’s claiming that they are far worse, and that they are, in fact irrelevant, useless, and various other pejorative terms. As long as they attract good students, they won’t be irrelevant, as long as they continue to send those students on to successful lives, they won’t be useless. SSobick has a lot of rhetoric, but no facts other than that research universities produce more research than LACs (big surprise).</p>

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A humanities degree from Amherst is less employable than an engineering degree from Berkeley, but it certainly isn’t less employable than a humanities degree from Berkeley. Yet, all the evidence suggests that the student with the humanities degree from Amherst is more likely to go on to get a PhD than the Berkeley student.</p>

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<p>“It’s a ranking based on graduate programs after all.”
response from ssobkik: “Yes, but how else should we determine the Prestige of an institution? Graduate Programs & Research expenditures seem like the strongest benchmarks for determining overall quality.”</p>

<p>There have been so many great posts so far. To the quotes above, I want to make my own, brief point: This is circular reasoning ssobkik. If your measure for excellence is based on having a graduate program and the very high research expenditures that go with that, then you will conclude that excellent institutions are those with graduate programs and lots of research money.</p>

<p>Other than that, the argument is that ultimately students will come to realize that they need what large research universities offer and LACs will fade away. Since it’s an argument about future behavior that is unsupported by any evidence about current trends in student choice of institution type, it is clearly an extremely weak argument.</p>

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<p>SSobick is looking to assess educational quality at the college level quantitatively, but he misapplies what may be accurate data to a disconnected premise – a case of true, true, and unrelated. This “ranking” may accurately assess research productivity. It may accurately compare schools by virtue of “volume” differences. But it never contends that these numbers have any connection to the quality of a school’s undergraduate education. That connection is an invention of SSobick and others trying to forward an agenda. </p>

<p>Just to set the record straight, I am also a graduate of one of these very research universities, not a liberal arts college. But if it’s hard data you want to try to assess “quality” education, look no further than this:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.collegenews.org/topliberalartscolleges.xml[/url]”>http://www.collegenews.org/topliberalartscolleges.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>….even though only 3 percent of American college graduates were educated at a residential liberal arts college, alumni of these colleges accounted for:</p>

<p>• 8 percent of Forbes magazine’s listing of the nation’s wealthiest CEOs in 1998
• 8 percent of former Peace Corps volunteers
• 19 percent of U.S. presidents
• 23 percent of Pulitzer Prize winners in drama, 19 percent of the winners in history, 18 percent in poetry, 8 percent in biography, and 6 percent in fiction from 1960 to 1998
• 9 percent of all Fulbright scholarship recipients and 24 percent of all Mellon fellowships in the humanities
• 20 percent of Phi Beta Kappa inductions made between 1995 and 1997 </p>

<p>On a per capita basis, liberal arts colleges produce nearly twice as many students who earn a Ph.D. in science as other institutions. Liberal arts graduates also are disproportionately represented in the leadership of the nation’s scientific community. In a recent two-year period, nearly 20 percent of the scientists elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences received their undergraduate education at a liberal arts college</p>

<p>And, SSobick, if you’re wondering what the #1 university on your ranking has to say about educational quality and have not been following the news, they’ve announced this year that they’re changing their curriculum and teaching methods to better resemble, you guessed it, a liberal arts college.</p>

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<p>BTW, just to conclude my thoughts, taking your own examples, Ed Phelps went to Yale for his PhD and did most of his Nobel work at Columbia. Likewise, Joseph Stiglitz went to MIT for his doctorate and is also recognized mostly for his work at Columbia (having been also at Cambridge, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Oxford and Princeton at different points in his career). </p>

<p>What contribution did Amherst really make to their Nobel prizes other than, which I must admit, feeding them into top graduate schools ? Going back to my previous post, if Phelps and Stiglitz had studied at MIT or Yale right from their freshman year in college, would their careers have been any different? I can’t tell, but probably not. </p>

<p>Besides, you make unfair comparisons. Namely, you take the most elite LAC (Amherst) and compare its alumni with those from a non-selective state school like the University of Florida. A fairer comparison (apples with apples, not oranges) would be to compare Amherst graduates with those from Harvard College or Princeton instead. </p>

<p>As far as quality of undergraduate education is concerned, I can’t really tell not having been to a LAC myself. However, I seriously doubt that undergraduate education quality can be maintained in the long run in a school/college that does not do a significant amount of research. In fact, I’m a strong believer in the German concept of university that requires that all university “teachers” be also active researchers.</p>

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<p>thank god for this ranking. for, like the rest of the world knows, schools like brown, dartmouth, and upenn would never pass cornell in a ranking taking into account things that actually matter. heck, on an international scale, one might even be shocked to find out how little people know about dartmouth, brown, and upenn…as compared to the other ivies.</p>

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<p>This is ludicrous. For those who haven’t looked at the methodology:</p>

<p>Alumni Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals 10%
Staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals Award 20%
Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories 20%
Articles published in Nature and Science 20%
Articles in Science Citation Index 20%
Size of Institution 10%</p>

<p>20% of the score for winning prizes? 10% simply for size? </p>

<p>And of course it completely ignores anything that does not come under the general rubric of science or mathematics. </p>

<p>This survey is useful only to validate the higher education development plans of countries that treat universities as though they were factories grinding out cheap knockoffs.</p>

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<p>“it is clearly an extremely weak argument”</p>

<p>If my reasoning is so flawed, then why are the Liberal Arts advocates coming out in droves to battle my views? Why are the Liberal Arts Colleges afraid to continue to participate in the US News rankings? </p>

<p>ME THINKS THOU DOST PROTEST TOO MUCH…</p>

<p>Bottomline: Non Research Universities & Liberal Arts Colleges still have alot of value to Americans, but in time their stock will falter. As Higher Education in the United States becomes increasingly international in focus, the paradigms of the nation will shift primarily in favor of large Research Universities.</p>

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<p>^^^^ Dude, you need help…LOL</p>

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<p>SSobick, idunno why u complain. U said it urself that the UNIVERSITY rankings are ANTI-LAC…
Newsflash…LACs are mostly NOT Universities. They usually do NOT offer Doctorate degrees,make them not Universities.</p>

<p>Also, those rankings are ridiculously stupid. Even a first grader would believe that. Harvard is definitely not the Best in the world. It is funny how most rankings seem to say that for grad school, yet there are schools that when ranked by departments often rank significantly better than Harvard in many areas.</p>

<p>Also, im not going to believe a survey done by some random, inexistent, Chinese University that isnt known anywhere in the world outside of china. </p>

<p>Plus, it freakin looks like a 5th grader made it on Microsoft Excel. And also, besides that, they are a Chinese University in the first place, which doesnt really give them my credibility simply because US schools are the best in the world. Only maybe 2 chinese universities could compete with the top 50 us Universities.</p>

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<p>“ME THINKS THOU DOST PROTEST TOO MUCH…”</p>

<p>You said this in one of your other threads, too.</p>

<p>Maybe the LAC supporters keep arguing with you because at LACs they don’t like to let even the most hopeless cases “slip through the cracks,” as you put it? If the best support for your arguments is that lots of people disagree with them, you have some work to do. A nice LAC education might not have made you any more right, but it probably would at least have taught you to argue better.</p>

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<p>Ssobick said:</p>

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<p>Here is a case in point of either a truly terrible education or a student who refused (or couldn’t) master simple thinking skills. The implication of the quote above is that any thesis put forward by anyone must be correct, and that any antithesis is PROOF that the thesis is correct. In other words, any attempt to dispute an original statement is de facto proof that the original statement is true. Ergo, if a movie star states that all wars are caused by Jews, those who speak up and “battle” this issue prove, by their very willingness to battle, that the original statement is true.</p>

<p>At least, according to Ssobick’s logic.</p>

<p>As for not participating in US News rankings, this is mostly not true. Some LACs have decided not to complete the academic reputation survey and/or not to publicize the rankings in their marketing materials. That does not mean that they won’t provide CDS information to US News. In addition, it’s not relevant. Since LACs compete in the rankings only with other LACs, a decision to “participate” or not participate has no impact on their rankings relative to large, research institutions. </p>

<p>If anything, Ssobick has led me to wonder about the quality of education provided at the University of Florida (if, in fact, s/he attends or attended that institution). The arguments Ssobick has put forth would not, for the most part, withstand even the most cursory examination in most academic settings.</p>

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<p>Agree, WilliamC - if you considered the departments that the majority of students end up majoring in (humanities, arts, etc.), the ranking would look very different.</p>

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I used those examples because SSobick has used these rankings in part to promote the University of Florida (which is, whatever you may say, selective). SSobick claims that schools like Florida are far more relevant/important/better at educating undergrads than schools like Amherst. Yes, Amherst has better students coming in, but that alone may make it relevant and important. You may very well be right that Stiglitz or Phelps would have had the same career had they gone to a Yale or MIT from the start, but they didn’t go to Yale or MIT. As long as LAC graduates are continuing on to academic success, one cannot reasonably claim that LACs are irrelevant, or failing to provide their students with sufficient opportunities for research. </p>

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<p>Amherst has been around (as a LAC) since 1821, and, by all accounts still provides a high quality undergraduate education. I don’t know what you define as the “long-run,” but that seems like a long time to me. LACs are still producing quality graduates after almost 200 years, and I see no reason to expect that to stop, other than the baseless speculation of SSobick and you.</p>