U.S. News #4 again

JHS
Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:12:31 +0000

On the other hand, for the oldsters among us, the notion that Chicago and Columbia “haven’t built their reputation quite just yet” [sic] is downright hilarious. In terms of faculty strength and overall resources, Chicago and Columbia have never in the past century been other than top-rank, world-class universities. What happened was that the 1965-1995 period (roughly) was very hard on urban universities located near poor neighborhoods (as Chicago and Columbia were, at least then, and to some extent still). They fell out of favor for undergraduates, an ever-larger portion of whom were growing up in racially and economically segregated suburbs and were frightened by the “inner city.” Chicago also had an apparently-deserved reputation as a place where undergraduates were miserable. But its academic reputation was always absolutely tops (Columbia’s, too).

Over the last 20 years, there has been rapidly accelerating gentrification in some of the areas near Chicago and Columbia, crime rates have declined, public housing has dispersed, and the pendulum has swung back so urban universities are in fashion again. Places like Dartmouth and Cornell are punished for being in the sticks. And USNWR’s methods pretty much bar the best public universities from top-10 eligibility. So Chicago and Columbia (and Penn) have kind of floated back to what was historically their natural level among private universities. (Whether that “natural level” is 4th, 5th, 8th, or 11th is neither very interesting or very important.) In Chicago’s case, a decades-long effort to improve the quality of undergraduate life outside the classroom has also had an impact.