This is hilarious. #23 is now University of West Georgia. It’s a regional school and not widely known. I have a kid there – I’ll have to ask him about all the partying. 
3 Likes
Not so sure its all about the academic elite, Tom.
Paraphrasing Matthew, Mark and Luke: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Northeastern to enter the kingdom of prestige in the minds of 50+ year old Bostonians. Wherever they went to school.
The things that were good about Northeastern in the 80’s and 90’s are still good now. They just won the marketing game and have a different profile of kids now. I suspect their feedback about their experience would be similar, with perhaps the 80’s and 90’s kids a bit more defensive. My old roommate used to make jokes about the fact that they advertised on tv. But he got a great job and is retired now as a result.
Northeastern won; snickering notwithstanding.
4 Likes
I read that in the 1960’s Northeastern got a lot of grief for advertising Its University College (now CPS) programs in the T subway. I recently saw a huge ad in the subway for Harvard Extension School. Times have changed.
1 Like
Princeton is part of the superlative HYPSM cohort – lauded for top-notch academics and very deep pockets.
Of those five, Princeton has the highest proportion of undergraduates. There are, simply put, fewer grad students competing for profs’ time.
So while it might not have been ranked #1 because of that, it always made sense to me that Princeton was ranked #1 in the undergrad U ranking, since it is the most undergrad-focused of the most elite (by rep…) schools.
2 Likes
U.S. News arrives at ties by rounding to a whole number in the underlying “overall score.” This doesn’t seem like a contortion at all. If anything, they’re acting against their presumed incentive in diminishing drama by not differentiating among schools that finish nearly identically statistically.
1 Like
In fact when you combine both basic observations–highest endowment per capita, and then largest focus on undergrads among the research universities that are even close–yeah, why WOULDN’T it be at the top of the undergrad-programs-at-research-university rankings?
Of course somewhere in here is an unspoken question about what one might think if US News didn’t put LACs on a separate list. But, they were on a separate list, so that’s not an active question as far as the US News National Universities rankings are concerned.
2 Likes
In case folks were wondering about the impact of the ranking. It made the NY Times weekly news quiz as question #7. Sorry I’m giving away the answer here:
So far at least 27,000 NY Times readers knew the answer!
1 Like
I’d prefer that USNWR lists the score more prominently, rather than just rank without score. If USNWR is supposed to me measuring something meaningful in their “best college” formula, then presumably it would matter if the output of that formula yields a 5 point difference between 2 colleges vs a 0.1 point difference between 2 colleges. For example, the LAC rankings are as follows.
- Williams – 100
- Amherst – 99
- Bowdoin / CMC / Pomona / Swarthmore / Navy – 94
As of now it is 59% of responses correct, the same as the question about Princess Di, and joint-lowest out of all of them… just not that important to the wider world I guess…
1 Like