<p>Chicago’s position has changed from:
1906 (pre-U.S. News): 3
U.S. News 1983: 6
U.S. News 2006: 15
U.S. News 2012: 5
U.S. News 2013: 4</p>
<p>I know factors like acceptance rate and alumni giving have picked up dramatically in the past few years, but why such a slump after the '80s? What happened in-between?</p>
<p>1983 - us news only ranked schools based on academic reputation. UChicago had an awesome academic rep. </p>
<p>2006 - us news ranked schools based on many other factors, and UChicago, up to that point, didn’t care much about factors such as selectivity and retention.</p>
<p>2013 - UChicago cares about factors such as selectivity and retention, and has maintained its sterling academic rep. Result: strong ranking for the school.</p>
<p>Just stop. Duke & Penn offer a more well-rounded college experience than Caltech does. Frankly, Caltech has been over ranked in the past although the school’s academics are among the best in the world and students there are among the highest scoring test takers. </p>
<p>I’d go to Brown, Vandy, and Cornell before I go to Caltech.</p>
<p>CuseAmbassador: US News rankings isn’t designed to measure “well-rounded” college experiences - that’s just not part of the metric. US News measures and favors high scoring test takers, world-class faculty, and great retention statistics.</p>
<p>CalTech fell this year because, for some reason, it’s academic rep dropped to 4.6, it doesn’t have as many small classes as its peers, and its retention stats aren’t that great. The big blow, I think, is that the academic rep has dropped - I’m pretty sure it used to be around 4.8 pretty recently. Don’t know why that rep score dropped.</p>
<p>CuseAmbassador, Caltech is not overrated, if anything it’s underrated by the majority of the population. Although certain things have gone down in quality there, it’s still a top notch education. Just because you think well-roundedness matters in your view, doesn’t mean that USnews cares.</p>
<p>Agree that Caltech is underrated. It’s much harder to get into than Penn and Duke, the undergrad program is the most rigorous in the country, and IMO, the alumni are far more impressive to me.</p>
<p>It’s what happens when 22.5% of your ranking is based on retention and graduation rates. Tell me again why schools with higher graduation rates provide better educations and career prospects? (Hint: It doesn’t. It’s there because HYP have the highest graduation rates in the country, and US News had to find objective criteria to force HYP into the top 3 spots.) Easy schools benefit, and difficult schools get the boot. </p>
<p>Then again, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Caltech does indeed have a stagnant professor pay package, meaning that their top professors are likely being poached by higher-paying institutions like Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, and Stanford. This is something that Caltech needs to fix soon (but for the purposes of education, not for rankings).</p>
<p>Phuriku, the reputation of a school is built upon the cumulative success of its faculty and students. So if everyone graduates at HYP successfully while the bottom 10% of MIT and Caltech get the boot, then yes, that HYP is doing a better job of “providing better educations and career prospects”.</p>
<p>It’s not only academic/reputation wise. During an economic downturn it is a good idea for institutions to spend some of their not-earning-much-in-the-bank endowment on acquisitions, infrastructure improvement, and hiring (reasons vary, but they all relate to being able to buy at a discount). Couple that to big time donations ($300 million for Booth, anonymous $100 million for financial aid, $25 million for Mansueto, etc.) and I think UChicago has been on such a spree for the last few years. It shows.</p>
<p>Is this the reason why UChicago put so much money into advertising this year? It paid off for them, as they had 10,000+ EA applicants and 13% acceptance rate (with a projected 9% overall rate for the class of '17), but it seems like a Machiavellian stance to take in order to increase their selectivity. Of course, I’m not one to debate the morals behind the college admission process.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago took a big jump in the USNWR rankings in 2007, I think, after they sat down and analyzed why they were being ranked lower than they thought they should be. Part of what they learned was that they were hurting themselves by the way they reported some of their data – e.g. (I think this is the case), they were reporting each of their Core Hum courses as one course (with hundreds of students and various sections) rather than as multiple faculty-taught seminars, which is really what they are. </p>
<p>Then, they restricted the size of each of the Core sections to 19 students. The result was that Chicago’s percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students – a USNWR ranking element – went from low to high.</p>
<p>I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think there was something similar with research money – they weren’t reporting that the way other universities were, so they weren’t getting credit for the research actually happening there.</p>
<p>So part of it was reporting data on a basis consistent with others, and part was paying attention so that they improved their numbers – a little bit of managing to the rankings.</p>
<p>More importantly, the University of Chicago always had a top-echelon faculty and academic reputation, but for many years the quality of undergraduate student life left something to be desired, and that hurt the college’s reputation. The current generation of faculty and administration leaders has essentially been working to improve that their whole careers, and over the past decade they finally hit a tipping point where it was easy to see that students were much happier and more engaged, and Chicago was an attractive place to go to college other than just for its academics.</p>
<p>I think the acceptance rate will be between 9.5% and 10% for the Class of 2017. I asked my friend (an admissions counselor) yesterday, and she said there are more than 30,000 applicants this year.</p>