US News 2017 rankings

tk21769
Sat, 26 Nov 2016 10:24:03 +0000

I disagree tk. Purely from a wealth and revenues point of view, when you include endowment, state funding, income generation etc…Michigan and UVa would both be among the top 20, perhaps even among the top 15. They are as wealthy as schools like Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Penn

That is not what the IPEDS revenue data appears to show. That data covers revenues from investments as well as from state/local appropriations (and other sources). If you have better data, maybe you’d like to cite your sources and lay out your evidence.

This is complicated stuff. A lot depends on how you define wealth or “financial resources”. If USNWR is using expenditure figures that consistently show a lower rank for state universities than the endowment or revenue figures would show, then arguably this is a bias against state universities. One might also argue that using expenditures is consistent with a focus on what the money buys for undergraduate students (smaller classes, better-paid faculty, better financial aid and facilities, etc.)

One might ask whether all that expense doesn’t reach a point of diminishing returns beyond what a Berkeley or a Michigan spends on instruction. USNWR states that it applies a logarithmic transformation to its financial resource calculations. Therefore, “schools that have expenditures per student that are far higher than most other schools’ values see diminishing benefits in the ranking calculations.” (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights). Nevertheless, in the Parchment cross-admit rankings, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, and UVa do come out ahead of some USNWR T20 private schools. So maybe US News places a higher value on extra expenditures (or on what they are buying) than many students and parents do.