US News 2017 rankings

IsaacTheFuture
Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:20:35 +0000

Alexandre made a good point about how funds are allocated (such as faculty salaries & financial aid). A better way to get a glimpse at how the money is being spent on students is to look at R&D expenditure (this can still be skewed by stuff over representation of engineering majors, but it still gives you a way better overall picture).

UMich: $30,620
UVA: $16,976
Brown: $37,699
Columbia: $31,070
Cornell: $43,572
UPenn: $34,735

Now, UMich is definitely comparable to all these elite private Unis (With the exception of Cornell, who is spending about $13k more per student), but UVA is definitely lagging behind. Why the big discrepancy between R&D expenditure & Endowment? I would hypothesize that UVA spends a disproportionate amount on their professors (which MAY suggest better profs, but this is just a hypothesis). Another explanation may be that since UVA isn’t that big of an engineering school (even Brown is more well known in that aspect), and engineering is known to use up a lot of money, it draws their numbers down (which may also explain why Cornell’s is so high, seeing as they’re the best engineering school in the Ivies). Still, that wouldn’t explain why Brown dedicates so much resources to their students compared to UVA, especially since Brown isn’t the most well known engineering school either. Just for some insight on how those schools stack up to their private and public peers:

Private:
Harvard: $48,274
Princeton: $34,601
Yale: $65,221
Duke: $69,344
MIT: $82,226
Stanford: $64,405
Rice: $21,845

Publics:
UCLA: 23,584
UC Berkeley: $20,639
UNC Chapel Hill: $33,241
Ga. Tech: $30,594
UT. Austin: $12,770

To no surprise, MIT is leaps and bounds ahead, but what surprises me is how much Duke dishes out and how little (comparatively to it’s HYPSM peers) Yale & Rice are spending on their students. Even Harvard is relatively lagging behind. One thing that could be affecting Rice’s numbers is it’s location; located in one of the biggest cities in the US that houses the largest cancer research center in the nation, Rice wouldn’t have to spend too much on it’s students, since they would have plenty of off campus opportunities at their disposal (could also explain why Columbia doesn’t spend more, seeing as they’re in New York). Do you have any reasoning for why Rice’s R&D is so low? But a school like Brown is so high?
When it comes to the Publics, GA Tech and UNC Chapel Hill can be compared to Umich, Brown, UPenn, & Columbia, & UNC is even larger than that of Columbia, which definitely surprised me.

Also, though I generally agree with you on your points, I have to disagree with the generalization of cost of living for elite private University cities. Sure, Columbia, UPenn, & UChicago professors have to be compensated more for living in such expensive cities, but schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, & even Emory (when compared to other large cities, Atlanta is cheap as hell) don’t face the same dilemma. So you can’t put too much emphasis on cost of living for the city when looking at endowment.