US News 2017 rankings

IzzoOne
Sat, 26 Nov 2016 08:50:07 +0000

Alexandre, I was responding to your comment that schools like UVA are as “wealthy” as schools like Penn. Looking at all sources of revenue and resources, it doesn’t look like that is the case. Although they are similarly sized, Penn’s budget is 1.9X significantly larger, Penn claims 2.2X the number of faculty (although they could have more adjunct, etc), and they do 2.3X the amount of research.

Note that research is really a major factor here. Penn does nearly $500M more research than UVA. UVA recognizes this as one of its “weaknesses” versus its competitors. BTW, UVA is now starting to try to self-fund research with a “Strategic Investment Fund”.

You then started writing about how lean UVA is compared to Penn. But lean and “wealth” are different measures, and it is difficult to measure efficiency. My view is that a lot of this spending (both Penn and UVA and others) doesn’t have much to do with educating undergraduates, and USNews has always done a great disservice by focusing on it. LACs can “spend” significantly less on undergraduates than these national universities, but in my admittedly objective experience, the quality of the education they received seems to be just as high (if not higher).

dfbdfb, my comment regarding undergraduate research was not that undergraduates don’t participate in research, it was that you can count R&D spending as spending on undergraduates as Isaac did. I’m pretty sure Johns Hopkins $2.1B in research isn’t all lavished on its undergraduates.