US News 2017 rankings

Alexandre
Sat, 26 Nov 2016 04:46:29 +0000

“UVA has an academic budget of $1.39B for 22K students, or an average of $63K per student. Penn has an academic budget of $2.99B for 24.8K students, or about $121K per student.”

Like I said IzzoOne, it is difficult to compare universities based on how much they spend. In addition to the reasons I listed in post #666 (coincidence? In think not! ), most public universities have been cutting costs on unnecessary functions and programs and merging/consolidating service departments and other related programs for decades and are in fact leaner, without impacting the functionality or quality of operations.

This is ironic considering the fact that public institutions are usually the ones that are considered more bloated and not as lean as private institutions. That is clearly not the case with universities, where public universities have had to adapt to changing circumstances for decades.

Finally, we have very little visibility in what universities include in their “academic budget”. For these, and a host of other reasons, I do not think it makes sense to look at spending.

Endowment, state funding and revenues are the three figures that should be factored in the financial resources rating of a university.

“A lot of that shows up in the student/faculty ratio. At UVA it is 15:1. At Penn it is 6:1. Average professor salary at Penn was $198K in 2014. At UVA it was $152K in 2014.”

Actually, Penn did not include graduate students in its student to faculty ratio. If it did, its ratio would be more like 11:1. Yet another way that private universities deceive the public and game the rankings. If you factor in graduate students in the student to faculty ratios, most elite private universities will have ratios that hover between 10:1 and 15:1. Also, the ratio of small to large classes at private universities and classes sizes in general, between elite private and elite public universities does not vary nearly as much as the “statistics” would seem to indicate when you compare apples to apples, although admittedly, smaller private elites will naturally have the edge in this department. However, in the last two decades or so, private universities have added thousands of seminars to their course catalogues while public universities have not, and this has given the appearance that classes at public universities are significantly smaller. That is not the case. But are smaller classes always necessary and better? If so, why aren’t wealthy public universities, like Michigan and UVa, that can easily make classes smaller if they wished to not doing anything about it? Could it be that in some cases smaller classes are a waste of resources?