I don’t think you need to worry about Wake- its reputation is solid and excellent and nobody really thinks Michigan or UF or UC Davis/UCSB/UC Irvine or Rutgers, etc are so many spots better in terms of the education and opportunities they provide. I do think there are some other schools that will suffer by dropping in the ranking, but not Wake. And there are some schools who will just never be able to rise much because the ranking system does not work well with their mission or demographics.
The ranking system has removed fully or at least lessened the impact of many factors that some of us feel are important to the experience and education. Hopefully every school doesn’t chase the ranking too much at the cost of some of their quality.
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I’m curious - I don’t know enough about the things that go into these rankings. But do you know what measures were removed/lessened from scores vs things that were added or now have greater impact to the scores?
Thanks!
Wake Forest and Vanderbilt (schools that both fell in the rankings) released statements that discussed this. You may want to start there.
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For US News, there is a methodology page with a chart that details this:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
I note this is mathematically tricky business because the same weighting percentage could have a larger or smaller impact on the overall ranking depending on the underlying variability of the measure in question.
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I’m no expert statistician, but looking at the chart in the usnews article cited below, I think some of the biggest changes in the new ranking methodology are:
class size eliminated as a factor (previously 8%).
first generation graduation rates and performance now 5% (previously 0%)
a total of 4% added for various publication stats (previously 0%)
alumni giving removed (3%)
terminal faculty degree removed (3%)
high school class standing eliminated (2%)
when you look at any ranking methodology, it is easy to see that many things that we as parents, and our kids too, would find important are not part of the system at all.
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Thank you! That’s interesting. Not making any judgments on the metrics used to determine rankings, but knowing these definitely make me put less stock in them overall considering the majority have no bearing to our situation. The things we care about (class sizes, classes taught by professors, faculty with a terminal degree, etc aren’t factored in rankings). I think it’s important for people to know what goes into these algorithms so they’re choosing based on fit rather than arbitrary algorithms that may have no relevance to the things they value.
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Yeah, at a minimum one would think you should use a customizable version where you can assign weights (including going from 0% to something and something to 0%) based on your own values, preferences, and circumstances. I’d also make it so you can input your personalized COA (using NPCs and merit estimates if you choose).
And US News actually has a product sorta like that (not everything I would do)–but you have to pay for it:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/myfit
So the more organized kids and parents make their own spreadsheets and such. But none of that gets publicized, because while much more meaningful on an individual level, it isn’t “news”.
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Honestly, when we first started this process, I too started with the US news rankings, eliminating ones that were too far etc, but essentially went down the top 100 schools. It’s a shame that so many including myself rely on these as gospel of best schools without even understanding what goes into making that determination.
I agree, a customizable ranking would be good. I’ll have to check out the my fit / I think I already bought a subscription so may as well!
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to be fair- it now places a higher value on things like faculty student ratios, amount of full time faculty versus adjuncts and grad students, graduation outcomes and amount of student debt, which I definitely as a parent prioritize. I think many of the rankings systems are flawed but I don’t think US News eliminated the items parents care about per se.
My only complaint about some of these is that faculty to student ratios don’t tell the whole picture (there are lots of schools with relatively similar ratios but they don’t necessarily tell you how big classes are - if the faculty is focused on research and TAs are teaching class, for example). I went to an admitted event this weekend and the professor giving overview of the department basically said max class sizes for entry level classes are no more than 70 and taught entirely by the professor (another school said these classes are more like 150 students, with smaller sections run by TAs). Their ratios are similar.
Amount of student debt is also irrelevant in a way, even if I myself value not being in debt, it’s irrelevant to me if other students at the same school are in debt as long as it’s affordable for my student. Similarly graduation outcomes for first gen or Pell recipients are important to those students, but if I don’t fall into those categories it’s also irrelevant to me. Not to say it isn’t good for society, but it’s not a factor i consider relevant to the question of whether my student will get a quality education.
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How come Duke didn’t plummet in the rankings? Does Duke know how to game the rankings?
Duke games the rankings by graduating 95%+ of its students and by graduating Pell-eligible students at comparable or better rates than non-Pell.
I don’t know what years go into the latest US ratings, but for the 2014 cohort, WF’s 6-year graduation rate was 89.5 for non-Pell and only 82.4 for Pell. I find neither of those numbers reassuring.
Colleges like Duke have a lot of wealth. Holding aside SLACs, Duke has a top 10ish endowment per capita among US research universities, also owns a lot of expensive buildings and facilities and property, also gets a lot of research funding . . . .
Wake Forest by broader standards is wealthy too, but not in comparison to Duke. Duke’s endowment alone is like 7x Wake Forest’s, and again Duke is also wealthier in a lot of other ways.
OK, so in recent years, wealthy private universities have been using more of that wealth to try to attract more kids from lower income families, first generation kids, and so on. But that is a competitive landscape since there are many wealthy universities pursuing what is a fairly limited pool of kids like that with at least pretty good academic qualifications who are interested in going to “national” private universities.
And to be very blunt, Wake Forest is kinda losing that competition. Like in this comparison of Freshmen Pell share with change since 2011 (toward the bottom):
Wake Forest actually lost share, down from 14% to 10%. Duke didn’t do great either, and it actually started behind at 13% in 2011, but finished ahead at 12%.
This is just one measure, but this is a real issue for colleges like Wake Forest given these emerging new measures. UNC, say, was at 20% and went up to 21%. UNC of course is wealthy in a different way, including thanks to state subsidies, and structured in a way it automatically does better in measures like this. Wake Forest again is competing against the likes of Duke for what is left, and Duke has a lot more financial resources.
But I don’t mean to be overly dire. Wake Forest is still wealthy by normal standards. Wake Forest is still using that wealth to provide a great college experience, including with excellent professors who take pride in being excellent teachers, and so on.
But will it be easy for Wake Forest to compete to spread those benefits to a lot more FGLI students? Against Duke or UNC or so on?
No, it will not.
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My pell-eligible 1550/4.0UW/14AP/DE classes kid was waitlisted at places like Emory, Carleton, Grinnell, Kenyon, etc. a few years ago. So I’m skeptical of the idea that selective schools with a low percentage of Pell kids are out there looking and just can’t find enough qualified ones to admit. By that reasoning, my kid should have been a shoo-in everywhere. Particularly since said kid did better overall at top 20 need blind schools than at need aware ones (which also says that there was not some enormous red flag in his app that scared colleges away from him). Wake Forest is need aware; Duke is need blind. Duke is attracting more low income kids because they’re willing/able to pay for more of them, not because there aren’t plenty of them out there. I mean, there’s an organization out there in Questbridge that’s vetting low income students and finding the most qualified ones and sending their names to colleges, but only about 25% of Questbridge finalists get matched.
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That’s a plausible explanation.
So if Wake can boost its overall graduation rates and improve the graduation rates of Pell eligible students, the school should (ceteris paribus) regain its top 30 ranking or at least move up in the US News Rankings.
Presumably Susan Wente knows this
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Maybe. But they don’t have the research, engineering or the stem that the large state colleges do, and other small private universities for that matter.
The Pell graduation rate is weighted to favor schools that have higher percentages of Pell students, so WF not only has to improve its graduation rates, it also has to recruit and enroll considerably more Pell students.
Another thing to consider is that due to the Columbia cheating scandal, US News now sources some revenue figures from publicly available data rather than self-reporting. (Columbia had fraudulently used hospital revenues to inflate its expenditures per undergraduate student.) Some of this year’s big fallers, such as Vanderbilt and WUSTL, may have been doing the same, inadvertently or otherwise. If WF had also been rolling up teaching hospital revenue into undergraduate spending, then those points aren’t recoupable.
So we know from demographic studies of test scores that your kid was in fact a rare type of kid. And what you are describing is actually consistent with that observation.
One of the main reasons colleges would plausibly waitlist such a kid is if their yield models were saying it was very unlikely they would yield even if given an offer. In other words, waitlisting is a way of not holding open enrollment spots for such kids if they are likely just going to take other offers they prefer by the decision deadline.
And in fact, although you didn’t give details, apparently this kid was given multiple offers by “top 20” need blind schools, which usually means also generous aid offers. And that kid can only accept one offer. So it would make perfect sense if the schools you named were seeing in their yield models very little chance of that kid actually yielding.
Anyway, one kid like this getting multiple offers from top 20 need blind colleges does not contradict the idea such kids are actually scarce. Such evidence would have to be more many verified stories about kids like this not getting any top 20 offers at all, nor offers (even off the waitlist) from the next most valued ranks of schools, and so on until they only had options at less selective schools than Wake Forest. And I have not seen that.
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By the way, I think it often helps to look at operating budgets to understand the financial constraints these colleges operated under. For this conversation, it is particular relevant to look at what portion of their operating revenues come from net tuition and fees (net is minus any grant aid).
So according to Duke’s latest available financial report (see Page 5):
17% of their operating revenues came from net tuition and fees.
For Wake Forest, holding aside the hospital-related revenues and expenses (see Page 5):
Net tuition and fees was 52.5%.
This in a nutshell is why colleges like Duke can be need blind, and Wake Forest has to be need aware. Wake Forest is much more reliant than Duke on net tuition and fees for operating revenues, and the more high need students it admitted and gave large grants, the less net tuition it would have.
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I think the evidence is (what I probably should have led with) that only 25% of Questbridge finalists match. And, according to Questbridge, only around 40% of them are offered admission to any Questbridge partner in the RD round. Again, these are kids who have gone through an extensive application process (arduous enough that I couldn’t convince MY kids to deal with it) designed to identify high achieving low income students. The other evidence is that most schools that meet need are need-aware. They’re acknowledging that they can’t afford as many students who need significant aid as are academically qualified. Here’s a quote from the Dean of Admissions at Kenyon: "Every year, prospective students who more than meet Kenyon’s academic standards are turned away because we cannot afford to cover their need, and we are missing out on this incredible talent.” Those aren’t the words of someone who’s TRYING to find academically qualified low income students and just can’t do it. The Cost of Kenyon - Kenyon Alumni Magazine
I don’t believe my kid was a case of yield-protection. At Kenyon? MAYBE. But I think the need-aware piece of the puzzle is more likely. But at Carleton? Wesleyan? Nah. He had great stats, but so do most of the admits at those schools. He did fine. I’ll never know if he would have done better if we were full pay, but need aware admissions would not be a thing at all if being full pay weren’t an advantage.
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