<p>It’s higher than Ohio State University, UT Austin, Penn State, University of Florida, and University of Illinois. I am surprised to see it that high. I always thought of it as a football school. I thought the University of Florida was more highly regarded.</p>
<p>Miami is a wealthy private school, and USNWR’s formula favors wealthy private schools.</p>
<p>Your perception has not kept up with reality…Funny, you cite two “Football is King” schools in comparison to UMiami. At least since 2004, UMiami has been ranked higher than OSU and had 20 spots on UF in 2011.</p>
<p>UMiami is a diverse, private school with small class sizes and and a student body with favorable stats to those schools I mentioned.</p>
<p>A little simplistic Bob, considering UMiami’s endowment is nowhere near a whole host of privates ranked significantly lower.</p>
<p>“Simplistic” is believing that USNWR’s formula equates to school quality.</p>
<p>Wealthy is defined by endowment/undergrad, not total endowment. Comparing total endowments is “simplistic”.</p>
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<p>USNWR’s most heavily-weighted ranking category is “undergraduate academic reputation”. For national universities, this accounts for 25% of the ranking. It is derived from a “peer assessment” survey (66.7%) and a high school guidance counsellor survey (33.3%).</p>
<p>Some public universities score very well in the “undergraduate academic reputation” category. Poster gadad examined the effect of PA scores on the 2010 USNWR rankings. He found that, after removing PA scores from the calculation, the rankings of 7 top-50 universities declined by more than 2 places. All were public universities. No public universities rose more than 2 places in the rankings after removing PA scores.<br>
(<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/851132-peer-reputation-skews-rankings-ok-here-usnwr-rankings-w-peer-assessment-removed.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/851132-peer-reputation-skews-rankings-ok-here-usnwr-rankings-w-peer-assessment-removed.html</a>).</p>
<p>In some other ranking categories, public universities don’t do so well. For example, within the top 50, public universities tend not to do as well as the top private universities in student selectivity, in graduation & retention rates, or in some areas of the “faculty resources” category (“Class size, 1-19 students” and “Class size, 50+ students”).</p>
<p>So, considering the weight assigned to “undergraduate academic reputation”, one might argue that the USNWR formula actually places a rather firm thumb on the scale for public universities. It’s just that, even with that advantage, they don’t perform well enough on the other measurements to place any schools in the top 20.</p>
<p>As for the University of Miami, with PA included, Florida outranked Miami by 3 places in 2010; with PA removed, Miami outranked Florida by one place. In the latest rankings, Miami now outranks Florida by 10 places (44 to 54). I have not seen the 2013 PA scores, though, so I don’t know what role they may have played in this shift.</p>
<p>You are trying to argue that the weighting of the formula inputs is somehow slanted in favor of public schools? Whether true or not (personally I think it’s laughable), this is beside the point. The chosen set of weak proxy measure inputs that are supposed to represent educational quality greatly favors wealthy private schools, regardless of the weighting selected.</p>
<p>“It’s higher than Ohio State University, UT Austin, Penn State, University of Florida, and University of Illinois. I am surprised to see it that high. I always thought of it as a football school. I thought the University of Florida was more highly regarded.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, admitting your own ignorance is not the smartest way to start a thread. LOL.</p>
<p>Because it is awesome. </p>
<p>Did yout know it was ranked 38 last year?</p>
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<p>Exactly. (That is because EVERY one of those items are wealth-related.) </p>
<p>btw: don’t forget that 5% for Alumni Donations. :)</p>
<p>Two words: Donna Shalala. Since she has assumed the presidency, the U has rocketed up in the rankings.</p>
<p>My son is a sophomore at the U and loves it. I am to date pleased with the education he is receiving. Yes, the school has a party scene, but so does most of the top ranked schools.</p>
<p>Gee Bob, don’t think we were debating the relative merits of the US News Rankings, just the mechanics of where they place schools. BTW, as far a “wealth” is concerned, you mention “Wealthy is defined by endowment/undergrad” Okay, against my better instincts, I will bite. By undergrad, do you mean how much the undergrad is worth? The undergrad’s parental worth? How much in outside of school aid the undergrad is bringing to the school? Whether the undergrad has productive oil wells in a trust? Seems to me you don’t really know the undergrads who attend UMiami and are going by generalities. Throw in a little class envy/Occupy 99% musings and your answer is predictable.</p>
<p>So you don’t think of UT-A OSU Penn St and UF as football schools?</p>
<p>The schools with the highest USNWR rankings generally do have high per capita endowments ([College</a> Endowment Rankings](<a href=“http://www.statisticbrain.com/college-endowment-rankings/]College”>College Endowment Rankings - Statistic Brain)). It is expensive to offer small classes, high salaries to attract the best faculty, generous aid to the strongest applicants regardless of where they come from, minimal “self help” aid to hold down student debt, and enough classes to ensure most students can graduate on time.</p>
<p>Forbes and stateuniversity.com are two other college rankings. Even though each of these 2 rankings and USNWR uses a somewhat different set of criteria, all 3 place well-endowed private schools in most of the top 50 slots. Another interesting approach is the National Survey of Student Engagement. It examines details such as how many 5-page, 10-page, or 20-page papers are assigned per term, or how much interaction students have with faculty. Unfortunately, many famous/popular schools have not been surveyed yet. Of the results I’ve seen, small private LACs (such as Hendrix, Earlham, Beloit, or Centre) seem to score significantly higher than big public universities (such as Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, or Minnesota).</p>
<p>Some other ranking methods yield better results for public universities. 8 of the top 10 national universities in The Washington Monthly rankings are state schools. WM considers “social mobility” and “service” (including ROTC and Peace Corps participation rates), as well as “research” factors.</p>
<p>If you wanted to construct a data-driven, exclusively academic ranking that puts state universities in a good light, you could use bibliometric techniques to measure research output (counting faculty publications or journal citations). This approach is used in the NRC graduate department rankings, which do show high “research” ranks for many state universities in many fields.</p>
<p>So all these rankings differ with respect to “the mechanics of where they place schools”. I don’t think that means they are all arbitrary or contradictory. It just means there are many perspectives on college quality. Pick the ones that work for you … or none of them.</p>
<p>My goodness, baghdad, you have gone off the handle. Endowment/undergrad means “$ of endowment divided by number of undergrad students”. This keeps us from crediting, say, Boston University with a higher endowment than Miami because even though its total endowment is slightly higher, it has 70% more students to serve with that endowment. It has nothing to do with your rather fantastic ventures into class warfare, which are particularly silly considering I have kids in both private secondary school and private college.</p>
<p>Tk, you can spin the weak proxy measures of educational quality however you like, but they are still weak proxy measures. “High salaries to attract the best” is laughable - high salaries, endowed chairs, fancy research labs are all used for one purpose only, to attract professors with strong research and grant performance. Teaching/education performance is completely irrelevant.</p>
<p>Of course, what is best for any given student may not necessarily be what gives the highest rankings. Beyond baseline criteria like having affordable cost and a decent degree program in the student’s major, consider other fit issues:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Student X is highly advanced, will be taking upper division courses as a freshman due to having taken post-AP transferable college courses in high school, may want to take esoteric specialty and graduate level courses and do graduate level research as an undergraduate in his/her major, does not mind large auditorium lectures, and is well capable of independently navigating a large bureaucracy.</p></li>
<li><p>Student Y is not highly advanced, will be taking regular freshman level courses as a freshman, will be taking mainly “core” courses in his/her major, learns best in small classroom environments with personal attention, and may need more hand-holding in the adjustment to college.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>It would be no great stretch of imagination to say that Student X will make the most of a big research university and minimize the disadvantages of such, while Student Y will make the most of a small LAC and minimize the disadvantages of such. But a small LAC is much less likely to be suitable for Student X, and a big research university is much less likely to be suitable for Student Y.</p>
<p>There are clear exceptions to your presumption of endowment per capita importance bob:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1088068-2010-fiscal-year-college-endowment-per-student.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1088068-2010-fiscal-year-college-endowment-per-student.html</a></p>
<p>Texas for instance has a higher endowment per capita. Michigan has a higher value in this category than some more highly regarded (and higher ranked) schools as well (notably Berkeley). In the realm of privates only, Emory, WUSTL, and Northwestern have higher values than Penn. Yet, again, it’s peer assessment that makes the larger difference between ranks as the former 3 have well been behind Penn in reputation.</p>
<p>The rankings favor wealthy private schools, that’s my claim, not that they precisely track per capita endowment one-for-one - you are trying to contradict a silly straw man.</p>
<p>Please tell me where in the methodology wealth comes in to play. Again, reputation is the primary differentiator between the top publics and privates. If you think wealth can buy prestige, Emory would like to have a word with you.</p>