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<p>I know that. But being highly selective helps determine prestige, which accounts for a quarter of the ranking. Why else would colleges be going to such lengths to collect sure-to-reject applicants? To keep the head counts up in the admissions offices?</p>
<p>Employers doesn’t just mean Fortune 500 (I never said that). It includes…well…all employers, both private companies and public companies, federal jobs and state jobs, etc.</p>
<p>Highly selective doesn’t really determine prestige. U of Michigan has a huge acceptance rate yet is highly regarded. CMU, Wake Forest, and Emory have “high” acceptance rates relative to peer institutions but are still highly respected institutions.</p>
<p>Everyone knows that acceptance rates are a function of who applies. Colleges don’t change the number of seats each year. Yet the number of students apply does change (more internationals, etc.). Doesn’t mean all of those kids are qualified.</p>
<p>Besides, it also depends on the kind of school (Curtis, Juilliard, Cooper Union, and the nations military academies to name a few).</p>
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<p>I was responding to Alexandre.</p>
<p>annasdad, there is plenty of evidence. The USNWR Peer Assessment score is a pretty good indicator of what goes on in the hallways of major universities.</p>
<p>“I know that. But being highly selective helps determine prestige, which accounts for a quarter of the ranking.”</p>
<p>Annasdad, you are referring to the peer assessment score, which is not dirrectly correlated with selectivity, athough it is a good indicator of prestige among academics.</p>
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<p>Precisely…</p>
<p>Annasdad, the USNWR Peer Assesment score and the USWNR ranking are not the same. For example, Cal’s PA is #6 in the nation, while its ranking is #21.</p>
<p>I will just say that prestige is in the eye of the beholder. Evidence has been found that for the PA score, some universities are cut-throat in the tactic or they pass it on to their secretary. But again, prestige is in the eye of the beholder. So who are you trying to impress? An employer? Your self-esteem? Perhaps the plethora of college presidents you are acquainted with? At the end of the day, it’s hogwash.</p>
<p>Alexandre is right. The US News PA score accounts for only 15% of the overall US News ranking. And I can assure you that among the college and university presidents and provosts I know who fill those things out, admit rates are the farthest thing from their mind when evaluating their peer institutions. They mostly think about which schools have the faculty, resources, and programs they envy, and which don’t. Selectivity may have a greater influence with HS guidance counselors; a survey of their ratings of colleges and universities now makes up 7.5% of the total US News ranking. But even there, a lot more than selectivity is at play.</p>
<p>Here are the most selective universities, according to US News
<p>Here are the schools with the highest PA scores:
<p>Strikingly, the top public research institutions–UC Berkeley and Michigan especially, but others as well–are esteemed by university presidents and provosts out of all proportion to their selectivity, while some highly selective institutions–like WUSTL (#9 in selectivity per US News), Georgetown (#13), Notre Dame (#16), Vanderbilt (#16), and Tufts (#18)—just don’t get the PA love. Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Cornell also score higher in PA than in selectivity.</p>
<p>Here are the schools with the highest GC survey scores:
<p>The GCs are easier graders, but their grades appear to closely track the overall US rankings, with a little extra love for Ivies (all except Penn ranked #11 or higher), highly selective Catholic institutions (Georgetown, Notre Dame, BC), and other highly selective Northeastern privates (Johns Hopkins, CMU, Tufts). Interesting that Caltech doesn’t rate higher with GCs despite being #1 in selectivity per US News and having stellar academics.</p>
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<p>Hard to be “cut-throat” when you have one vote out of hundreds. You might choose to downgrade your closest competitors as the University of Florida president reportedly did, but if everyone does it those downgrades will just cancel each other out, and if only a few do it the effect on a score on a 5.0 scale with hundreds of people casting ballots is going to be trivial. It would take a huge conspiracy involving dozens and dozens of college and university officials to materially affect any competitor’s final score.</p>
<p>Cut-throat was probably the wrong word. Here is an interesting article on the topic:</p>
<p>[News:</a> Reputation Without Rigor - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings)</p>
<p>Man, Tufts gets no love from PA scores despite its acceptance rate and counselor PA scores being tied with U of Chicago.</p>
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<p>Exactly. It’s because the university officials filling out the PA survey aren’t thinking about a school’s admit rate. They’re thinking about faculty, mostly, and their judgment is that the Chicago faculty is stronger in math, and physics, and econ, and poli sci, and classics, and English, and history, and on and on. The PA is the only part of the US News ranking that bears any relation to faculty quality, which when you think about it just might have something to do with academic quality.</p>
<p>This is where, to me, things get sketchy. Because I feel it reflects more of graduate school than undergraduate. Notice how the counselors is so different from PA? That’s because counselors focus on undergraduate institutions whereas, for the most part, the other PA is more familiar with graduate.</p>
<p>I personally think PA is a joke. But that’s just me. The article I provided explains some of the reasons for my stance.</p>
<p>These passionate defenses of USNWR just confirm my assertion upthread about its sway over CC folk, and not just over semi-educated kids. </p>
<p>You cannot rank colleges objectively and meaningfully using simplistic measures like those in USNWR, or for that matter, any of the other rankings. What matters is the impact a school has on the subsequent life of its graduates, and that (1) isn’t quantifiable, for a number of reasons, and (2) would yield different “winners” for different types of students, indeed for each individual student. To say that (for example) Harvard is a “better” school than, say, Tufts, is nonsense. For some students, Harvard is “better,” perhaps, but certainly not all. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Look at Mathematics total R&D expenditure NSF Rankings 2009:</p>
<p>1) JHU
2) UT Austin
3) UT Austin Anderson Center
4) NC State U.
5) PA State Universities
6) Rutgers University
7) SUNY Stony Brook
8) OH State
9) Texas A&M
10) Brown
11) Stanford
12) U. Minnesota
13) NYU
14) Iowa State
15) Berkeley
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21) Princeton
25) MIT
34) Cornell
35) Harvard
60) Columbia
67) CalTech
75) Yale</p>
<p>Now don’t tell research & development in mathematics is unimportant. As you can see, most of the colleges at the top are public universities and your so called “elites” are lying at the bottom. </p>
<p>Selecting college doesn’t matter on how “elite” the college seems or how highly it is ranked. Go for how good the college is in your major. For Math, one may well pick PennState over Columbia.</p>
<p>I am not criticizing any colleges here. However, trying to substantiate one college is better than other just because a “ranking system” says so is ludicrous.</p>
<p>my high school guidance counselors were clueless so the thought of them ranking colleges is scary for me, probably why I don’t trust the US News guidance counselor rankings haha</p>
<p>I feel the same as you do pierre. The knowledge and scoring of high school guidance counselors are given way too much credit at USNWR.</p>
<p>they knew a lot about the colleges in the area that people at my school typically go to but once it came to colleges outside of new england/northeast, they didn’t know much</p>
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So your way of comparing is the entire state system of PA vs. a school of 8K in NJ (Princeton)? Colleges of 30K+ (UT and OSU) vs 5K? Most comparisons should at least be on a per student basis. What does that look like?</p>
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For R&D budget, the “per capita” calculation should be based on number of tenure track faculties, not undergraduate population.</p>
<p>There’s little point in looking to NSF’s data for research expenditures. For one, it focuses only on science and engineering. More importantly, it selectively includes affiliated institutions: JHU operates APL for the DOD, so why not include JPL for Caltech, which operates it for NASA? Or LBNL for Berkeley, which operates it for the DOE? Or SLAC, which is operated by Stanford for the DOE (and until recently it owned SLAC as an institution, and still owns the plant)?</p>
<p>Then there are the affiliated institutions that aren’t technically operated by the university but that have an influence on the university and its activities. For example, LLNL at Berkeley; the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) at Stanford; or the Scripps Institute by UCSD.</p>
<p>Another glaring problem is the arbitrary separation of state university schools: for some, they count all campuses’ research expenditures, while for others they list them separately.</p>
<p>And having certain kinds of schools definitely makes the comparison mucky. Some have medical schools, some don’t; but even for those that do have medical schools, there are other kinds of schools that make the comparison difficult. For example, Berkeley doesn’t have a medical school but simply adding UCSF’s total to it also gives Berkeley an unfair advantage over universities that don’t have nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry schools also (which UCSF does).</p>
<p>Basically, there’s too much uncertainty to really pay attention to the NSF research expenditures study. Though it is interesting to see aggregate figures of research and what the sources of funding are (federal, industry, etc.).</p>