40 Colleges & Universities Receive 5 Star Academic Rating
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Anonymous
Departmental strength. Resources, faculty, and research. UVA is not a player in STEM. |
Anonymous
I think there’s more than one way of determining whether a university has strong STEM programs at the undergrad level. One is to look at STEM PhD production rate as a percentage of students completing their undergrad there. I don’t think UVA is in the top 100. Another is to look at UVA grad program ranks and extrapolate to undergrad. I don’t think any are in the top 20. Another is to look at the percentage of majors in STEM (the idea being students tend to self sort into the strongest depts.) UVA is around 27% for traditional STEM (ie not counting social sciences.) Not a low number but not a high one either. There are other indicators but those are usually the things I first consider when getting a sense of a school’s strength in STEM. That said, it could still be a perfect STEM school for some. |
Anonymous
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STEM isn’t everything.
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Anonymous
…especially at UVA |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
| I love how everyone on DCUM are the experts on ratings when it comes to UVA just based on their own opinions. |
Anonymous
Probably the impacted major thing plus the high % TAs teaching undergrads vs. profs |
Anonymous
Which makes it kind of useless, given that many schools are test optional which skews the SAT part, only public high schools have class rank, so that skews the top 10% part, faculty salary will vary by region and cost of the college plus endowments which has nothing to do with academics, and I'm not sure how useful separating out the graduation performance of Pell grant recipients speaks to academic quality of schools versus the economic reality of the students. We need to stop pretending that shcool are bad or not worth attending if these lists don't cherry pick them. It is counterproductive to the country as a whole and to the mental health of our young adults. |
Anonymous
And higher faculty salaries doesn't mean those people are teaching undergraduates. Higher paid faculty have been doing less and less teaching of undergraduates for decades. |
Anonymous
90% of the colleges/universities in the US should be removed. That should be much more productive to the country. Too many worthless and uselss schools and money is wasted. |
Anonymous
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The book notes 5 star UCLA's strongest programs as:
Computer Science, Engineering, English, Fine Arts, Mathematics, Performing Arts, Political Science, and Psychology. UCLA seems like an interesting community. Overall, this college guidebook loves the UC system with 4 UCs receiving the second highest academic rating (4.5 stars) and one (UCLA) receiving a full 5 star rating for academics. Many seem to underestimate the quality of the University of Virginia. Univ. of Virginia is an outstanding university. When I wrote the first two posts in this thread, I thought that there would be strong reaction to rating the academics of UC-Berkeley the same as for Boston University and the Univ. of Florida, and Boston College. To really stir things up, I will list the SLACs that earned a 4.5 star academic rating (same as UC-Berkeley) : Smith College, Wesleyan University, Bucknell University, Bates College, Univ. of Richmond, Scripps College, Colgate University, Colby College, Colorado College, College of the Holy Cross, Lafayette College, Union College, Vassar College, & Grinnell College. Th three authors of the book all have earned doctorates--two PhDs and an EdD. |
Anonymous
Same goes for Michigan. Among public schools Berkeley, UCLA and Michigan are top tier. Other schools are a step below.. UVA is likely 0.5 points below the top tier mainly because of their weak engineering programs but can't be beat from a value perspective for in-state students. |
Anonymous
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The three authors received their undergraduate degrees from Georgetown (Justice and Peace Studies), Appalachain State, and Temple University. Two received PhDs in Education from the Univ. of Georgia and the third from Temple University.
My thought is that US News does a great job separating National Universities from LACs. I find it difficult to equate a world class research university such as UC-Berkeley with LACs such as Scripps College, Union College, Colby & Bates, Univ. of Richmond, and Colorado College--which, in my view, is one of the most overrated rich kid schools in the country. |
Anonymous
That and class sizes. But I would think all this would apply to each of the big public universities. I personally don’t see UVA and UCLA offering a better academic experience than Berkeley. They are fantastic values, but that’s really a different thing. I would have all three at 4.5. And drop some of the other 4.5s to 4.0. It’s worth remembering the authors of college guides want to sell books. And if all the top rated schools for actual academic experience are of small to medium undergrad size, they might have a reduced audience. Maybe there should be different rankings for public universities vs private universities vs LACs. Similar to USNWR but with a category for national public unis. The trade offs and experiences are so different across the groups. Having different lists would force more reflection on what matters to a given student and family, rather than just automatically valuing the higher ranked thing when apples, oranges, and bananas are being compared. |
Anonymous
The thing is, a bachelor's degree is just not a big deal. Nearly any school has adequate resources to teach bachelors level material. If a student can find engaged faculty and peers and access to the programs that they are interested in, they can do great from anywhere. While I would never advise a kid to choose BU or UVA over Cal for a PhD program in most sciences, they can absolutely get just as good of an undergraduate education at any of these schools, and many, many others. |