What happened to W&M, Brandeis, Tulane, Pepperdine and others..from historically T50 to outside looking in?
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Anonymous
Pepperdine is “is composed of an undergraduate liberal arts school (Seaver College)…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperdine_University Brandeis “as a small liberal arts college, we are committed to intense intellectual engagement of faculty with students.”. https://www.brandeis.edu/registrar/bulletin/provisional/arts-sciences/index.html William and Mary made up something called a liberal arts research university so maybe you got a point there: https://www.wm.edu/academics/departmentsandschools/ |
Anonymous
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Vanderbilt's reaction to the changes in methodology.
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/09/why-new-us-news-rankings-are-flawed-opinion |
Anonymous
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Wake Forest is barely "t50", somehow beat out by Rutgers. W&M has exactly the same entering class stats and %s as UVA yet is beat out by Virginia Tech on US News. Michigan State (no offense to Michigan State) is somehow t70 now. Did the average student at Rutgers suddenly become much smarter than the average Wake student? No. Is the average Virginia Tech student smarter than the average student at Tulane? No.
So-called "t50" schools with ranks that now reflect their ability to be large, pell-grant numbers, etc. will always be on the outside looking into the group of schools whose intellectual character remains clear to those who make any effort at all to look. |
Anonymous
| t50 is a made-up distinction by a failing out-of-print magazine. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Wake being barely T50 sounds about right though. I don’t have a view on the relative positions of the other schools you mentioned, but it’s odd to me that you focused exclusively on the smartness of average students. These are rankings of universities, not just an ordered list of the average undergraduate student’s metrics. There’s more to assessing a school than its incoming students’ test scores. |
Anonymous
From the article (written by someone at Vanderbilt): “In Vanderbilt’s case, 83 percent of students graduate with no debt whatsoever. If a family chooses to borrow anyway, this is usually done to better manage cash flow on a short-term basis.” Vanderbilt doesn’t include student loans in their FA packages - but they do tell parents to borrow money via parent plus loans if the FA they offer isn’t enough. I’d love to see how many Vanderbilt parents/families have debt when their student graduates. |
Anonymous
THIS. |
Anonymous
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Pepperdine and Brandeis had dropped prior to the revision in rankings.
Pepperdine has always been thought of as a very wealthy school that was a “safety” for wealthy west coast private school kids. It has always been 3rd wheel to USC and UCLA. |
Anonymous
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There’s probably educational investments that peers are making that Pepperdine isn’t, and that’s causing their slump. One big trend has been offices of institutional excellence cropping up. Higher education administration requires a ton of investment in new areas of education. What?! This is a word salad of nothing. Give some concrete examples of how Pepperdine’s academics have slid. |
Anonymous
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It makes no sense to rank colleges when there are so many different kids of colleges thousands of miles apart with different areas of interest and excellence.
Ignore the ranking; it is the least important factor in choosing a school with your kid. And as you have noted: rankings change. |
Anonymous
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I have a professional connection to the rankings, and I find it crazy how smart people attribute so much value to them. They are particular indicators of specific things that "proxy" things a parent might care about, like academic excellence. But they don't actually measure that. It's worth thinking about what they are actually measuring and seeing if htat is something you value.
It's not just "the changes" to the weighting or indicators, it's that they never were a good way to assess the worth of a school. |
Anonymous
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1. Metrics (and weights) have changed- so when looking at rankings, evaluate what you care about (e.g., social mobility emphasized in current ratings vs. class size/research, faculty degrees, which were more prominent in the ratings before changes in 2023).
2. Be careful how you interpret the metrics. Data to evaluate performance on level of debt after graduation, for example, is only using data on students who receive federal aid. |
Anonymous
| As a parent of a senior applying to more than one of these schools, I am pleased they are dropping in the rankings. |
Anonymous
Why? Most remain a competitive and selective admit. |