New Yorker article on the US News College Ranking

[Anonymous]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell

Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read the whole article by Malcolm Gladwell. But the abstract gives a good idea. Here's a good quote from the full version:

“If you look at the top twenty schools every year, forever, they are all wealthy private universities,” Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, told me. “Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are--Berkeley, U.C.L.A., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, U.N.C.--do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top tier of institutions? It doesn’t really make sense, until you drill down into the rankings, and what do you find? What I find more than anything else is a measure of wealth: institutional wealth, how big is your endowment, what percentage of alumni are donating each year, what are your faculty salaries, how much are you spending per student. Penn State may very well be the most popular university in America--we get a hundred and fifteen thousand applications a year for admission. We serve a lot of people. Nearly a third of them are the first people in their entire family network to come to college. We have seventy-six per cent of our students receiving financial aid. There is no possibility that we could do anything here at this university to get ourselves into the top ten or twenty or thirty--except if some donor gave us billions of dollars.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell

Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read the whole article by Malcolm Gladwell. But the abstract gives a good idea. Here's a good quote from the full version:

“If you look at the top twenty schools every year, forever, they are all wealthy private universities,” Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, told me. “Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are--Berkeley, U.C.L.A., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, U.N.C.--do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top tier of institutions? It doesn’t really make sense, until you drill down into the rankings, and what do you find? What I find more than anything else is a measure of wealth: institutional wealth, how big is your endowment, what percentage of alumni are donating each year, what are your faculty salaries, how much are you spending per student. Penn State may very well be the most popular university in America--we get a hundred and fifteen thousand applications a year for admission. We serve a lot of people. Nearly a third of them are the first people in their entire family network to come to college. We have seventy-six per cent of our students receiving financial aid. There is no possibility that we could do anything here at this university to get ourselves into the top ten or twenty or thirty--except if some donor gave us billions of dollars.”

Penn State is #1 though -- in partying and alcoholism. He left that part out.

[Anonymous]

OK, maybe. I wouldn't know and didn't go there. A quick google shows you may have a point although it's a year or two out of date.

But there's a bigger point here, which is that the US News and World Report ranking is biased towards private schools with huge endowments, because the components of the index (faculty salaries, number of PhDs on faculty, endowment) are all linked to how rich the school is.

If you can get access to the full article, the USN rankings don't include some other arguably important measures, like value for money, or pct who graduate relative to predicted pct (which is based on SES). A school that ranks highly on "value for money," which isn't included in the USN rankings, would by definition do poorly in the USN rankings.

[Anonymous]

The most objective university rankings are the 3 world university rankings and Penn State is not in the top 100. U.S.news is a buddy system and not as objective.

[Anonymous]

Actually, Penn State is ranked #83 in in the aggregate world university ranking taking all 3 into account. Although it is not as high as The University of Maryland at #79, it is well ahead of UVA at #99.

[Anonymous]

Ok, I've now seen two threads with an anti-Penn State person posting about alcoholism. What's with the venom? Did you not get accepted there or did a cute PSU guy dump you or something?

And for the record, I went to Penn State and am still sober.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, I've now seen two threads with an anti-Penn State person posting about alcoholism. What's with the venom? Did you not get accepted there or did a cute PSU guy dump you or something?

And for the record, I went to Penn State and am still sober.

Congrats - how many days sober are you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, I've now seen two threads with an anti-Penn State person posting about alcoholism. What's with the venom? Did you not get accepted there or did a cute PSU guy dump you or something?

And for the record, I went to Penn State and am still sober.

That was me and no venom at all. This may be a recent development there.
I just heard a story on NPR bout the serious drinking problem t Penn St. and then
saw a news article where the Dean of the school has acknowledged this is a serious problem there.
I can post it if you wish.
Have definitely scratched that one off my list.

[Anonymous]

Hope you guys learned something from the New Yorker article about rankings systems, too.

[Anonymous]

I work in a university where "breaking into the top 20" has long been our mantra, and we sit well below that year after year. My own view is that the rankings are sticky, and will never change, and this article gives a reason why. But a more enlightened view is that there are lots of great institutions out there, and lots of problems at the top ones. So your choice is to try to go to a top school, and gain benefits of prestige, or go to another place where you may be perfectly happy. Both strategies have advantages. But don't sit around expecting the rankings to move very much in our lifetimes, or those of our kids. You just have to take it as a given and move on.

[Anonymous]

I went to Penn State (Honors College), and the resources, classes, and professors there easily outclass the private, expensive university I now work at that actively tries to market itself as "world class" and games every metric it can, as hard as it can.

Yes, some of the 50,000+ students there drink too much. But many others get great educations in the hard sciences, social sciences, and liberal arts. I suspect you'll find heavy drinking in many schools (but with its rural location, it's much more obvious when it happens at PSU than when, say, Georgetown students go out in Adams Morgan and get lost in a large crowd of drunks. And as far as I know, we never had students manufacture drunks in a dorm room, either).

I personally despise Spanier, but he has a point -- US News and World Reports rankings are not an objective measure of the quality of the education one will receive, but rather a complex set of metrics -- and many schools now "game" the data to try to justify their ever-increasing tuition rates.

[Anonymous]

^^ "manufacture drugs"...although manufacturing drunks in the dorms isn't really possible either, now that it's a dry campus

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work in a university where "breaking into the top 20" has long been our mantra, and we sit well below that year after year. My own view is that the rankings are sticky, and will never change, and this article gives a reason why. But a more enlightened view is that there are lots of great institutions out there, and lots of problems at the top ones. So your choice is to try to go to a top school, and gain benefits of prestige, or go to another place where you may be perfectly happy. Both strategies have advantages. But don't sit around expecting the rankings to move very much in our lifetimes, or those of our kids. You just have to take it as a given and move on.

At the beginning of her college search DD had her eye on only a few schools, one in particular, not ivy, but highly competitive LAC. We visited these schools and they truly were lovely, but due to research she decided to take a look at lesser known and less prestigious schools. She will admit she started these visits with a snooty attitude and a ton of bias, but that melted quickly. She found MANY wonderful lesser known schools throughout the east coast and midwest and several that surpassed her original first choice as far as being a fit for her.

I am so glad that she did not limit herself. She has not made her final decision yet and is still awaiting word from a few schools, but she has several acceptances from some very fine colleges and most of these arrived with merit offers. Searching for a school that fit her as opposed as striving to fit a school has made her final year of high school a tad less stressful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work in a university where "breaking into the top 20" has long been our mantra, and we sit well below that year after year. My own view is that the rankings are sticky, and will never change, and this article gives a reason why. But a more enlightened view is that there are lots of great institutions out there, and lots of problems at the top ones. So your choice is to try to go to a top school, and gain benefits of prestige, or go to another place where you may be perfectly happy. Both strategies have advantages. But don't sit around expecting the rankings to move very much in our lifetimes, or those of our kids. You just have to take it as a given and move on.

At the beginning of her college search DD had her eye on only a few schools, one in particular, not ivy, but highly competitive LAC. We visited these schools and they truly were lovely, but due to research she decided to take a look at lesser known and less prestigious schools. She will admit she started these visits with a snooty attitude and a ton of bias, but that melted quickly. She found MANY wonderful lesser known schools throughout the east coast and midwest and several that surpassed her original first choice as far as being a fit for her.

I am so glad that she did not limit herself. She has not made her final decision yet and is still awaiting word from a few schools, but she has several acceptances from some very fine colleges and most of these arrived with merit offers. Searching for a school that fit her as opposed as striving to fit a school has made her final year of high school a tad less stressful.

name them. Then we will see how "fine" they are.

[Anonymous]

You are rude and demeaning. Go away.