What’s wrong with William & Mary?
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Anonymous
To be classified as R1 by Carnegie, significant research activity much occur. Simply offering graduate programs does not guarantee this. |
Anonymous
That wasn't my point. I'm saying W&M is educationally a lot more like a "national liberal arts college" than a research university, but they are classified as the latter because they have a small handful of graduate programs. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
OK, but just as a factual matter, they do have a football team in one of the most competitive conferences in the FCS. The team is coached by Mike London. |
Anonymous
William and Mary is hard to classify. It used to call itself the best small public research university in the country. I think that’s still the case. |
Anonymous
PP here that made me LOL. I just don’t CARE about football ! |
Anonymous
I think the "hard to classify" is an issue for William & Mary, but I'm not sure what they can do about it. US News just has two relevant categories: National Universities and National Universities. William & Mary is more or less between the two, but it is of course included in National Universities because of its Carnegie classification. It is too big and has too many programs and research for a National University. (William & Mary does about $60M in research a year vs $5M at Williams College.) But against the National Universities, William & Mary is typically much smaller than the top public universities. It is closer in size to schools like Brown and Princeton. William & Mary doesn't have a medical school, which brings in a lot of research money that helps with the resource inputs in US News (even though they don't really have much to do with undergraduate education). I think this is one of the reasons William & Mary considered merging with Eastern Virginia Medical College a few years ago. In the end, they decided it didn't make sense. I'm sure if Eastern Virginia brought in more research like UVA Health or MCV, they would have gone ahead. |
Anonymous
What?? |
Anonymous
Ok,nerd. |
Anonymous
Probably not a bad move declining to merge with some third tier medical school. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
All U.S. accredited medical schools are a very difficult admit. Admit rate for EVMS is about 13%. I think William & Mary took a close look at the merger (EVMS would have become William & Mary Medical School), but it didn't make financial sense. |
Anonymous
Not the PP, but I think they mean "National Universities" and "National Liberal Arts Colleges" here. The point being that W&M falls between the two so it's hard to classify. Acquiring a medical school is a way to move up in the rankings because it will generate research expenditures. It doesn't necessarily generate funds because med schools are expensive to operate. Medical schools regardless of ranking have a lot of research only faculty and do replication studies etc. so just by their everyday business have factors that will generate research expenditures. This is different than the rest of the academic departments where you have to be a top, active scholar to get research grants and they are usually relatively small compared to medicine/health sciences. Really any ranking system should separate out universities with medical schools vs. not or treat these research expenditures differently. Having a rating of high research activity at a school without a medical school is more impressive. |
Anonymous
They should, but I don't think they do. UCLA ranks higher in resource categories than Berkeley, and I would I would bet this is a primary reason UCLA is now is ranked higher than Berkeley. UCLA has a medical school and Berkeley does not. USNWR uses government IPEDS data, which shows UCLA's "Instruction" spending per student is $50K per student vs. $20K per student at Berkeley. I doubt that either figure is really accurate, but I really can't see that UCLA would spend significantly more on undergraduate education than Berkeley. Tuition is similar, state appropriations are similar, endowments are similar. The difference is all in the medical school health side. The reason UCLA has more "Instruction" is because schools can count time spent creating research proposals, leave to do research, etc. as "Instruction". It is counter-intuitive, but it is allowed by the accounting rules they follow. |
Anonymous
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I chose W&M way back when because it was the public school that provided the environment closest to the two private Ivy League schools I really liked, Princeton and Dartmouth. All three are all primarily residential, of a similar size, focus on teaching and student-professor interactions, and have a sense of community and history. I think that this is still the same today -- I can't think of a public option that comes as close as W&M. Choosing W&M worked well for me.
So there may be things that W&M could be doing better to market itself, but I still think it is unique among higher education options. Perhaps they need to figure a better way to communicate that to kids that are looking for the same things I valued. |