Reply to Times Higher Education/Wall Street Journal Rankings 2018 are out

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[quote=Anonymous]After taking a review at the methodology, I am not exactly sure why LACs are included in this ranking.

1- Teaching expenses per student. Universities pay far more to attract and keep high quality researcher professors. LACs don't pay as much, but student satisfaction with teaching tends to be high. In essence, LACs are more efficient about how they spend money vs. how satisfied students are. 
2- Faculty per student. Again, universities have a lot more professors who may never be working directly with students. What is the actual ratio of professors who work fully or mostly with undergrads? 
3- Research papers per faculty. LAC professors don't publish to the same extent: their commitment is toward teaching and supporting undergrads. Again, you'd have to take out professors who don't mostly interact with undergrads to get a fair comparison.  
4- Student engagement. One of the questions is "to what extent does the teaching support apply the student’s learning to the real world" and this is inherently against the whole mission of a learning for the sake of learning LAC.
5- Number of subjects taught. Not sure how a school with under 2000 students will ever be able to beat one with 20000+ in terms of offerings.

I think this is a solid ranking all in all, but as US News does, they really should separate out LACs and universities which are like apples and oranges. Students will make their own informed decision about which they prefer, and then from there they can see what schools in each respective category excel. [/quote]

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