Reply to Wake Forest - Rankings Drop? Why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People don’t feed that anti Wake troll.  They start a thread like this every few weeks.  Just ignore.[/quote]

Not a troll. We visited Wake in the spring and really liked it. DC decided to apply and is working on the supplemental essays now.

In the meantime, we're trying to understand the context for the rankings change. Though we don't take the rankings literally (i.e. no assumption that a higher ranked school is a better fit for DC), Wake's swift drop caught our eye.

Given that the first few reponses to my questions here weren't very helpful, I googled around to try to learn more. Here's what I found:

USNWR changed its ranking criteria in 2023 and Wake immediately dropped 18 spots - from to #29 to #47.  (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/us/us-news-college-ranking.html )

Wake Forest's statement at the time:

10/2/23

"This year, U.S. News no longer considered the following criteria, many in which Wake Forest excels, which collectively accounted for 18% of last year’s rankings:

- Class size
- Professors with terminal degrees (the highest degree achievable in their respective fields)
- Alumni giving average
- Graduate debt proportion borrowing
- High school class standing

"U.S. News no longer measures things that make us who we are,” Wente said in a Sept. 18 email to the university community.

Wake Forest’s average student-to-faculty ratio is 10:1 — compared to the national average of 18:1. Additionally, 99% of all undergraduate classes at Wake Forest have fewer than 50 students, and 95% of faculty have a terminal degree at Wake Forest.

During the 2021-22 academic year, Wake Forest saw a 24% alumni giving rate, which is 124% higher than the national average of 11%. In the same year, alumni gave a whopping $91,820,239 in charitable contributions — making up 36% of the total charitable contributions to the university.

According to the U.S. News website, the average debt at graduation for a Wake Forest student is $31,476 — lower than the national average of $37,718.

In addition to removing some metrics, U.S. News added the following criteria:

First-generation graduation rates 
First-generation graduation rate performance 
College graduates earning more than a high school graduate
Citations per publication 
Field-weighted citation impact 
Publications cited in the top 5% of journals 
Publications cited in the top 25% of journals

Wente especially raised concern with the third metric, which measures if a university’s graduates earn more than a high school graduate.

“Does that mean we don’t value K-12 teachers,” Wente said. “Nationally, we underpay our K-12 teachers. But if you’re going to make $40-50k a year as a starting K-12 teacher, you can’t do that with a high school diploma. But does that mean your college education was not worth it?”

“Pro humanitate is at the core of what we do, and that inspires a lot of Wake Forest graduates to go into a range of career paths,” Ashleigh Brock, chief of staff to the Office of the President, said. “Not everyone’s going to be an investment banker in their first year after college. I don’t think our motto would suggest that we want that.”

source: https://wfuogb.com/21279/news/telling-our-story-wake-forest-the-u-s-news-rankings/#:~:text=Wente%20told%20the%20New%20York%20Times%20last,doing%2C%20or%20what%20it's%20deciding%20to%20measure.''  [/quote]

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