Reply to Do Penn State grads/current students carry a stigma?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yawn.  The usual rule applies.  I just figure a grad from there was too dumb to get accepted into a better college.[/quote]

From Macolm Gladwell's New Yorker article on the problem with USNWR rankings:

“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.”[/quote]

Spanier is a fraud and is in jail now.

If I were PSU president, I could get the school into the thirties in a decade or two.

The state (PA) doesn't give much support financially, so I would be able to plug the hole from alum/donor drive and I'd take the school private. Cut enrollment by half (the lower half of students at main campus don't deserve to be at the school), spin off the branch campuses back to the state, go completely race/hook blind, carve out a niche for high SAT scoring/so-so gpa type kids that are unhooked so can't get into top 25.

Within 15 years, the school would be in the low 30 range consistently.

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Really?  You have experience doing this? 
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