Reply to Which universities have gone DOWN in stature over the years?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's important to recognize that the concept of "stature" as it's thrown around on this site often has little to do with educational quality.

Small liberal arts colleges have been hurt (generally) in "stature" - not quality - by the bias of the stupid USNWR rankings towards large research universities.  Which has led to the ghettoization of SLACs like Williams and Amherst on a separate list and the under-ranking of low-research "universities" like Dartmouth and Brown -- notwithstanding that the best of these are generally assessed as offering a better undergraduate educational experience.   Those undergraduate-focused schools aren't hurting - they're growing their programs and endowment, they continue to turn away 8.5 or 9 applicants for every one they accept, more than half the students who are admitted chose to attend them, and their alums continue to out-earn those from bigger undergraduate diploma mills.   But all that said, in terms of "stature" or "prestige" or the other dumb non-educational 'popularity/buzz' measures that DCUM airheads and uninformed chatter about endlessly, the smaller schools have come to be perceived as being somehow less prestigious (admittedly to a population of idiots), and less likely to attract common apps from families (because let's be honest, parents are a big part of the problem here) that are more focused on prestige/stature and rankings than on education quality.

A generation ago, it was harder (and reasonably so) to get into Amherst and Williams than into most Ivies; now it's easier to get into Williams than it is to get into Rice or USC (or fraudulent Columbia), which is simply bizarre and indefensible if we're talking about the quality of an undergraduate education.   And another example of how the inventors/perpetrators of the USNWR ranking scheme have done great harm to US higher education and its users and should, if there's any justice, forever rot in hell.

[/quote]

Jesus Christ. [/quote]

+1000[/quote]

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