Reply to Top 10 public "ranking"?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Schools should not be reduced to department rankings.  That is a bad proxy for the overall experience and value.[/quote]

Top public institutions are very large and serve a broad population. It is absolutely important to prioritize departmental rankings! The variety, depth and quality of upper division courses is tied directly to the faculty and TAs. Your experience if you are serious about your field of study will greatly be determined by this. We know two kids at Purdue both top students. One is majoring in a humanities degree and miserable, hates the area, experience, area is boring and classes to easy. The other wants to engineer automobiles. He is over the moon with joy. Spends his time with kids who are just as passionate about engineering and auto industry as he is, has an internship already and loves it. Despite being NMSF finds the engineering and math courses challenging.

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Departmental rankings are usually for graduate programs.  Graduate study is very different from the undergraduate experience.[/quote]

You cannot separate these things so cleanly. The professors will be the same (and, yes, the professors will teach the undergrads and write the recommendation letters). The strong departments will have research money and offer research courses or seminars to top/interested students. The reputation of the department will help with jobs in that field—including if there is on-campus recruiting—and grad school applications. Any ECs tied to the department will be influenced by the quality and size of the department. You cannot separate these two things into entirely different worlds.[/quote]

I don't agree.  Professors can spend their time on research, graduates, or undergraduates.   At research universities they usually prioritize those areas in that order, yet undergraduate tuition is used to subsidize research and graduate education.  Being strong in research and graduate rankings does not mean the school is a great choice for an undergraduate.  The other thing that happens is that tuition for majors in areas like humanities and social sciences will be used to subsidize STEM fields.  Many undergraduates get the short stick at many universities.[/quote]

Sorry, but this is not how teaching assignments or university finances work. Most professors get undergrad teaching assignments and nearly all of your major’s courses will be taught by those professors. Do they all love those assignments? No, but they are still accessible to the students, and top students will generally find a receptive audience.

Undergraduate tuition does not subsidize grad programs. The funding comes from numerous other sources. Undergraduate tuition often doesn’t even cover the cost of the undergraduates. At large schools undergraduate tuition is often a very small portion of the school’s revenues.

This isn’t to say everything is great about being an undergrad. But if you aren’t looking into departments when you are looking at schools, I really don’t know what you’re doing.[/quote]

I know how university finances work and it is largely a cross-subsidization shell game as previously described.[/quote]

Subsidization from the endowment, grants, donations, fee-generating services, and expensive professional grad and money-churning certificate programs, yes. For publics, also from the state’s contribution, yes. From undergraduate tuition and fees? No. The undergrads don’t cover their costs and they certainly aren’t covering anyone else’s.[/quote]

For publics, state contributions and undergraduate tuition both go into the general fund bucket, which is unrestricted.  Once the funds are there, they are indistinguishable as to source.  So when you say the state's contribution can fund research but not tuition, that makes no sense in the way higher ed does accounting.

Even if you do not agree with the above, would you agree that tuition can fund instruction?  If so, did you know that a large percentage of research is actually accounted for as instruction (even though no one is being taught and the activity looks exactly like research)?  At a large research university, "departmental research", which is any research not externally funded, can account for a very large percentage faculty time.  You can see this manifested in lower teaching workloads (which are still funded by tuition and other unrestricted funds).[/quote]

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