Reply to What happened to Miami of Ohio?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Declining state funding.

In such a government environment, the only public universities that can survive and maintain a high reputation are large research universities.

Federal research funding brings them plenty of money (the schools take a cut out of research grants won by professors) and the large student population keeps the state government happy (they are educating more people on a lower budget due to fixed costs).

[/quote]

Federal research grants DO NOT cover all costs.  Far from it.  The university often has to cover a significant percentage with institutional (its own) funds in order to get the grants.  The source of these funds can and does include undergraduate tuition.  So large research universities often do a lot of cross-subsidizing from undergraduate programs (partucularly the humanities) to fund STEM research.  This benefits the professors that do the research and graduate students, but certainly NOT undergraduates from a quality of education perspective.  If you look at a school like Virginia Tech, which does $556M in total research a year, but notably has more of it coming from Institutional Sources ($231M) than from any other source including the Federal government ($211M), you can see that this can be a huge percentage that the university is funding in that case.

USNWR doesn't care about actual quality of education, though.  They primarily measure inputs, and research increases the overall university budget, so if the university can somehow attribute some of it to USNWR resource categories, it benefits them in rankings.

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3525001&id=h2[/quote]

Does USNWR factor research expenditures into their rankings? I was under the impression they don’t. [/quote]

It factors in several places, but this is straight from the USNWR methodology on Financial Resources:

"U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, [b]research[/b], student services and related educational expenditures in the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years. Expenditures were compared with fall 2018 and fall 2019 full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate enrollment, respectively."

The Government IPEDS database that is used by USNWR also allows "departmental research" to be counted in the "Instruction"  category.  Departmental Research includes things like faculty start up costs (for research faculty), and any research that is not organized (e.g. external sponsored research).  The gist of it is faculty can be doing research, it is categorized as instruction, and USNWR is picking it up as instruction.  This is a big category.  [/quote]

So average spending per student on "student services" a.k.a. additional pork and graft for administrators who don't do anything is actually used as a metric for moving up the ranks?

Absolutely ridiculous. Basically pushing for bloated administrations and punishing efficiency. No wonder college tuition is astronomical these days, universities get rewarded for bloat.[/quote]

Yale has more administrators than undergraduate students.[/quote]

:shock: [/quote]

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