Anonymous wrote:
All the California public schools should be dropping. We flew out there to see if my daughter should apply and it is pretty obvious that the schools are having budget troubles more severe than in some of the other states.

Anonymous wrote:This is the 3rd rating this year that will severely hurt UC Berkeley's ego.

With UCLA beating UC Berkeley in the THE World Rankings (different ranking/methodology than this one), UC Berkeley tying with UCLA and USC on US News after years of constantly rating higher, and this one with both USC and UCLA leagues ahead of Berkeley, administrators are not going to take this lightly. This is in addition to UCLA's consistent lower acceptance rate in recent years, and for the first time last year- a stronger admitted student profile than UC Berkeley. Seems like there's a shift towards a new flagship of the system.

Anonymous wrote:UVA and W&M not in the top 5 publics?

#fakelist

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:After taking a review at the methodology, I am not exactly sure why LACs are included in this ranking.

1- Teaching expenses per student. Universities pay far more to attract and keep high quality researcher professors. LACs don't pay as much, but student satisfaction with teaching tends to be high. In essence, LACs are more efficient about how they spend money vs. how satisfied students are.
2- Faculty per student. Again, universities have a lot more professors who may never be working directly with students. What is the actual ratio of professors who work fully or mostly with undergrads?
3- Research papers per faculty. LAC professors don't publish to the same extent: their commitment is toward teaching and supporting undergrads. Again, you'd have to take out professors who don't mostly interact with undergrads to get a fair comparison.
4- Student engagement. One of the questions is "to what extent does the teaching support apply the student’s learning to the real world" and this is inherently against the whole mission of a learning for the sake of learning LAC.
5- Number of subjects taught. Not sure how a school with under 2000 students will ever be able to beat one with 20000+ in terms of offerings.

I think this is a solid ranking all in all, but as US News does, they really should separate out LACs and universities which are like apples and oranges. Students will make their own informed decision about which they prefer, and then from there they can see what schools in each respective category excel.

I think the criteria that should be given most weight = Salary / Total Tuition

So the methodology automatically dings public universities?

Anonymous wrote:After taking a review at the methodology, I am not exactly sure why LACs are included in this ranking.

1- Teaching expenses per student. Universities pay far more to attract and keep high quality researcher professors. LACs don't pay as much, but student satisfaction with teaching tends to be high. In essence, LACs are more efficient about how they spend money vs. how satisfied students are.
2- Faculty per student. Again, universities have a lot more professors who may never be working directly with students. What is the actual ratio of professors who work fully or mostly with undergrads?
3- Research papers per faculty. LAC professors don't publish to the same extent: their commitment is toward teaching and supporting undergrads. Again, you'd have to take out professors who don't mostly interact with undergrads to get a fair comparison.
4- Student engagement. One of the questions is "to what extent does the teaching support apply the student’s learning to the real world" and this is inherently against the whole mission of a learning for the sake of learning LAC.
5- Number of subjects taught. Not sure how a school with under 2000 students will ever be able to beat one with 20000+ in terms of offerings.

I think this is a solid ranking all in all, but as US News does, they really should separate out LACs and universities which are like apples and oranges. Students will make their own informed decision about which they prefer, and then from there they can see what schools in each respective category excel.

Anonymous wrote:Rankings are fake. All that matters is when the student graduates do they go out into the world and actually accomplish something. Do they cure cancer, end wars and poverty, help another human being. Who care where they go to school. Actions of individuals are what matters!