Cornell - The People's Ivy Leauge

UC's rightly belong on the top ten. But Texas A&M better than UCSD? Something is wrong here.

Marquette? People must really like the basketball team, that's not even the best university in Milwaukee.

Go Panthers.

ROTC membership seems to rate high among your criteria. Would any sane person join the ROTC while the neocons are ruling the country?

Yes, I love how taking a stand against discrimination against gays (e.g. banning ROTC) is considered a negative.

I have long waited for a college ranking system that is even sillier and without reason or purpose than the US News and World Report Rankings. My long wait is over.

Intriguing list. Unfortunately, our prejudice against public college graduates is such that a magna cum laude Texas A&M graduate with an extensive background in community service would still find it harder to get a job in Washington government circles than most grads in the bottom half of Harvard's graduating class.

I love seeing MIT at the top, even though I wasn't able to attend because of a subpar financial aid package.

But seriously, I'm afraid that overall this is a really, really bad college ranking. There's a huge emphasis on ROTC, a reliance on Peace Corps numbers that I suspect magnifies statistically insignificant differences in enrollment, and the usage of measures (like graduation rate and sheer quantity of Ph.Ds produced) that reward schools for creampuffing their curriculums.

And why only "service" in the Peace Corp?

Banning ROTC from college campuses has about the same impact as making ignorant blog comments on reversing the current gays in the military policy.
It does allow all the students at Yale think they are fighting discrimination though.

Also striking me as odd is MIT at #1 and Caltech at #109.

Though I find these things kind of odd anyway--strength of department affects students far more than some overall notion of 'university,' with the exception of the lib arts schools

Uh, Washington Univ. in St. Louis isn't ranked 120 in the US News rankings and it sure as hell ain't in Washington state. Fix it.

Yay, 'horns!

I'll second that. Hook 'em!

I'd guess the great leaps forward for UCR and UCD has to do with the incredible competitiveness at the UC system in general. The state has not built a new campus in several decades so currently getting into Berkeley or UCLA requires virtually straight A grades and phenomenal scores. That leaves some extremely talented high school students left to UCR and UCD. That obviously lifts the entire UC system. It also is a strong reason for the state to begin adding again to the UC system.

Good for U.W. (Mush, Huskies!), my graduate school. But the ranking for the University of Hawaii is way too long, given the supposed emphasis on a school as "an engine of social mobility." UH allowed many a plantation worker's child to receive the benefits of higher education and a damn good one at that. The academic courses are uniformly very good and certain departments (e.g., Astronomy, Marine Sciences) are among the best, if not the best, in the world. True, Hawaii doesn't have a large endowment or a big ROTC program, and as a public school from a small state, it is at the mercy of a legislative caprice. Still, it offers not only a good education, but it's still affordable to kids from blue-collar families. It was rated by U.S. News as one of the best values in the nation.

I have to add that Texas A&M defintely deserves its ranking, despite its political backwardness. From engineering to life sciences, it really is top notch. . . . Too bad about the football program.

Hey doofus,

What's so ignorant about it? Is the military anti-gay? Yes. Does ROTC follow the military in this? Yes. Is prohibiting ROTC from being a fully registered organization, or having a campus environment that discourages ROTC enrollment a statement of anti gay discrimination? Yes. Does the ranking system make that a disadvantage? Yes.

You both bore me and remind me why I should never post comments on blogs.

I meant to say Hawaii's ranking is way too low. . . . not quite sure what a "long" ranking would be.

It's fixed in the online version, but in the print, y'all managed to misspell "Champaign" as in "University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

It's not the same as the drink. Bastards.

Anti anti-gay discrimination

robertl: "I'd guess the great leaps forward for UCR and UCD has to do with the incredible competitiveness at the UC system in general. The state has not built a new campus in several decades ..."

I believe that there is a new UC campus being constructed in Merced. At least it's not in Visalia ...

Note to DevilDog -- a big Mahalo for your defense of the University of Hawaii's rating. Most people are amazed to learn that it is also one of the top 25 research universities in the country. Some of the earliest and most promising breakthroughs in cloning and genetics have been made by scientists at UH's Institute for Biogenesis Research.

However, there is a dark side to the school's much-vaunted research prowess. Thanks to a dubious Department of Defense grant back in the early 1960s, University of Hawaii chemists were able to invent and perfect the very proficient and now-notorious chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange, the use of which would later become synonymous with all that went wrong during the Vietnam War.

Of national universities, Berkeley's 2 (yay), Stanford's 7 (hah), USC is 33 (take that, Drum).

I'd think a former Caltecher like Kevin would at least comment on Caltech's miserable ranking in this index. The Washington Monthly article even comments on Emory's big drop in their rankings relative to US News, but Caltech's is even larger.

But if you take a look at the methodology, it's clear that Caltech doesn't enroll enough students to score well on some of the indices, such as "total number of PhDs awarded in Science and Engineering" -- even though it is the best, or one of the two or three best, science and engineering PhD granting schools in the country. They do have a huge research spending for a school their size, but don't know exactly how it compares to UC Berkeley or MIT.

P.S.: I checked on the research spending question -- Caltech is ranked 58th -- but I wonder where it stands on a per-student basis.

The US News ranksings are complete bullshit.

I guess CSU Fresno would have thrown the curve too far off.

Your methodology is as screwed up as US News, who use a bunch of measures of the same thing (exclusiveness) year after year. ROTC? Peace Corps? Give me a break. That will hose universities that take lots of poor students, working students, older students. About as useless a measure as I have ever seen.

Upperword mobility? How about the diversity of the student body? The percentage of students who are the first in their family to attend a university? How about the ability of working students and non-traditional students to attend the place?

Research? Should not be only PhDs in science and engineering.

Graduation rates? How do you define it? in fours years, six years, or ultimate receipt of degrees?

These exercises do more damage than good in general.

If you can stand to live in Riverside, UCR is a great school...but it is a hell of a trade-off.

And definitely, you should score universities on the pleasant temperament (or lack of same) of their graduates.

One thing I did notice was that counting PhDs and research dollars penalizes both small schools (because it is not per-student) and schools that focus only on undergradate education.

On the other hand, if you are looking for diversity, you might look at diversity of PhDs produced -- years ago, one of the profs on my committee remarked, "well, we've got good news and bad news. The good news is, Rice produced more Hispanic applied math PhDs this year than any other school in the country. The bad news is, it only took two.

And, on the other other hand, you shouldn't ignore masters degrees. It was claimed (and I think it is true) that if you want to maximize your income in a field, don't stick around for a doctorate. To the extent that this diversifies the upper middle class, that's also a good thing.

The remarks about working students are also on point. I noticed that USouthFlorida didn't do especially well, and I think perhaps this is because they are very much a "commuter school". My father almost finished his MBA there (I think I have that right -- I was very young at the time), while working full-time as an engineer.

It seems like you only did this for the national universities. Or were the Liberal Arts schools more closely parallel to their USNWR ranking?

I looked through (quickly) the Liberal Arts Colleges rankings and I noticed that Washington Monthly has the same myopia when it comes to categorization as US News. Schools like Bucknell, Lafayette, and Harvey Mudd are not simply Liberal Arts Colleges. They have significant engineering components that are not taken into consideration (and in some circles seem to be a disadvantage). At the same time WM lists the above schools as liberal arts, they omit schools such as Rose-Hulman, Rowan, and Villanova which are as much liberal arts as the schools above. Lastly, the ranking compares schools with ONLY undergraduate degrees (Swarthmore) with school that have graduate programs (Bryn Mawr).

It doesn't make a lot of sense to say the WM ranking scheme is different (or better) than the US News ranking scheme if both can't produce enough discernment to separate an apple from a watermelon.

I looked through (quickly) the Liberal Arts Colleges rankings and I noticed that Washington Monthly has the same myopia when it comes to categorization as US News. Schools like Bucknell, Lafayette, and Harvey Mudd are not simply Liberal Arts Colleges. They have significant engineering components that are not taken into consideration (and in some circles seem to be a disadvantage). At the same time WM lists the above schools as liberal arts, they omit schools such as Rose-Hulman, Rowan, and Villanova which are as much liberal arts as the schools above. Lastly, the ranking compares schools with ONLY undergraduate degrees (Swarthmore) with school that have graduate programs (Bryn Mawr).

It doesn't make a lot of sense to say the WM ranking scheme is different (or better) than the US News ranking scheme if both can't produce enough discernment to separate an apple from a watermelon.

P.S.: I checked on the research spending question -- Caltech is ranked 58th -- but I wonder where it stands on a per-student basis.

My univ. has a relatively small medical research community (e.g. fewer faculty and students) so there is no way we ever compete on "total" research dollars. But we typically have the highest per faculty research funding. We'll never be the top school no matter how good we are dept. by dept. It's a good point to bring up.

I don't understand Kevin's metric. South Carolina State University is ranked #9 in the Washinton Monthly list but doesn't even show up in the USN&WR. Seems that this school has at least a delta of 109, much higher than the 63 of UCR.

"I'd guess the great leaps forward for UCR and UCD has to do with the incredible competitiveness at the UC system in general. The state has not built a new campus in several decades so currently getting into Berkeley or UCLA requires virtually straight A grades and phenomenal scores. That leaves some extremely talented high school students left to UCR and UCD. That obviously lifts the entire UC system. It also is a strong reason for the state to begin adding again to the UC system."

CA has a three tier system. The second tier, CA State U's, places like San Jose State, are perfectly good universities in their own right, just not world-class research centers.
To justify a new UC campus, you'd have to explain why it makes sense to expand the first tier system rather than the second tier system. It's not immediately obvious to me that that is optimal. The fact that every parent in CA thinks that their B- GPA teenager is a misunderstood genius who deserves to get into UC doesn't mean that CA (and the world) would be better off by diluting the pool of excellence in the UC campuses.

What about schools like mine (Utah State, **/48) who were unranked by USN&WR, but highly-ranked by TWP? Don't we get props?

All's I'm saying is that any ranking that puts MIT at #1 (2 years in row even!) sounds pretty good to me.

Kevin - if you include the liberal arts colleges as well, the real winner is Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, which went from 100th on the U.S. News rankings to 21st on the Washington Monthly rankings, for a delta of 79.

Beat that, UC-Riverside!

A quick look makes it seem like a legit survey, much to my surprise. Berkeley and Wisconsin both have a leftist flavor, but WM ranked them higher than USN did. I didn't see any real clunkers.

I'd guess the great leaps forward for UCR and UCD has to do with the incredible competitiveness at the UC system in general. The state has not built a new campus in several decades [...]

Wrong. UC Merced, the 10th campus in the UC system, opened in Sept. 2005.

But if you take a look at the methodology, it's clear that Caltech doesn't enroll enough students to score well on some of the indices, such as "total number of PhDs awarded in Science and Engineering" -- even though it is the best, or one of the two or three best, science and engineering PhD granting schools in the country.

Rating factors like that on total numbers rather than in proportion to the size of the student body is ridiculous.

I wonder if the US News and World Report or the Washington Monthly have heard about this new invention: moveable type. It allows for the easy and rapid dissemination of information by collecting it into cheap and easy collections called "books". One needn't be a favorite of a castle or bound to a monastic house to advance in learning anymore. From Ultima Thule to Little America, from Djakarta to Cadiz, if someone wants to learn, the same timely information can be obtained, quickly and easily. The learned essays of John Maynard Keynes or the sad whimsy of Calvino, the translations or originals of the poet Sappho, the mathematics of Ahmed ibn Yusuf or Munishvara, and the learned annotations and commentary attendant to each -- all of it available.

As a result, there's a phrase that describes the ranking of universities and colleges: the making of distinctions without a difference.

Hey, did you guys hear about the doctored Reuters photo?

Isn't that kind of interesting?

Kevin? Bueller?

But I wanted more. I wanted to add some value of my own. So I used the raw data from our report to create the "Striver Index," those schools that made the biggest jump from their U.S. News & World Report ranking to their Washington Monthly ranking.

There also ought to be a "Cavalier" index of the schools that made the biggest drop form US News to Washington Monthly rankings.

BTW: Doesn't Playboy or somebody have a Party School index? How does this tie in?

From my two years of grad study at Iowa State, I would guess the reason so many big midwest land-grant schools did so well on the Washington Monthly survey (all 10 public institutions in the Big Ten in the top 75, 10 of the Big XII's public colleges in the top 138 -- only Texas Tech is not listed) is that the culture of many of those colleges has been geared towards public service from their inception; indeed, many of them were born in the wake of the Merrill Act. Consequently, on the whole such colleges' communities place serving the public and country at a higher priority than state universities created elsewhere under different circumstances. (I received my undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, a relative newcomer among flagship universities with a hodgepodge history as an agricultural-military institution, with relatively little state support, that it's still trying to overcome.) I would guess the same culture applies to the University of California system, if not more so.

Perhaps the relative absence of southern institutions derives from the aristocratic culture in many of those states. Education was seen as the domain of a relatively few. I would think the destruction and weakened economy resulting from the Civil War further set back many southern universities. Then, many politicians made the colleges their playthings, focusing on everything but education (Huey Long seemed more preoccupied with Louisiana State University's football team and band than with its academics). Finally, of course, the race question certainly affected colleges in the south. To be sure, several states below the Mason-Dixon line now have solid university systems (Virginia, North Carolina, Texas), but many still languish.

Oopsie...that should be Morrill Act.

Kevin,

I think that one factor that probably should be considered in the ranking is doctors produced. Currently, the ranking notice science, engineering, and PhD's generally--it seems like MD's would be similar to science and engineering PhD's in social benefit. (This would help some of the liberal arts colleges, which put a high proportion of students into medical schools.)

Rating factors like that on total numbers rather than in proportion to the size of the student body is ridiculous.

If you are judging "overall impact", I can see how total large numbers are better. A place like Stanford has higher $$$/researcher, but publishes much less than a place like Harvard because of the size difference. Also, the larger size of Harvard means you can train more graduate students and post-docs which, I feel is also important. It may be arbitrary, but not ridiculous.

(BTW, I do not go to Harvard, the Stansbury of the East.)

[[Perhaps the relative absence of southern institutions derives from the aristocratic culture in many of those states. Education was seen as the domain of a relatively few.]]

That's the stereotype, yes.

In fact, North Carolina opened the nation's first public university, in 1793. The state's constitution has long mandated that university tuition be as close to free as is practicable. It's hardly free these days, but at the system's best campuses you still get a big bang for your buck.

I'm a bit puzzled by the drop of my alma mater, Davidson, relative to USN&WR, but imagine it has to do with the demographics. Still, the school committed to provide financial aid for every student who needed it back in my undergrad days (1978-82), and so far as I know, that policy remains in effect.

I probably shouldn't complain about the quality of free ice cream available on the web (as DeLong would say), but:

While I agree that the Washington Monthly rankings are an additional useful piece of information, one thing I don't really get a sense for is: how large is the variation in quality over the list? My current employer (Stanford) is WM University # 7; my grad school (UCSC) is # 68. Is Stanford a lot better than UCSC, or is the difference marginal? Without really knowing the methodology used to rank the schools I can't suggest how to make a ranking which really quantifies how much better one school is compared to another (I realize that US News doesn't give this information either).

Another factor you might consider is cost spread. As I say, Stanford is # 7, UCSC is # 68. On the other hand, Stanford is way more expensive than UCSC, so if the real quality variation from #7 to # 68 is low, you might be better off going to UCSC. Then again, Stanford may have more generous financial aid (or more stable -- UCSC, as a UC campus, has periodic fiscal crises which are much more severe than anything experienced at Stanford), or there may be other factors which change the net cost (many UCSC students live off campus and therefore have additional expenses over and above what you get at Stanford).

-PT

Washington University in St. Louis was ranked 11, not 120 by USN&WR. Also, it's located in Missouri, not Washington state.

Hell yeah! Nice to see some love for UCR! Go Highlanders!

Go Highlanders!

(good to see you here Vladi G)

If you can stand to live in Riverside, UCR is a great school...but it is a hell of a trade-off.

It's really not too bad around the campus, and they've done a ton of building in the last 10 years. It looks completely different now than it did when I graduated from UCR ('95). There's a full on mall/student center type area across the freeway, and the student rec center has had a fair amount of development around it. It lost a little bit of its charm, but that's a trade off I'd be willing to accept in exchange for cable TV in my dorm room (heck, there was no cable even on the TVs in the common rooms).

And really, you don't have to live in Riverside, and I'd venture to guess that 50% of the students don't. It's kind of a weird mix between a commuter school and a non-commuter school. And as someone who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, the heat and smog were really nothing I wasn't used to. The only difference was that the smog got there later in the day. Plus, it's an hour closer to Vegas.

I have to laugh at articles like this. The New Yorker has tiptoed toward the unspeakable in their last few articles about admissions, but even they haven't talked about the fundamental reality: after a brief flirtation with eglitariansim in the 1950s and 1960s, elite university admissions are once again being used as filters and marriage services for the upper class. That is one of the reason tuition keeps going up so fast: those who can pay, do. Those who get scholarships can attend, but they will never marry my daughter (unless they bring $1 billion bride price to the wedding). Those who can't pay, don't belong there.

All this ranking of "alternative" universities is great for kids wanting an _education_. But if they don't go to Harvard or Stanford, they ain't gettin' past middle manager no more. Middle-middle class parents know this, which is why they are so desperate to get their kids into the "best": the Gilded Age is returning, and those who go to the wall will die of starvation just as they did in the 1890s.

Cranky

Hi Lex!

Good to find a fellow Davidson alum.

Davidson was the school I had in mind in suggesting that medical doctors should count as equal to general PhD's at least. I think that almost 25% of my class (2001) went to medical school.

Hah! Texas beats USC once again! :P

Kevin:

As one earlier posted noted, your "striver" index makes no sense because it does not allow you to consider schools who may be unranked by US News, like Wyoming, but which make the top 100 in the Washington Monthly list. Having said that, as a former higher ed official, I also agree with those who find these lists ridiculous. A motivated student can get an excellent education at any remotely decent 4-year school and pursue a profitable career. These lists -- and Washington Monthly's is not radically different than US News -- simply feed or validate class anxiety that is a particularly noxious weed in America.

As long as data relating to the quality of the education isn't a metric, we'll be all right.

I think a lot of people are completely missing the point of the Washington Monthly's rankings. They're attempting to rank the colleges according to what they're doing for the nation as a whole, not the student as an individual. Comparing them to US News is like apples & oranges.

Patrick wrote - "I have long waited for a college ranking system that is even sillier and without reason or purpose than the US News and World Report Rankings. My long wait is over."

Silly, indeed. Everyone knows the sport rankings are the best gauge of quality!

As an added service Wash Monthly might consider best foreign schools, and perhaps rank them by accessibility to Americans, Cost and protection from a possible draft.

Its not exactly the best of time to be young in this country.

Now wait a minute. How can you put together a list of great colleges when you can't even pass Geography 101. You have WEST VIRGINIA Weslyan listed as being in Virginia. Hasn't been in that state since 1864.

How come you missed Shepherd University on the list. A great hidden treasure.

What Nittany Lion helped massage the algorithm? Third? Top 50, maybe. Top 10 is just absurd.

Penn State is #3? Wow, makes me think I shouldn't have wasted my money on some fancy school when I could've stayed in my home state and gone to a top 5 university. Had I gone to PSU I would've been smart enough to know this.

In an index of "value given", there are reasons that UCR deserves a high ranking (and why its "contribution" ranking is so much higher than its USNWR ranking.) [Bias alert: I'm professionally connected with UCR]

Just for the record: UC-Merced has opened, but has only about a 1000 students in a few classes, yet, and is not really fairly ratable. That'll take a few years. They've also been hit hard by an enrollment slowdown in the UC system (and by the big campuses intentionally over-enrolling for arcane technical budget reasons).

UCR, as some have noted, benefits because it gets very bright students who didn't quite make the UCB/UCLA/UCSD cut. It also deserves some 'upward mobility' credit: it is one of the (if not the) most diverse full-size public universities in the country, ethnically, economically, and according to most other criteria. A lot of students come from blue-collar and no-collar families, but a lot also from middle-class families. A lot of first-generation college-students, and a lot who aren't. It's graduate student profile is similar--diverse and non-traditional, especially compared to the Top-20 type graduate universities, (who themselves admit that they are becoming narrower and narrower in who they admit to their graduate programs).

No place is perfect, and UC in general, and UCR in particular, have their challenges. The system as a whole, like many public universities, is suffering from 15 years of progressive public defunding--and the poorer campuses, like UCR, have suffered the most. Moreover, UCR has more than doubled its enrollment since 1998. It's crowded, resources are tight and they're often oddly distributed -- but it's also growing, changing, and providing a lot to its students.

So thanks to Kevin. College ratings tend to be pretty silly -- and the USNWR ratings, at this point, have been so thoroughly 'gamed' by the second-tier schools that they are probably largely meaningless, but it's nice to get a little free publicity!

concerning service, which I think is a brilliant component, I agree with the other posters who ask why give so much credit to a blatently discriminatory organization (ROTC), and not others? Sure, the Peace Corps is nice and all, but what about Americorps, or the Lutheran Volunteer Corps? or Catholic Charities? I turned down the Peace Corps in favor of Americorps because I wanted to fix problems here first, but that, along with the (at my count) 18 other classmates of mine who joined service organizations don't count (out of 450, by the way). Sure, every other school has the same issues, and it won't change numbers much, but why must the only service that is credited be associated with the Federal Government? (yes, of course Americorps counts as a Federal program)

I wouldn't join a Federal agency of any sort coming out of school now because I certainly don't want to go abroad and imply that I support the actions of the US Government at this time. Instead, I will go abroad this fall with a private charity, contrary to the Peace Corps, I will make less money and pay my own airfare and housing. if I were 22 again, this wouldn't count towards my alma mater's ranking. Why the Federal Government bias?

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UC-Merced has opened, but has only about a 1000 students in a few classes...

Hey, but 1,000 students means its closing in on Caltech's size pretty rapidly. :)

UCR, as some have noted, benefits because it gets very bright students who didn't quite make the UCB/UCLA/UCSD cut.

As someone who, as a transfer student, was accepted at UCB and UCLA, but instead went to UC Davis (my first choice school), I think its ludicrous to say that any UC is strong simply because it gets cast offs from UCB, UCLA, and UCSD.

I have to be pretty suspicious of any methodology that would rank MIT number 1 and Caltech 109.

As someone who has lived right by downtown Riverside, the area around the campus is quite nice. The one thing it seems to lack is enough amenities for a sizable student populace. It's not Santa Barbara, but in terms of other locations in the Inland Empire, it's easily the best of an average lot.

Maynard Handley: they have been expanding the CSU system in California for some time--San Marcos, and Channel Islands since about 1995. I can't think of a better place to put the 9th UC school than in the Valley.

Doctors are glorified auto mechanics. Sure your pediatrician is a good and your ACL reconstruction went well but how does this help 'the nation.' It doesn't.

These rankings are a joke. Giving equal ranking to all statistical measures? Counting the number of PhDs instead of the Percentage? Counting the Peace Corps?

Look, I get that you don't like USNews. But Emory 96? Go spend a week in classes in about 70% of the schools you ranked ahead of them and then compare the academic environment, the work requirements, the quality of the professors, etc. Emory is a great school. A lot of the ones you have ranked ahead (U of San Fran! Hahahahahaha) aren't.

If you want to develop a new ranking system, it has to pass the laugh test. Otherwise it's more useless than USNews. At least USNews is an indication of what people think are good schools. Your ranking is an indication of what you WANT to be good schools.

Speaking as someone who has a BS in Civil Engineering from UC Davis and a Masters in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M, I have to say that was I surprised but very happy to see the following in Washington Monthly:

Texas A&M -- # 5
UC Davis -- # 10

And while it may not mean that much,
I'm still loving every minute of it!

PS: Gig 'Em Aggies!

Good thing these rankings have no crediblity whatsoever.

California Institute of Technology....ranked #109....one spot behind Mississippi State University.

Mississippi fucking State University.

CIT, which actively works with NASA's JPL ...and has a middle 50% SAT as 1470-1580....vs. MSU, which is based in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) and has an equivalent middle 50% SAT as 844-1200.

Did you read that: 1470-1580 vs 844-1200 (middle 50% SAT scores).

The most brilliant of college students vs. the not-so-brilliant college students.

And I'm from Arkansas.

Please shoot yourselves for creating this awful joke.

At least USNews is an indication of what people think are good schools. Your ranking is an indication of what you WANT to be good schools.

Look, I get that you don't like USNews. But Emory 96? Go spend a week in classes in about 70% of the schools you ranked ahead of them and then compare the http://www.ggjh.info/sitemap.htm academic environment, the work requirements, the quality of the professors, etc. Emory is a great school. A lot of the ones you have ranked ahead (U of San Fran! Hahahahahaha) aren't.

This is obviously another flawed ranking - as none of my favorite schools were number one.

Apologies to cmdicely, who said: "As someone who, as a transfer student, was accepted at UCB and UCLA, but instead went to UC Davis (my first choice school), I think its ludicrous to say that any UC is strong simply because it gets cast offs from UCB, UCLA, and UCSD.?"

Quite right! I didn't express myself well, though I certainly didn't either say or mean to imply anyone was a "cast-off". After all, the criteria that very selective colleges use (1) tend to overweight class and family residence location and income, rather than academic and social contributions, and (2) are ultimately fairly arbitrary: the students who are not selected are just as promising, or more so, than those who are admitted: they're all good, and it's basically a (loaded) crap-shoot. [See recent discussions in Atlarpers and also in Harvard Magazine that, in my view, basically acknowledge this.]

The consequence is that "the cut" at places like UCLA/UCB/UCSD, while more _restrictive_ than those at other UCs, have not been shown to be more effective at identifying potential. I didn't say, and didn't mean to imply, what cmdicely read out of the message.

I noticed the, once again, that all the service academies are missing from the rankings. Obviously you can't get a good education at places like West Point, Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy. (Should get credit for a 100% ROTC equivalent!)

Wow, Kevin Drum, the first time I saw this ranking I thought it qualified as embarassing, possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen in this website.

And now you've done it again. You're absolutely shameless.

According to your ranking, South Carolina State University is a better school than Yale.

Now here's the question: Would you actually send your kid to SC State instead of Yale? If he asked for your advice, would you tell him, "go South young man?"

Having lived in South Carolina, let me tell you the answer: no.

I can't believe someone as smart as you would be seen publishing this garbage.

A competent 4th grader could do better. Reading this makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

> simply feed or validate class anxiety
> that is a particularly noxious weed in
> America.

Scott,
I understand your point from a societal point of view, but the problem for kids and parents comes down to this question: are we moving toward a 100% winner-take-all society (as I believe we are)? If so, then the families face a fairly severe prisoners' dilemma situation. If their kids goes to a non-elite school and gets a good education, but the political economy is set to allow only the graduates of the perceived elite universities into the ruling class, then those families that fought to get their kids in with the elite win. While the well-educated go to the wall and starve to death.

Cranky

Penn State is a solid middle tier University with a few very strong programs and people. It also has a president Graham Spanier whose boosterism is so unabashed that he could have been conceived and created by Sinclair Lewis. He is not above fiddling with the facts to make both Penn State and himself look good. He’d say he was protecting the brand. Therefore the suggestion made above that a Penn Stater may have hacked the algorithm used in the rankings, while clearly tongue-in-cheek, is not entirely without merit. My guess would be that there was some rather high level lobbying from Penn Staters to construct a ranking on which it would come out well. That is the Penn State Way.

The one aspect of the algorithm which jumps out at me as having been altered as a result of Penn State lobbying is the use of total research expenditures. The reason this is suspect is that it is a number that Penn State has long touted as an indicator of its research prowess. Very few other schools publicize this number the way Penn State does. The reason that other school don’t pull out the megaphone when the NSF announces its most recent numbers is likely because research expenditures is an input measure and therefore it is a lousy indicator of output, i.e. the quality or the impact of the research. The likely reason that Penn State does reach for the megaphone is that on other metrics of research performance it does not compare well with well regarded schools. However, on this measure it keeps some very good company. In 2002 it ranked 12th in the nation one right behind Minnesota and ahead of Berkeley. In fact, it even ranked ahead of MIT on this measure.

To give some credence to my claim that Boosterism with its attendant intellectual dishonesty is the Penn State Way consider the following. In 2004 Graham Spanier contracted with a Pittsburgh based consulting firm Tripp-Umbach to undertake a study of Penn States economic impact on the Commonwealth. Despite the fact that Penn State paid for the study Spanier and his undelings continually referred to it as an “independent” study. Here is what Eva Pell, senior vice-president for research and Dean of the graduate school wrote in her 2004 annual report on research, “An independent report released last fall identified Penn State as the
single largest generator of economic impact in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,…”
” The entire Tripp-Umbach report was little more than a well coordinated spinfest. When the study was complete Spanier called a press conference to announce it finding that Penn State contributed $6.9 billion each year to the state’s economy. According to the Daily Collegian ,the student newspaper, Spanier made the following remark at the news conference,

"I was somewhat surprised to see the huge economic impact of the university in relation to other areas," he said. "To know that Penn State's impact is equivalent to all of those combined, and then some, is impressive."

The study itself was glossy and made to look “scientific” with a methodology section. However the section did not actually give sufficient information to judge the quality of the study. According to the report, “The methodology employed in the calculation of these impacts is derived from the standard set of impact research tools developed by the American Council on Education (ACE) for the measurement of college and university economic impact.” Now presumably one could look up the methodology developed by ACE, but Tripp-Umbach didn’t actually use their methodology. They used one which was derived from that methodology and there is no way of knowing how it was modified by Tripp-Umbach.

Tripp-Umbach has a record of issuing reports which help the agenda of those who have hired them. Recently they conducted a study of the potential economic impact of a medical school for Florida International University which found, according to the Miami Herald, that

[A] new medical school in Miami-Dade County would directly create at least 2,448 new jobs in the next 10 years -- and more after that.

The Herald contacted two experts in the field to assess the Tripp-Umbach study. Here is what they reported,

''A big chunk of the benefits they're projecting would come from spin-offs,'' said Joseph Cortright, an economist who co-authored a 2002 biotechnology industry study for the Brookings Institution. He read a copy of the FIU study sent by The Miami Herald.
Cortright said that while there are nine areas in the country that have enough biotech industry to support the added businesses, South Florida is not among them. ''As this industry has grown, it has grown most and fastest at those places where it is already established,'' he said.
Christopher Thornberg, senior economist with the University of California Los Angeles Anderson Forecast, said ''economic impact studies are nonsense.'' He did not review FIU’s study.

I could go on documenting this sort of intellectual dishonesty, but I believe my point has been made. In my mind there is every reason to believe that the Washington Monthly’s rankings were constructed with desired results in mind and I would not be the least bit surprised if Penn State had either a direct or indirect role in the construction.

1. Good thing these rankings have no crediblity whatsoever.

California Institute of Technology....ranked #109....one spot behind Mississippi State University.

2. According to your ranking, South Carolina State University is a better school than Yale.

I don't think either of the above people got the point. The Washington Monthly looks at how much of a public service aspect these colleges have, and how much they are contributing to the communities they serve.

Certainly in terms of resources and curricula, S.C. State and Miss. State aren't in the same league with Cal Tech and Yale, but as public colleges serving defined constituencies (and S.C. State is a historically black institution; you may recall that in 1970, several people died there during campus disturbances, several weeks after the far more publicized Kent State incident), they have far different aspirations than elite private universities. They aid social mobility, just as schools like CCNY/CUNY and Long Island University (the latter a private college in Brooklyn) have done for generations of New Yorkers -- including my father.

College rankings are pure B.S. Have you EVER been to College Station? An what comes after UC Merced? Maybe UC Oildale?

What about Berkeley?

"Cornell - The People's Ivy League"
Agree!

CIT, which actively works with NASA's JPL ...and has a middle 50% SAT as 1470-1580....vs. MSU, which is based in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) and has an equivalent middle 50% SAT as 844-1200.

Caltech really ought to be referred to as "Caltech" if you don't want to write out the full name, not "CIT". And Caltech doesn't "work with NASA's JPL, it manages JPL for NASA.

But, yeah, the ratings are weird. They may make sense from some perspective of "total social value without regard to size, population, or public cost incurred for the social benefit produced", but ratings of that seem to have no use whatsoever.

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