Slashdot Mirror
Top University Rankings for 2004 Released
jemecki writes "US News and World Report has posted their annual rankings for the top colleges and universities in America. Of particular interest to Slashdotters are the top Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering universities and the top overall engineering schools. For those that don't want to RTFA, Harvard and Princeton are the best in the country, and MIT, Stanford and Berkeley are the best in Engineering."
I can only see 3 schools listed. Why post the article if we have to pay to see more than 3 schools in the list?
Am I missing something?
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Just want to remind everyone that a lot of the rankings are quite subjective: "The rankings are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program they are familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished)."
Personally, I'm more interested in which universities have good industry and job opportunities surrounding them, since my first job after getting a degree will likely be close to wherever I graduate from.
I agree. However remember that in-state undergrads at Berkeley pay only about $6k/year for tuition as opposed to $30k...
:)
but it's not for everyone
Recently, I served on a committee for our college that did some strategic planning. You know... the whole "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats" deal.
Anyway, one of the ideas that someone brought up was the notion of trying to influence our ranking in the U.S. News annual report. So we looked into how the rankings are done.
As I recall, it turned out that the main factor in the rankings of universities as a whole was the peer assessment (other deans of universities and colleges). To this end, all of the institutions who put a priority on being near the top of the list make sure to send out promo material to everyone that U.S. News queries... ideally a few weeks before U.S. News sends out the queries, so that the promo material is still fresh in the mind of the voters.
For either the overall rankings or the rankings of the individual programs (like engineering, business, etc), there were some other very interesting quantitative measures that came into play. One of them was something like the percentage of classes with fewer than, say, 21 students (which increase a school's score) and another was the percentage of classes with more than about 35 students (which lower a school's score).
One insteresting suggestion someone on the committee made was, if we had any classes with a maximum class size of 21 or 22, lower it to 20. Only one or two students have to wait until next quarter for the class, and the college gets a discreet jump in its score. Same goes for lowering classes with a max of 35 or 36 to 34. Every little bit helps.
Anyway, the long and short of the story is that... there are a lot of clever people who make it their business to juice the scores that their school gets. If a school isn't very high on the list, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad school. It might just mean that they haven't found out how the ranking game is really played. (Kinda like an athlete who doesn't realize that everyone else is using steroids yet).
In general, the best and brightest faculty in a given field are going to be primarily interested in their research. Graduate students are vital, and substantial, part of most research programs. Thus, the leaders in a field are more likely to go to an institution where they can supervise a cadre of grad students.
(Yes, there are exceptions; some brilliant professors are happy to concentrate on teaching rather than research. You'll find good examples at the institutions at the top of the list. I am speaking in general.)
These things are such a scam. Everyone should read this article.
Guess what: higher ed is expensive. I work at a very expensive private college. Assuming that you were to pay full freight for everything (few do), you would pay $11k/year less than it actually cost us to provide you the classes, services, room+board, etc.
So how do we do it? Volume! No, really we make it up by grants, donations and endowment income. The latter has been in the tank over the past few years, the former has been a lot tighter as well as all those insta-zillionaires watched their stock profits vaporize.
Cuts? Sure. My department's budget is down 25%, we're running 20% low on staff. We're under hiring freeze, we're putting off needed renovations (Library+leaky roof = bad news) we've stopped replacing computers in labs, we have cut adjunct profs and reduced the courses taught, etc, etc. And guess what: the budget still doesn't balance. We're eating our endowment to stay alive until the good times return. (And that's with the amazingly lower salaries in higher ed: you think you can get a PhD with 20 years of experience for $80k/year in industry? Our president makes a whopping $165k: a CEO of a similar sized corporation would clear a million easy.)
We're one of the lucky ones. We've got enough endowment to survive for quite a bit longer without layoffs. We even got a small raise this year.
But overpriced? No way: it just costs a hell of a lot to run a college.