Michigan ranked #21 in new USNews Rankings, highest all-time
The title says it all. The 2023-24 US News national universities rankings came out this week, and Michigan reached its highest point yet at #21, 3rd among public universities.
Educators have taken issue with these rankings, and some universities have stopped participating altogether, but they remain the gold standard in their space and it's pretty nice to see the stature of UM growing.
For context, Notre Dame is at 20 and Georgetown is 22, while UVA is the next public school at 24 - not bad company at all.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_mo…
September 20th, 2023 at 8:56 PM ^
Just giving you a hard time brother *slaps back so hard you choke on your drink*
September 21st, 2023 at 6:40 AM ^
Shades of Peter Drucker, arguably the greatest management consultant of all time.
September 21st, 2023 at 9:40 AM ^
Shades of coma splicing.
September 20th, 2023 at 8:54 PM ^
Michigan is 28th in the WSJ ranking for anyone keeping score
September 20th, 2023 at 9:24 PM ^
I mean no disrespect to the august authors at WSJ, but what the fuck are rankings that somehow include Lake Forest College and Illinois Institute of Technology above Michigan, Northwestern, etc.
Oh, and here's the top 20. Feel free to read their methodology if you want but the gist seems to be that if they think you help people graduate and make money after college, you're a good school. They seemingly don't really explain how two schools that were ranked in the top 20 last year (Brown and Johns Hopkins) are not outside the top 50, but again I'm sure the super-smart people who write for the WSJ totally paid attention in their analysis and didn't find it weird that those two schools suddenly had terrible graduation rates (which they don't) or poor graduate salaries (they don't).
September 20th, 2023 at 9:56 PM ^
Is Florida a good school? I don't pay too close attention to these types of lists, but I don't recall UF showing up on them much when I have looked.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:01 PM ^
I think UF is actually a strong academic school. Probably #2 in the SEC consistently.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:33 PM ^
Vandy is obviously #1, but I would have guessed Texas A&M, Missouri, UGA, or Texas(Almost SEC) before Florida. Good to know, thanks for the response.
September 21st, 2023 at 10:05 AM ^
I think Florida is considerably better than the other schools you mentioned. Its actually a very very good public university
September 20th, 2023 at 10:17 PM ^
They're another one who tried to game this system. Especially the law school if I recall.
September 21st, 2023 at 12:06 PM ^
It's a solid school but they're sort of a classic example of a school that sort of "games" these rankings. Like, a lot of the global college rankings list UF in the MSU tier of schools; solid state schools but nothing spectacular. For example, Times Higher Education has them in the 150s (UM is 23rd, MSU is 106th), and QS has them at 106th and while UM is 33rd and MSU is 136th.
I read an article about something similar happening with University of Alabama, which basically spent a bunch of money to attract higher-achieving kids from out-of-state (which raised their freshmen profile) but their graduation rates and retention aren't great because some of those kids leave even with the financial support (they transfer to a better school once they've gotten through some courses) or simply don't do great when actually in college.
Florida is better than they used to be but I do think it being considered a top-5 public school is more an example of wonky metrics and analytics than some massive academic improvement.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:05 PM ^
We would so beat the piss out of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Even on the road.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:20 PM ^
LOL. Well deserved disrespect. There are some really obscure schools listed here.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:33 PM ^
Damn it. First we lost to NJIT by 2, now we are losing to them by 7?!?
September 20th, 2023 at 10:53 PM ^
Lake Forest is ranked higher than Wake Forest. Weird!
September 21st, 2023 at 12:04 AM ^
BYU?! Jesus. I mean John.
September 21st, 2023 at 12:39 AM ^
All these rankings are horseshit that can be gamed. For example, the WSJ rankings above. For the first few years that they were out my alma mater Williams College was #1, but now its #31. I'm sure not a damn thing has changed at the school itself to justify this change. What really matters if you want to get an idea of the quality of the school is look at what employers recruit at the school and look at the law schools and med schools the school places its graduates. Every year the top 10 US News rankings shuffle around when probably nothing changed at those schools to justify the shuffling other than the need to sell subscriptions to the mag.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:47 PM ^
Lake Forest is number one in my Best Hologram Gallery Rankings.
September 21st, 2023 at 11:44 PM ^
Fuck USC. Okay, I feel better.
September 20th, 2023 at 8:55 PM ^
When I first glanced at this title I thought this was a football ranking and was briefly wondering how Michigan was ranked as low as 21 and how they had never been ranked higher.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:08 PM ^
My superhero name is DropBearManBear
September 20th, 2023 at 9:40 PM ^
ManBearPig is mine, I’m super cereal
September 20th, 2023 at 9:10 PM ^
They may be mostly BS, but they are the rankings that make the most sense to me.
Not like the recent WSJ list, which had Florida as the top public school.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:39 PM ^
I also saw the WSJ list. FIU is one spot behind Michigan and thus the 4th or 5th highest raking public university on their list, with UF in there at #1. I'm not It saying those are bad schools, but I live in Florida and interact with many grads from UF and FIU, and they are not the same as those who come out of Michigan and Georgia Tech, for example.
I think WSJ must be doing a lot of work with that "...compared to similar schools..." ranking.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:48 PM ^
That's sort oh how they do it though, make sure the Ivies and a handful of other well known elite schools are at the top and it gets buy-in from the general public who then won't think too deeply about the reality of the rankings.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:53 PM ^
WSJ has a clientele they service. Follow the money.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:33 PM ^
Always baffling to see ND rated so highly. I'm not saying it's a bad school. I'm sure it's a quality one. But I've lived in several cities, where (for better and worse!) I've been surrounded by highly competitive HS students/college applicants. None of the high-achieving students apply to ND; I've never heard these kids even mention it in the same breathe with all the other elite schools, including the top 5 or so public universities. They'll apply to Boston College before ND. And I don't know many academics who consider ND to be an elite school. It's weird.
September 21st, 2023 at 9:01 AM ^
I feel the same way re Southern Cal. I'm trying to go back and retrace when it morphed from a safety school for privileged kids to some esteemed, borderline cream-of-the-crop-type place. That it was a T25 school for so many years kind of dinged USNWR's credibility with me (and I think generally they do a decent job with this - in the minority there, I know).
Anyway, looks like they rightly gave our fellow publics much more equitability this year. Glad to see Maryland in particular finally getting into the T50. And they're still woefully underranked, IMO.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:36 PM ^
Talk about burying the lede, RUTGERS is up to #40! 🤯
The criteria were adjusted and many large, public universities improved significantly. Little Brother is up to #60, same as UC Merced (which really makes me question these rankings. UC Merced 16 spots higher than UC Riverside?!? Come on, man!)
My theory is that UCLA, USC, and Washington were brought into the Big Ten because the presidents couldn’t fathom Rutgers being 4th best in the conference.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:37 PM ^
This will be an unpopular opinion but as far as quality of education I do think Michigan is massively overrated in undergraduate rankings. As an alum I will say that if you just take the best classes you can find in your major due to the size of the classes and/or the quality of the professor or GA the quality of instruction on average just isn't that great, especially in engineering school.
From an extracurricular stand point and the opportunities you can find while you're on campus the school is world class. I'm just not sure the quality of the instruction is taken into account in these rankings.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:44 PM ^
Disagree. The Michigan Engineering education, at least in my experience, produced a fundamental understanding of literally every physical concept I encounter in the field. The rest can be learned at work, but the deep knowledge of fundamentals can not. Michigan forced that into my brain, and I have passed many people educated differently than me over the years en route to a lucrative boss-level position. It could be just me, but I doubt it.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:40 PM ^
Half my classes were taught by GA's and the ones that weren't were largely massive classes where the professor was much more interested in consulting or researching than teaching kids. Not that the content wasn't world class nor the labs and resources, I was just massively disappointed by the quality of the instruction.
And, of course, you mentioned nothing about the quality of the instruction in your counterargument.
September 20th, 2023 at 11:06 PM ^
Your first sentence could be made about many Engineering schools. I suspect you and I would be disappointed at the quality of education at numerous schools, but I only went to one, making comparisons difficult. I admit it was eye opening for me, too, when I went from high school (small, instructor-led, daily classes) to UofM (large - 100 students on average - mixture of professors and TAs, 2 lectures per week, 1 discussion session). But the professors are some of the world’s experts in their fields. They have to focus on research or risk not getting tenure. The best teacher I had at UofM didn’t get tenure and I thought that was terribly unfair. That’s probably the main reason I didn’t go into academia. But there is no denying their intelligence. It is up to the student to make use of office hours and maximize their learning opportunities. The TAs and GAs come from a pool of top students. They were also conducting research at the frontiers of knowledge. But it is up to the undergraduate to reach out, make the connections and benefit from the opportunities.
A friend of mine got his Ph.D. at UofM and started teaching at an SEC school. He said the quality of student was exceptionally poor. He spent most of his time correcting their mistakes. Eventually, he ended up at MSU and is doing very well. I know another UofM EE Ph.D. who ended up at MSU and is in a leadership position there. Another friend I went to UofM with is currently President of one of the IEEE societies. I was taught optics at UofM by a Nobel Laureate. Another professor was known as the Father of Holography. Another worked on the design of the Stealth Bomber.
My company has outreach to a half a dozen engineering schools across the country. One of them is UofM. As a result, I know and work with several UofM graduates. They are every bit as good as their counterparts from UCLA, UC Berkeley, Illinois and MIT. In fact, I find the MIT grads to be substandard, relatively speaking. They tend to rest on their school’s reputation, but don’t really contribute much.
September 21st, 2023 at 12:22 AM ^
The distribution of student quality at a school matters a great deal. It dictates the level of material that can be successfully taught. There's no comparison between the difficulty of the material I encountered as an undergrad engineer at Michigan to what I think I can cover at an average private liberal arts college. Those kids would be discouraged in a hurry ... better for me to give them skills that will help them do programming locally rather than fail to prepare them for Oracle or Google.
Yes, the undergrad teaching quality at any large university is going to be shaky. Outside of the Ivies, star teachers who do a lot of undergrad work seem to be few and far between.
September 20th, 2023 at 11:11 PM ^
I don't think ratemyprofessor.com is used in the USN&W report rankings. Not saying whether it should or shouldn't but I just don't think quality of lecturers or course syllabi are ever factored into rankings like this or honestly what universities really care about. So it doesn't surprise me if you walked away feeling like the class instruction sucked, but I don't think that means Michigan is overrated, you just would personally use other factors for rankings.
Also, FWIW, when I read Brad's reply, I very much took away that he was crediting UM's classroom instruction for his education.
September 20th, 2023 at 9:46 PM ^
James Earl Jones said we are the best university in the world. So......
September 20th, 2023 at 9:48 PM ^
Glad to see my second alma mater recover from the tragic academic scandal that plagued their athletic program to come in 22nd.
/s
September 20th, 2023 at 10:19 PM ^
All the public schools went up
September 20th, 2023 at 10:29 PM ^
I haven't really followed the US News college rankings since my daughters were applying to college many years ago. (Brief aside: They made me as proud as I could be when they were accepted and broke my heart when they each opted for small liberal arts schools -- but one daughter redeemed herself with a two-year post-doc fellowship in UM's Digital Studies Institute.)
Back then, something like 25% of the US News formula was something, if I recall correctly, called Academic Reputation. It was based on a survey of academics around the country. Michigan always did exceedingly well in that category, much better than its typical overall No. 25 ranking, but was brought down by factors that shouldn't matter like alumni donations and acceptance rates.
I thought that Academic Reputation was the most important category, maybe the only important category if you cared about what your degree would mean in terms of graduate and professional applications.
I don't know if the rankings still work the same, but we know Michigan's academic reputation is still tops.
September 20th, 2023 at 10:45 PM ^
What distinguishes Michigan from all the other top institutions is the breadth of their excellence. The rankings don’t capture that.
September 20th, 2023 at 11:51 PM ^
US News and World Report school rankings are not the gold standard. They are the McDonald's of school rankings.
Gold standard is The Times Higher Education World University Rankings or the QS World University Rankings.
These rankings take into account academic reputation, publications, references to publications, salary after graduation, etc. -- not all the tripe that is in the US News rankings.
In THE -- out of all universities in the world -- Michigan is 23, Notre Dame is 201, Georgetown is 136, UVA is 156.
Around Michigan are:
20, Cornell
21, UCLA
22, UCL (University College London)
23, Michigan
24, NYU
25, Duke
The top 10:
Oxford
Harvard
Cambridge
Stanford
MIT
Caltech
Princeton
Berkeley
Yale
Imperial College London
September 21st, 2023 at 12:00 AM ^
This isn’t Michigan’s highest ranking all-time. U-M ranked 7th in 1983, the first year of the U.S. News rankings. (And 17th in 1990.)
September 21st, 2023 at 12:26 AM ^
Any academic ranking that ranks ND above Michigan needs to rethink its methodology. USNWR underranks the public elites.
September 21st, 2023 at 1:02 AM ^
There is also a massive difference in student quality at UM based on whether you’re in-state or out-of-state. In-state acceptance rates are still around 40%, so your slightly above average moron nephew from Port Huron is still able to get in. Out-of-state acceptance rates, on the other hand, are around 10% or lower, putting it on par with the very best schools in the country.
September 21st, 2023 at 1:10 AM ^
Not false, but is that a negative?
I'm no longer a Michigan tax-payer, but I am a native.
And IMO the University of Michigan's mission 100% should be more tilted toward educating 2nd-tier students who are actually from the state, versus educating 1st-tier students who are from the Northeast and Chicago.
If that costs U-M a few points in UNSWR (an otherwise irrelevant magazine)'s University measurement competition, such is.
September 21st, 2023 at 7:54 AM ^
From the university:
"In 1960, state support accounted for 78 percent of the UM-Ann Arbor General Fund budget. It has dropped to 13% of the General Fund budget in 2023. U-M experienced significant baseline declines in state support in fiscal years 2004-2006, and again in fiscal years 2010 and 2011."
I'm not sure what it takes to be a 'public' school, but Michigan's future has become one of tuition/endowment/research funding (not that the 13% hurts, mind you), so it seems reasonable that the migrated from servicing in-state students to finding a balance between higher income out-of-state kids and the local kids. It looks like, all other things being equal, they do favor in-state applicants.
September 21st, 2023 at 11:18 AM ^
I don’t disagree that, as a public university, UM should cater more to students from the state. But it definitely affects the rankings and the quality of the student population when compared to a Berkeley or UCLA where it’s super hard to get in even for in-state students.
September 21st, 2023 at 1:28 AM ^
That 40% is of applicants. My guess is that the average IQ of Michigan applicants isn't the same as average IQ of overall population. Your slightly above-average moron nephew might not get in after all.
September 21st, 2023 at 1:34 AM ^
I know most folks are talking about U-M, but on a tangent and at the risk of getting a bit political .......... it bothers me how these rankings tend to propagate the idea of "pedigree, pedigree, pedigree" among particular private schools.
Let's take US Supreme Court Justices. There have been 116 of them.
Eight of the 9 current Justices graduated from one of 2 law schools (Harvard & Yale). 89% of our current Justices have graduated from one of 2 schools!
And then the 4 most recent Justices to leave the Court. 3 (Breyer, Kennedy, Scalia) of them also graduated from those same 2 schools. And the 4th (Ginsburg) attended Harvard before leaving for Columbia (because of a sexist Harvard law dean), and graduating from there.
Is this really good for us in the long-run? Nearly everybody, in a country of 330MM and a couple hundred law schools, all coming from the same 2 places? I get it, those are top schools. But pedigree is not always a good proxy for quality.