WolvWild

October 7th, 2015 at 9:46 AM ^

Just from looking at the list of criteria, a few things jump out:

 

- How is Global/Regional research reputation computed?  Is that basically just one of those peer institutional rankings?  Is regional just within the United States?  

- Are the number of conferences a University holds really relevant to its quality as an institution of higher learning?

- I see a huge % basically tied into # of citations, but I imagine a lot of that has to do with the material concerned in said citations.  I imagine certain fields of study, such as medical research, are cited far more often than others, meaning just counting the number of times a University is cited is incredibly simplistic.  What if Michigan has several excellent fields of study where the frequency of citations would be expected to be low?

- The one I think I see the biggest problem with is # of PhDs awarded.  Is Michigan supposed to behave like the UCF of PhDs here, and just give away as many as possible?  PhDs are supposed to be difficult to obtain, and rewarding institutions for giving out more is certainly not proving that one is better than the other.  I am sure many lower-tier schools have higher graduation rates than Michigan, but that is not telling at all (I believe US News includes grad rates in its undergrad rankings as well, another faulty measure).

Joined: 11/12/2013

MGoPoints: 486

VAGenius

October 7th, 2015 at 2:43 PM ^

This new measure as to what's "best" kind-of irritates me.

Michigan used to be considered a great school because it was so easy to NOT graduate. Large numbers of incoming students would fail out and/or transfer elsewhere... either because it was too hard or because they couldn't figure out how to manage themselves in the unstructured environment (i.e. too much partying, not enough studying).

I graduated in 1990 and we figured out that of the 60 guys who were on our "Honors" hall in Mary Markley in 1986, over 25 of them had failed out and/or transferred... quite a few of them being friends of mine who went on to success at other schools.

Personally, I loved this part of the Michigan experience. It was a Darwinian but I felt it prepared you well for the "real world" - you're on your own kid, figure it out - sink or swim. It was one of the big things my Mom stressed to me when I went off to school - as it had been that way when she went in the 1960's. She used to remind various Ivy-league parents that Michigan might be easier to get in, but it was a lot harder to get out.

Now that these college rankings "ding" the school for such behavior so the school has clearly been managing the trend upwards. The four year graduation rate quoted in that US World article is 76%.... it was 69% in 1999 (the oldest data I can find in a quick Google search) and I'm pretty sure it was lower before that.

I suppose the other thing driving this is the absurd cost of tuititon nowadays - people probably deserve to get there money's worth and it's a pretty expensive "lesson" if you fail out.... but I still like thinking of Michigan as a place where it was hard to graduate - and I have to have some suspicion that standards get lowered somewhere along the way to help drive higher rates and keep the "business model" of high tuition in place.

Anyway, that's my "old guy" rant for the day.

Joined: 10/26/2009

MGoPoints: 926

cheesheadwolverine

October 7th, 2015 at 11:10 AM ^

I think the tl;dr answer is that it's esentially a ranking of world universities by research quality.  ND doesn't try to be the equal of a Michigan or a Northwesten in that area, it's more focused (for better or for worse) on undergraduate education.  Well undergraduate education and unjustified arrogance.

Joined: 10/25/2008

MGoPoints: 7482

Tuebor

October 7th, 2015 at 10:08 AM ^

You really can't go wrong with any B1G school, with the possible exception of Nebraska.  Obviously UM and Northwestern are the class of the conference but there are many that aren't too far behind.

Joined: 03/14/2011

MGoPoints: 17467

Esterhaus

October 7th, 2015 at 10:17 AM ^

 

In the party school rankings surely boosted our UNWR rank. The evaluators visited A^2 on the right weekend and, poof, "princeton can use a guy like Joel."

Joined: 03/16/2015

MGoPoints: 7733

RationalBuckeye

October 7th, 2015 at 2:46 PM ^

I think any list that weights various research measures as heavily as this one does is going to be favorable to a school like Ohio State. Not regarded as a premier institution for undergraduate prestige, but the sheer size and resources of the entire entity make it a pretty good producer of research and innovation.

Joined: 04/06/2012

MGoPoints: 3237

FrankMurphy

October 7th, 2015 at 5:08 PM ^

The methodology doesn't seem to adequately account for factors like size and selectiveness, which is a critical flaw. That's probably how Stanford, Princeton, and Yale ended up ranked below UC-Berkeley, despite having significantly better pedigree. Princeton's ranking in particular seems to be way out of whack considering that its undergraduate reputation is up there with the likes of Harvard and MIT.

Joined: 08/19/2008

MGoPoints: 31920

FrankMurphy

October 7th, 2015 at 5:01 PM ^

UC-Berkeley is the most grossly overrated university in the world. There is absolutely no way Berkeley is better than Stanford, Cal Tech, Columbia, Princeton, or Yale in anything except maybe engineering (and even in engineering, Stanford and Cal Tech are better). Berkeley isn't even the best school in its own region. I really don't get how it consistently manages to do so well in these kinds of rankings.

Joined: 08/19/2008

MGoPoints: 31920