What are they doing to shoot up the US News & World Report Rankings? Maybe I am being harsh on these schools, but I always viewed these schols as a place you could pay for an education, in case you could not get into a real school and wanted to save face by not going to TCEH or Southwest. I realize A&M is going to have some issues in these rankings by expanding enrollment, but it is kind of a shock seeing SMU pass us and having Baylor and TCU right on our heels?

These rankings depend on the metrics that USNWR decides are important indicators of academic excellence. Therefore, from the start you have to keep this in mind. The metrics they use may or may not be favorable to A&M (as you mentioned Acceptance Rates may be one of them). I don't know all of the metrics they use or pay attention to USNWR for two reasons:

1. If I want to go to graduate school somewhere, the last thing I would ever do is look up the USNWR rankings. No student wanting a doctorate would ever look at the USNWR grad school rankings and base their decision off them. These students will be more concerned about the specific fields of research that the school offers, and they will also be extremely concerned about possible faculty advisors. Also, if you are wanting to go towards graduate education, you should be looking for advice from your own Professors and not an online ranking service that has known issues with corruption (falsified self reported SAT scores, avg class ranks, acceptance rates, etc.) This thinking also applies for a masters. I would trust A&M faculty opinions way more than those of statisticians crunching numbers with metrics that may be absolutely meaningless to me.

2. If I don't want to go to graduate school, then I am going to be most concerned about my chances of achieving full time employment with a reputable company after I graduate. I also want to know if the school I am considering has a Department of Science/Engineering/Business that will provide me the education necessary to reach this goal. Some people care about student to faculty ratios and other metrics that may assess the quality of education you received, but for me these things are not as meaningful as the employment prospects I will have when I graduate. For my case, I know A&M provides a quality engineering education, and the school also provides extensive opportunities to find employment with top notch companies through career fairs and the career center. For my case, SMU being ranked higher than A&M means absolutely nothing because their engineering program is extremely young and is not even in the same league as A&M.

TL;DR version: I would be cautious about using USNWR rankings as the ultimate authority on University prestige. I would also warn prospective students to be cautious about basing their decisions off these rankings unless they truly understand, agree with, and highly value the metrics used in the study.

So in a quick google search you can see the US News research methodology. These are some of the thing they take into account:

Retention (22.5%): graduation rates

Faculty Resources (20%): Class sizes, student/faculty ratio, Professor salaries?!?!

Selectivity (12.5%): acceptance rates, SAT/ACT scores, % applicants admitted

Financial Resources (10%): per student spending on instruction, research, student resources, educational expenditures

This is 65% of the overall ranking.

Undergraduate Academic Reputation (22.5%): surveys of presidents, provosts, deans of admissions, and high school councelors


Comparing A&M with Baylor:

HS Counselor score out of 5: 4.1
Freshman Retention Rate: 86%
Classes <20 students: 50.7%
Classes >50 students: 10%
Student Faculty Ratio: 15:1
Acceptance Rate: 57.5 %

A&M:

HS Counselor score out of 5: 4.1
Freshman Retention Rate: 92%
Classes <20 students: 20.8%
Classes >50 students: 25%
Student Faculty Ratio: 21:1
Acceptance Rate: 69.2 %

I wonder with the selectivity metric, if they're able to compare a Baylor vs an A&M directly. Are they using the rate of people we give "full admission" to, or are they counting gateway/TEAM, etc?

Penn State is a decent school to compare us to. They are 20 spots higher at #48. Where they see a huge edge is that their Classes< 20 students is at 42.1%, Classes>50 students is 13%, Student faculty ratio is 17:1, and acceptance rates are 55.5%.

Personally, instead of using these metrics when evaluating Penn State, I would look at their particular programs and note that they have a top tier engineering program. Being in Pennsylvania, I know that people consider Penn State as the state school to go for in engineering with UPitt being reputable too. You don't need these rankings to tell you this kind of information.

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TL;DR version: I would be cautious about using USNWR rankings as the ultimate authority on University prestige. I would also warn prospective students to be cautious about basing their decisions off these rankings unless they truly understand, agree with, and highly value the metrics used in the study.

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PennsylvaniaAg is wise.

We should still be concerned that we are sliding every year. You can't say "these rankings don't matter" when the US News results are released, then turn around and boast that "we're top 5" when the Washington monthly rankings are released. (we share a top 10 spot with UTEP in the Washington Monthly rankings, if that gives you an idea of how valid that ranking is with academic prestige)

The US news rankings are still important. We should be concerned about our academic reputation far more than increasing enrollment by 25%. We're already one of the biggest universities in America. We should be reinvesting our money in faculty. Just my opinion.

Obviously these rankings matter because there are tons of people who base their entire realities on these rankings. While I don't agree that this is a wise way to look at the academic world, there is nothing that can change the current perception of these rankings. Therefore, A&M probably should be playing the game like everyone else. If you aren't playing the game, you clearly get left behind as can be seen by our "slide" and the "ascendance" of other schools that we deem inferior. Getting the board of regents to allow more spending to improve the academics at our school will probably be difficult if not impossible.

It's the same thing as politics. You can hate politics as much as you want. However, it is never going to go away and it will always be controlled by whoever has the money and is willing to spend it.

Ours (8th grade) is leaning Duke. Duke puts in a massive recruiting effort that starts in public elementary schools.

That must be the reason for their 12% acceptance rate.

Your vision of those schools, at least with respect to SMU is about 10 years out of date.
SMU's average SAT score is above 1300. (old scores).

Also the job network of the Dallas business market with SMU is strong.

Daughter goes there (admitted to both SMU and A&M) and loves it. one of her classes has 4 kids in it.