2018 US News rankings are out

6,180 Views | 20 Replies | Last: 5 yr ago by oragator
oragator
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I think you guys moved up a few spots, fwiw.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
Farmer1906
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AG
Any have the details on 'locked' rankings?
HECUBUS
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Washington Monthly rankings are clearly more accurate:

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017college-guide?ranking=2017-rankings-national-universities
coldmoose
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Good to see the uptick.
AggieMavsfan
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AG
I read that they adjusted their formula this year so that graduation rate is put in the context how relatively difficult each major is. So engineering is allowed a lower "expected" graduation rate than liberal arts degrees, and I assume a school like A&M that has a lot of engineering majors would benefit from this change.

I am glad we stopped the slide from previous years and moved up several spots.

These ratings do seem tilted toward private schools, who don't have to deal with the top 10% rule. I don't believe that SMU is really that close to UT or that Baylor is that close to A&M. At the school I went to, the kids who got into UT had much better grades/scores than the kids who went to SMU, and likewise for A&M vs Baylor.

I wonder what it would take for A&M to pass UT, or if it will ever happen. Just eyeballing the rankings, this looks like it's the closest we've been in awhile (69 vs 56). But throughout the list, it is the case that most land grant colleges like A&M are ranked behind their major state university brethren.

I'm also curious about the rankings that are behind the paywall, like top undergrad business programs.
fourth deck
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AG
I believe A&M was above texas for brief time in the 90s. We were close to top 50 when I started but then they changed the criteria to focus on class size and we took a plunge. For all the hype of Vision 2020 and the goal of becoming a top 10 public institution, the current admin seems happy with touting rankings on being a best value, etc.

While the overall ranking stopped its slide, undergrad engineering is down to 14... thanks Banks. Aerospace looks like it has really jumped, maybe that department head could take over?

As flawed as the US News rankings are, they are still unfortunately the primary ones looked at by high schoolers and their parents. Maybe we could take Clemson's approach:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/03/rankings


Tamu_mgm
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AG
A&M is much better than #69. Under-ranked again.
McInnis80
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Since a part of the ranking are based on expenditures and faculty salaries, A&M will be at a disadvantage. It costs a lot more to live in Palo Alto, Cambridge or Princeton than it does in College Station, Austin or Clemson, SC. I remember when we were ranked about UT one factor was that our percentage of alumni giving was much higher than UT. I don't know how much the school benefits by a bunch of people making token contributions.
Token
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tcfitz3
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There's also a built-in bias for older "quality" schools which means an East Coast bias. There's a subjective element in reputation that keeps schools there long after they lose their luster. I do not think there is any way SMU is a better all around school than A&M or that it's admits have better credentials. That's one example.
AgOutsideAustin
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The school in Austin is getting more selective and lowering their auto admit to top 6%.
CrottyKid
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AgOutsideAustin said:

The school in Austin is getting more selective and lowering their auto admit to top 6%.



We should do the same.
AggieMavsfan
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CrottyKid said:

AgOutsideAustin said:

The school in Austin is getting more selective and lowering their auto admit to top 6%.



We should do the same.

They had to apply for a waiver from the state to drop it from top 10% to top 6%. The agreement they came to with the state was that they could cap their auto admits at 75% of total admitted students.

In looking at A&M's admission profile, I am calculating that only about 64% of our "full offers of admission" (excluding team, gateway, psa, etc) are to students who were top 10%.
http://admissions.tamu.edu/freshman/profile

I don't love the top 10% rule, but we can't just change a state law on our own, and we probably aren't going to get a waiver in the next few years given that UT's agreement is for 75%.
BigDog12
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AggieMavsfan said:

CrottyKid said:

AgOutsideAustin said:

The school in Austin is getting more selective and lowering their auto admit to top 6%.



We should do the same.

They had to apply for a waiver from the state to drop it from top 10% to top 6%. The agreement they came to with the state was that they could cap their auto admits at 75% of total admitted students.

In looking at A&M's admission profile, I am calculating that only about 64% of our "full offers of admission" (excluding team, gateway, psa, etc) are to students who were top 10%.
http://admissions.tamu.edu/freshman/profile

I don't love the top 10% rule, but we can't just change a state law on our own, and we probably aren't going to get a waiver in the next few years given that UT's agreement is for 75%.

one should probably look at the size of the freshman classes as well

A&M is really not doing a great deal to limit the freshman class or the size of the university while UT has a dream to be a 48,000 student university with a large graduate enrollment and about the lowest they can get to is 50,000

A&M wants to be 60,000+ with a much lower % of graduate students

so if A&M was to do something (intelligent like firing john not so sharp) and limiting enrollment to 55,000 or so students and bumping up the % of graduate students then you would see the % of auto admits under the 10% go up dramatically

that is the issue with UT they are not going to grow past 52,000 or so students no matter what they are doing all they can to get below 50,000

A&M at this point seems to want to compete with AU, ASU, UCF, USF and U Phoenix in enrollment size to the detriment of attractiveness to top students





BigDog12
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McInnis80 said:

Since a part of the ranking are based on expenditures and faculty salaries, A&M will be at a disadvantage. It costs a lot more to live in Palo Alto, Cambridge or Princeton than it does in College Station, Austin or Clemson, SC. I remember when we were ranked about UT one factor was that our percentage of alumni giving was much higher than UT. I don't know how much the school benefits by a bunch of people making token contributions.

while the token contributions are something to consider and discount

I give some credibility to the donations mattering especially from alumni

in the USA especially pretty much NO ONE thinks to themselves "my degree was pretty much meaningless to my success and my time at that university was a waste or a haze, but hey I think I will send them $500 dollars just because"

you have to view donations as somewhat of a sign of "customer" satisfaction and when you look at the LARGE donations especially you time and again hear highly successful people credit their time at a university for their success and their quality of life after their time at that university

and again no one thinks "I did not learn a damn thing from that university so I am going to hire all the graduates from there I can"

that pretty much flies in the face of "ags hire ags" because if you thought your time at A&M was a waste or left you unprepared why in the hell would you work your way to be in a position to influence hiring for a business or for your own business and then go hire students from the university you feel left you unprepared

so speaking with your dollars is a very good sign that people placed some value on their time at that university just as people hiring from the university they graduated is
bmks270
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FacebookFriend said:

AggieMavsfan said:

CrottyKid said:

AgOutsideAustin said:

The school in Austin is getting more selective and lowering their auto admit to top 6%.



We should do the same.

They had to apply for a waiver from the state to drop it from top 10% to top 6%. The agreement they came to with the state was that they could cap their auto admits at 75% of total admitted students.

In looking at A&M's admission profile, I am calculating that only about 64% of our "full offers of admission" (excluding team, gateway, psa, etc) are to students who were top 10%.
http://admissions.tamu.edu/freshman/profile

I don't love the top 10% rule, but we can't just change a state law on our own, and we probably aren't going to get a waiver in the next few years given that UT's agreement is for 75%.

one should probably look at the size of the freshman classes as well

A&M is really not doing a great deal to limit the freshman class or the size of the university while UT has a dream to be a 48,000 student university with a large graduate enrollment and about the lowest they can get to is 50,000

A&M wants to be 60,000+ with a much lower % of graduate students

so if A&M was to do something (intelligent like firing john not so sharp) and limiting enrollment to 55,000 or so students and bumping up the % of graduate students then you would see the % of auto admits under the 10% go up dramatically

that is the issue with UT they are not going to grow past 52,000 or so students no matter what they are doing all they can to get below 50,000

A&M at this point seems to want to compete with AU, ASU, UCF, USF and U Phoenix in enrollment size to the detriment of attractiveness to top students




Hey! USF and most of the others are great schools, also, A&M is way beyond them in enrollment.

1. UCF... 64k
2. TAMU... 60k
3. OSU... 56k
4. FIU... 55k
5. UF... 52k
...
8. UT... 51k
...
...
... USF... 49k
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StickTogetherAgs
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oragator
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2019 rankings are out.
Think you ticked up again?

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
fourth deck
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oragator said:

2019 rankings are out.
Think you ticked up again?

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
Yes, moved up overall to #66. Undergraduate engineering holds at #14. Can't see business behind the paywall.

Interestingly enough, it looks like the ranking methodology has changed again and does not take into account acceptance rate. That certainly hurt us in the years it was included.
500,000ags
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Does anybody know what Florida does so well? #35 overall school in the country is amazing.

Their business school is similarly ranked to A&M. Engineering seems materially lower.

They do have an extensive college list - ag, arts, business, dentistry, construction, education, engineering, journalism, law, medical, nursing, pharmaceutical, public health, and veterinary.
oragator
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500,000ags said:

Does anybody know what Florida does so well? #35 overall school in the country is amazing.

Their business school is similarly ranked to A&M. Engineering seems materially lower.

They do have an extensive college list - ag, arts, business, dentistry, construction, education, engineering, journalism, law, medical, nursing, pharmaceutical, public health, and veterinary.
Honestly, a lot of the credit has to go to the state legislature.
They created what was known as preeminence funding a few years ago, where UF and FSU (and now USF) got special dollars to help them improve.
Separately, they created a performance based metrics system for a chunk of the funding that goes to the state schools. The metrics happen to dovetail with what some of the rankings systems look for like student outcomes (not accidental, ratings were part of the calculus).

https://www.flbog.edu/board/office/budget/_doc/performance_funding/Overview-Doc-Performance-Funding-10-Metric-Model-Condensed-Version.pdf

UF is using that extra money in part to hire 500 new professors and try and take the student faculty ratio from 20:1 down to 16:1.

The other thing is just demographic luck, as the state has grown, UF has held pretty firm in its freshman class size, so admissions standards, student quality etc continue to go up. But all the florida schools jumped this year, FSU has jumped 17 spots on the public list in 2 years I think. USF jumped 10 spots this year alone.

UF's new goal is to be a top 5 public, but the sledding gets much harder from here. Not sure it's feasible in the near future, heck maintaining will be hard. Good to have goals though.
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