OT: US News and World Report Best College Rankings
USC is the Michigan of the West? Both schools are tied at #24 in the USNWP most recent college ranking list. UCLA is the highest ranked public school followed by UC Berkeley and then Michigan.
And boy, has college become extremely expensive.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:03 AM ^
Wrong thread title. It should say, "Michigan is Nearly the #1 Public University in the Country."
September 15th, 2020 at 7:23 AM ^
“in the clear!”
September 15th, 2020 at 7:24 AM ^
Only 23 spots and a broken Schlissel away from housing it.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:21 AM ^
Aha! One of the countless "funny" comments, but this one is actually funny.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:23 AM ^
In before the CALIFORNIA IZ SOCIALISTS GRAAAAAAARGH
September 15th, 2020 at 7:29 AM ^
I don't remember USC being as well-regarded back in the day. Instead, I remember "University of Spoiled Children." It has come up in the world.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:33 AM ^
Hell yeah, it has! It's so difficult to get into that parents have to funnel money through Title 9 sports teams and fake their kid's resume to have a chance...
September 15th, 2020 at 11:03 AM ^
I don't know how old you are, but you probably weren't paying attention (understandable if you don't have a kid applying to college) but dating back to when I was applying to schools in the late 90's early 2000s USC was always ranked very closely to Michigan then as well. It has always been a very strong private college. That doesn't mean that the Spoiled Children nickname wasn't true then or now, however. But it's a private school in Los Angeles, I'm sure the same nickname could be applied to NYU or Georgetown or Stanford or 100+ other schools.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:30 AM ^
Couldn't agree with you more that college is way too expensive. I'm not in the "free college for all" camp, but it needs to be much more affordable and accessible...and those that can should pay their fair share.
That being said, as the parent of an in-state Michigan sophomore, U of M still feels as though it provides a great value for the investment.
He will be fortunate to graduate debt-free with a Michigan degree.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:42 AM ^
Same here!
September 15th, 2020 at 9:29 AM ^
I was lucky, both in terms of getting admitted and being able to work my way through Michigan at $3.50/hr. The mid-70’s was a different time, and I got a nice union card with less than $10,000 of student loan debt. I don’t know how someone could work their way through now without incurring an order of magnitude more debt. Given technology, there needs to be a lower cost option to get a degree remotely for schlubs like me. It won’t have the street appeal that a degree from a prestigious institution would, but the right person just needs to get in the door. Put another way, the cost of a prestigious degree has become another way to promote class distinction in our society, and that’s just bullshit.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:36 AM ^
Username checks out. From BBA 1977. Worked at the EQ Cafeteria for beer money.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:49 AM ^
Yup, and class distinction is a huge driver for these rankings.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:54 AM ^
The main reason college is so expensive is because of cuts in government funding. Though, on average, college is with the investment ainec.
September 15th, 2020 at 12:27 PM ^
I'm no expert, but I've read a little bit. Hasn't easy access to government loans also had a big hand in it? Loans that kids can't default on which are giant piles of guaranteed money for universities. I'm for finding ways to reduce the cost of college, but making it free for everyone will only exacerbate the cost problem
September 15th, 2020 at 12:53 PM ^
Schools are also culpable. Tuition hikes have been disproportionate to funding cuts; at times tuition has risen while funding was flat. Schools also haven’t fought for funding as aggressively as other public institutions, in part because they prefer private money to public money (more autonomy).
And then there’s the competition among schools for rankings and prestige. That leads to duplication of services and offerings and higher costs.
Christopher Newfield from UCSB has written some fascinating stuff on this topic.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:37 AM ^
IMHO In-State costs are all that matter. If you are coming here from out of state (or out of country), you can afford it.
Some of you can probably figure out what year I started my BS. Tuition was $464 per semester for up to 18 credits my freshman year!
September 15th, 2020 at 11:11 AM ^
But what does "if you are coming here from out of state, you can afford it" supposed to mean? Michigan should only admit out of state kids who are rich? I don't like that line of thinking and I don't think it makes for a good split. I understand that out of state should be more than in-state, of course. But out of state tuition at public colleges is now on par with the TOP private schools and I think that will do them a major disservice if they become regional-only again.
When my boys were born I dreamed of them going to Michigan, but right now that would cost me about $300k per kid, and although I make good money and I've been saving, that's just not going to happen.
September 15th, 2020 at 12:20 PM ^
Agreed. While my kids have a great option in UNC (and others), one of mine is applying to UofM for engineering (along with other private univ). Obviously I have a soft spot for Michigan but the thought of paying that out of state tuition is crazy. Yes, in a broad sense I can afford it but that doesn't mean it's not severely overpriced. It's a real obstacle for young people these days.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:48 AM ^
The cost would have been very hard on me at the time...I don't know what it is now, but my son spent 4 years in the Marines and ended up with a free education (as far as money) from Michigan
September 15th, 2020 at 8:52 AM ^
A co-worker's daughter (senior this year) plans to do the same (Navy, I think). Great plan.
September 15th, 2020 at 7:58 AM ^
Gotta buy your way into the ruling class.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:35 AM ^
I don't get comments like this. We are so far removed from aristocracy of western European countries. The last I saw the US has the highest rate of class and income mobility in the world. Can it actually be any better? And if so how?
September 15th, 2020 at 8:45 AM ^
I'd be curious to see that research. From what I've seen, the US lags in socioeconomic mobility behind a number of European countries and Canada.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:00 AM ^
I was with you so I did a quick google search. First result that came up says the US is 27 out of 82 countries. That’s inline with the what I’d heard recently. Not the worst but def a lot of room to improve.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/
Edit: Business Insider link to same list
September 15th, 2020 at 9:04 AM ^
I stand corrected. If only I'd had a resource at my fingertips to be able to have looked that up myself ?♂️
September 15th, 2020 at 10:59 AM ^
I think anyone who grows up here in the US could be forgiven for assuming we are one of the most economically mobile countries, because we go to such great pains to highlight rags-to-riches stories.
But that's really a huge part of our national mythology-- those stories are such statistical outliers they have almost no relevance to the overall state of the economy, which as it turns out is structured in a way that makes moving in either direction (up or down in socioeconomic status) not that common.
September 15th, 2020 at 11:22 AM ^
I'm curious what you mean when you say that our economy is structured that way. Not being argumentative. I hear this frequently but I don't know what is being referred to here.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:04 AM ^
Not to go all RADICAL SOCIALIST (!!!) on you, EYB, but even Stanford is somewhat on board with the idea:
https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016-Economic-Mobility-3.pdf
Other resources:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/ (EDIT: Rafiki beat me to this one by four minutes.)
September 15th, 2020 at 9:52 AM ^
Maybe they finally realized that shacks around the campus going for $3 million wasn't the best look for an academic institution.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:23 AM ^
I don't want to get too much into this on a Tuesday, but if you look at the economic and educational "diversity" of our media and political elites, you might be tempted to reconsider comparisons to our founding nobility.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:58 AM ^
We absolutely have an aristocracy. We're about 2 generations away from Lord Gates, Prince Zuckerberg, and Emperor Bezos.
We would have had it already if not for the massive estate taxes at the end of the gilded age.
September 15th, 2020 at 11:13 AM ^
Okay that is absolutely true, and you'll get no argument from me about elitism and its lack of diversity.
BUT, and I will likely get bombed for this, but whatever. While my facts were off originally, I still don't believe that my overall point is incorrect. While it is nearly impossible for someone to become super rich unless they inherit the wealth, moving from lower class to middle or upper class is not as difficult as you're making it out to be, unless I'm simply misunderstanding your point (which is possible. I can be pretty dense).
Anecdotally, I know many people who have risen out of poverty or near poverty, from broken homes without any support, to become middle, or upper middle class. In this case, I believe anecdotes provide proof that it is possible with personal ambition for just about anyone. Obviously there will be examples of people that are screwed from the time they were born, but in my experience there isn't much that is blocking anyone from moving up other than personal road blocks.
I also think employers need to be held accountable here, and I say this as someone with a family business that employs 35 people. Too many employers have strict hiring guidelines that require college degrees, when one isn't needed. It's basically a ln entry test to see if you CAN complete college, which is absolutely stupid when college degrees can be bought these days. So there either needs to be a public funded option that is no cost to the student for a bachelor's degree, or, more preferably, some sort of incentive for employers to hire people without degrees when possible.
Having said all that, I could be completely wrong. It's not like my opinion will change the outcome of any election or any policy decisions.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:52 AM ^
The US traditionally ranks either last or dead last in overall socioeconomic mobility/wealth & income equity relative to other developed economies. There are several ways to measure it, the most widely used is probably the Gini Coefficient. But social mobility as defined by ability to move from one quartile of income to the next is a better way in some regard, there's a good visual of that ranking here:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/
EDIT: Well crap, nevermind I'm just repeating what was already posted. Another way to think of it, and a quick Googles didn't help me turn up the original paper, was that among developed economies, you can predict a newborn baby's socioeconomic outcome in life more accurately with a single piece of information than anywhere else in the world's most highly developed economies. That piece of information is the income of the parents.
September 15th, 2020 at 11:22 AM ^
I've read some really interesting studies on this.
One of the things that used to contribute to economic mobility was that - in the 40's, 50's, and 60's, when most professions were dominated by men - men would marry their secretaries, assistants, nurses, etc. This is not a sexist theory invented by me; it's supported by the data.
Today, most men marry within their own educational/socioeconomic realm. It is without a doubt a better situation that women are getting closer to attaining professional equality...but it has reduced overall social mobility within the U.S.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:26 AM ^
These rankings are so dumb in so many ways. I wish we could figure out a better way to do this, as it seems overly important to students and faculty.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:46 AM ^
I read the methodology section and 10% is faculty salary (7%) and faculty with the highest degree in their fields (3%). Probably relevant for some degrees but not so much for others, I can definitely say a lot of the most educated professors I had were far from the best teachers.
Also 20% of the whole ranking is "undergraduate academic reputation" which is basically a survey of fellow academics doing surveys on how the school is perceived. So, basically like recruiting rankings.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:35 AM ^
It’s a beauty pageant. Any set of metrics that reduce the n-dimensional matrix, which describes something as complex as a university system, to a scalar list isn’t particularly meaningful. Too much information loss.
September 15th, 2020 at 11:21 AM ^
OK - I get what you're saying. And of course this is a simplistic-er way of looking at this, but it's important to have some idea of which schools are better than others and a simplistic list is better than no list. And it's not completely subjective - they have a methodology and it's visible. Michigan, for example, spends a lot of time and money making the school better and part of that is to be recognized as one of the best.
As to the poster above you who mentioned that 20% of the ranking is based on "undergraduate reputation" or whatever it's called - don't we want that? I feel like a major part of picking a school is how good of an education people think I'm getting. That's part of getting a job after graduation. "People who really know this stuff think this is a great school" is about as important of a criterion as you can have. It certainly shouldn't be all of it, but it needs to be included.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:32 AM ^
I'm curious as to why the cost of college has gone up so much. The stereotype is that baby boomers don't understand how hard millennials have it because they could pay their way through college with a part time job while millennials have to take out the equivalent of a mortgage and will be paying for it until they die of old age. But there are waaaay more universities now, more opportunities, and presumably more efficiency in education with modern technology and high speed internet. And yet the cost has sky rocketed. I have no idea why that is, I'm just curious.
September 15th, 2020 at 8:42 AM ^
Because the mission of Universities is no longer the general education and welfare of their students, advancing theories and research, etc.. it is to collect as much money as possible. All else is secondary. Look up how the endowments have grown with increasing tuition.
There is also a lot of discounting going on. You have a high base price and get as many students as you can that can pay full price - with a lot of state schools where local governance doesn't care (ie, Michigan) this basically means as many wealthy out of state students as possible. Then you start discounting with scholarships, etc. I know where I went to school the tuition basically doubled over less than 10 years, but the number of students receiving some financial aid or university sponsored scholarship was something like 90%. The president basically said they did this to make our tuition more on par with other private schools so the perceived value of the degrees were more equal.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:25 AM ^
I think it starts with the combination of easy money in the form of student loans and higher demand for professional degrees as our economy has shifted from manufacturing to professional services. Universities are taking advantage of both. You could argue a bubble has formed by now, but these two factors that started it are real.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:08 AM ^
bingo, thats a huge part of it
September 15th, 2020 at 9:55 AM ^
It's because of state funding cuts
September 15th, 2020 at 10:08 AM ^
I am as well. Especially considering nothing has changed in 50 years for many disciplines. Economic principles are the same now that they were in 1970 (albeit with more data on what works). Accounting principles are the same. History hasn't changed. The English majors read many of the same books (or similar books). Foreign languages are the same etc.
Obviously science is changing all the time, but that hardly merits the increasing cost on tuition.
Universities will never do with less until critical mass is reached and people just stop going. People talk about wealth transfer in the US, and the biggest component is the transfer from the young to the old via entitlement spending and education.
September 15th, 2020 at 10:30 AM ^
I believe your comment reflects a misunderstanding of higher education. It's not simply conveyance of facts. Two examples:
• Economic principles have changed immensely since the 1970s. Then the focus was on communal action and social good (New Deal, Great Society), and that profits for business was essential. Since then Friedman's argument has prevailed, that the job of business is to maximize profits, with all over values minimized or ignored.
• History is about facts AND how we see them, which changes all the time. In the 1950s "history" said that women should stay home with children, and though some still believe that, it's no longer widely accepted.
September 15th, 2020 at 11:56 AM ^
State funding cuts definitely factor in, but the main driver, imo, is the exponential growth in admin positions. Those assistant vice presidents of campus life are largely useless but do manage to suck up a whole bunch of money that could otherwise go to professors or be spent in other ways that would actually advance a school’s ability to educate its students
September 15th, 2020 at 8:58 AM ^
It’s like recruiting rankings! We win!!
September 15th, 2020 at 9:43 AM ^
Impressive for USC. I hear it's easier to get in if you try to get an athletic scholarship on the crew team.
September 15th, 2020 at 9:47 AM ^
interesting how school rankings over time.
when i went to UM, i had friends transferring to UVA, the better public school back then.
Also, UC Berkeley was the highest ranked public school at the time where UCLA and UM were tied.
for about a decade UM would ALWAYS be #25 every year, almost as if it was the benchmark to rank the other schools up or down.