TU #195 US News 2024 rankings.
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I mean.... I don't know how much more of a joke you can have. The academic rigor of the majority of OU & OSU's courses vs. TU's is night and day.... and that comes from having distinct comparisons of friends and colleagues who attended them and majored in comparable fields.
The only thing that I can see which hurts us in terms of rankings are cost and a general lack of faculty research.
The only thing that I can see which hurts us in terms of rankings are cost and a general lack of faculty research.
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Also University of Houston is at #133 that should tell you all you need to know about the rankings.
Houston is a R1 University spending $240M annually in research. Assuming the R1 status is now more weighted in the rankings?
Seems like a major factor. I personally think that the volume of research is not as important as the quality of the research. A lot of these Universities are putting out large swathes of documentation that no one in the private industry reads and is of mediocre quality.
On top of that, undergraduates are rarely involved in developing research, although they may help in some of the testing / data collection.
In many cases, the nature of funding such research should actually be considered detrimental to undergraduates because often the research-centric faculty is less focused on actually teaching.
One place we aren't classified by Carnegie is in 'community engagement'
Community engagement describes collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. The purpose of community engagement is the partnership of college and university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.
One might argue that TU is heavily engaged in the community via the various museum engagements and I think TU doesn't get enough credit for its involvement with the Schusterman Center. The fact that UCF is certified in this field and we aren't is troubling.
Community engagement describes collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. The purpose of community engagement is the partnership of college and university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.
One might argue that TU is heavily engaged in the community via the various museum engagements and I think TU doesn't get enough credit for its involvement with the Schusterman Center. The fact that UCF is certified in this field and we aren't is troubling.
"But more than a dozen public universities, many of them with relatively low profiles, climbed at least 50 spots in the rankings. Fresno State moved up 64 places, to No. 185, for instance, and Florida Atlantic ascended 53, to No. 209. Many other public institutions recorded smaller, if notable, gains, like Rutgers, which saw each of its three campuses rise by at least 15 places.
They benefited from an algorithm that sent some private universities’ rankings plummeting but represented an effort to account for deals that higher education leaders routinely talk up, like transforming the lives of economically disadvantaged students."
"The company discarded five factors that often favored wealthy colleges and together made up 18 percent of a school’s score, including undergraduate class sizes, alumni giving rates and high school class standing."
With a New Formula, U.S. News Rankings Boost Some State Universities
"Many public universities rose in the undergraduate rankings U.S. News & World Report released Monday, while many private ones fell — a sign not of their changing quality but of the changing formula for an annual sorting ritual that in recent years has faced intensifying criticism."
U.S. News college rankings are scrambled as its formula changes Many public universities climbed abruptly, while many private ones fell. The lists have come under increased criticism.
U.S. News college rankings are scrambled as its formula changes Many public universities climbed abruptly, while many private ones fell. The lists have come under increased criticism.
One problem is that there are lots of different kind of colleges that serve lots of different kinds of students with vastly different goals. The single rating is like trying to come up with a scale to say which is best, Tony's Tire Emporium, The Happy Bean Cafe or Gentle Finger Proctology. How can you compare those things? It's a fool's errand, but a fool's errand that generates a ton of $$ so USNWR keeps up the fiction.
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It's very troublesome to those of us who think seriously about the validity of measurement.
I need to type a long response about heterogeneous composites.It's gotta kind of make your head want to explode
I think I speak for all of us on the board when I say that we would very much enjoy reading that piece and that we look forward to it soon.
There is an ever increasing perception that the value of higher education is declining. You can learn how to code in fifteen minutes and make 500k with Google tomorrow.
Long-term, I actually think this perception might place a higher value on it.
Universities invested in weird
. I don't know why students needed amazing dormitories. What is wrong with slogging to through ugly and getting it done. That actually wasn't the reason for most of the higher costs though. Huffycane has pointed this out numerous times.
In OK, the legislature has actually pulled back funding for the state universities in order to give more tax cuts for Kevin Stitt's back pocket. They pimp low taxes as if it is the only thing that businesses think about to recruit talent to states. Then we lose businesses like Hilti and wonder why. We embarrassingly whore ourselves out to Tesla and Panasonic and pat ourselves on the back for being second and relevant. The Panasonic people came over here and realized our people can't put together complete sentences. The Tesla executives didn't want to move to Oklahoma. That is the story. But for the legislature, they will say it wasn't enough TIF or straight cash bribe investment. GTFOH.
As the Italians like to say, it's a fugazi.
Long-term, I actually think this perception might place a higher value on it.
Universities invested in weird
. I don't know why students needed amazing dormitories. What is wrong with slogging to through ugly and getting it done. That actually wasn't the reason for most of the higher costs though. Huffycane has pointed this out numerous times. In OK, the legislature has actually pulled back funding for the state universities in order to give more tax cuts for Kevin Stitt's back pocket. They pimp low taxes as if it is the only thing that businesses think about to recruit talent to states. Then we lose businesses like Hilti and wonder why. We embarrassingly whore ourselves out to Tesla and Panasonic and pat ourselves on the back for being second and relevant. The Panasonic people came over here and realized our people can't put together complete sentences. The Tesla executives didn't want to move to Oklahoma. That is the story. But for the legislature, they will say it wasn't enough TIF or straight cash bribe investment. GTFOH.
As the Italians like to say, it's a fugazi.
Every data feature that US News inputs into their system will promote an inherent bias. Adjust that bias to reality rather than promoting a certain outcome.
I don't think that they have their ratings balanced in terms of quality of education, if that is what they're actually attempting to measure. The quality of education overall at TU vs any other in the state or several surrounding states, is superior. The way I tend to measure that is the intelligence and diligence of the average student, and the expectations put upon students in their classes. What I have noticed, working at a very big company, with a large amount of people from a variety of schools across the company is that very few people , even those with nice GPA's and good degrees, are actually trained to solve problems and take initiative.
I was able to come into a new company with no experience in the specific field, and be promoted ahead of people with degrees from 10 different state schools, some of whom had almost a decade of subject matter experience, and I attribute some of that success to the well rounded academic background TU gave me.
Tulsa has teachers that specifically throw out conjectures on how students from other schools might screw up by using flawed methods, and how we should best not fall into the same traps, or how we should fix their messes and that expectation of expertise flows across a number of disciplines.
I have seen legitimate academic bowl competitions where Tulsa scrubbed the floor with 90% of the schools in attendance and closely competed with, ultimately beating, the rest that were of similar caliber. Also ironically, the kids in the audience from TU were more well versed than most of the people actually competing from other schools.
I don't think that they have their ratings balanced in terms of quality of education, if that is what they're actually attempting to measure. The quality of education overall at TU vs any other in the state or several surrounding states, is superior. The way I tend to measure that is the intelligence and diligence of the average student, and the expectations put upon students in their classes. What I have noticed, working at a very big company, with a large amount of people from a variety of schools across the company is that very few people , even those with nice GPA's and good degrees, are actually trained to solve problems and take initiative.
I was able to come into a new company with no experience in the specific field, and be promoted ahead of people with degrees from 10 different state schools, some of whom had almost a decade of subject matter experience, and I attribute some of that success to the well rounded academic background TU gave me.
Tulsa has teachers that specifically throw out conjectures on how students from other schools might screw up by using flawed methods, and how we should best not fall into the same traps, or how we should fix their messes and that expectation of expertise flows across a number of disciplines.
I have seen legitimate academic bowl competitions where Tulsa scrubbed the floor with 90% of the schools in attendance and closely competed with, ultimately beating, the rest that were of similar caliber. Also ironically, the kids in the audience from TU were more well versed than most of the people actually competing from other schools.
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It's pretty simple. "Overall" evaluations of things that don't relate statistically to one another in the same direction are very tricky to interpret. Those kinds of measures are not completely useless, but handle with care.
An example is measuring the success of a company's hiring program by combining two factors: (1) maximizing retention and (2) maximizing job performance. The tricky thing is that programs designed to maximize job performance won't necessarily maximize retention, and visa versa. They don't go together very strongly or even sometimes - at all. So if you put them together into a single index, it's hard to know what that index represents without digging deep. If you are not careful, you might feel your are doing OK if your organization is doing "average" on this measure, when in reality you are doing great in one area, and absolutely crappy in the other.
If US News wants meaningful rankings, they would be better off creating "sub-scales" of factors that go together themselves. Perhaps things like academic quality, affordability, and promoting social justice. People who are interested in these things individually could then pay attention to the one they care about and ignore the others.
And if you happen to be someone that believes that academic quality, affordability, and promoting social justice are the three most important things in evaluating a university, an "Overall" measure that combines these things might be useful to you - even if the three factors don't statistically trend the same way across colleges. But it still makes it tricky to interpret that overall ranking without digging into the three individual factors.
They were hit but not nearly as hard as us.
The article illustrates the points I was making too.
All of a sudden you are a much better university because you could always offer first generation students in state tuition???
www.nola.com
The article illustrates the points I was making too.
All of a sudden you are a much better university because you could always offer first generation students in state tuition???
Tulane falls 29 spots in U.S. News & World Report 2024 college rankings
Tulane University slipped 29 spots to 73rd, a drop that school leaders blamed on a big shift in the methodology of the annual rankings.
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Malcolm Gladwell, love him or hate him, has a very interesting take on the U.S. News & World Report rankings. He covers it pretty extensively in one of his books, and also in several podcasts. Revisionist History Podcast
In short it's a near complete farce and if your dumb enough to pick a college, or be strongly swayed, by these rankings you don't belong at Tulsa, Tulane, or large number of schools that the formula is tilted against.
In short it's a near complete farce and if your dumb enough to pick a college, or be strongly swayed, by these rankings you don't belong at Tulsa, Tulane, or large number of schools that the formula is tilted against.
This is very similar to what the left did with “ESG” stuff to dictate corporate behavior. A small group of people makes the yardstick that everyone else is judged by. Control the yardstick and you (indirectly) control behavior by controlling the incentive structure.
The end result is something I like to call “woke seppuku”, where an institution commits credibility suicide for the sake of complying with whatever the woke diktats of the moment are.
There is no metric like this for companies so that point is just nonsense.
Schools do have multiple legitimate goals and all the USNWR changes seem to reflect reasonable things. Educating low income people so they aren't low income anymore is valuable for everyone - they move off state support, pay more taxes and become valuable cogs in the capitalist machine that generates wealth for society as a whole, and what's more American than lifting yourself up with your own bootstraps through education? Or is lifting yourself up with hard work too woke these days? Back in the olden days we would also have said that helping others help themselves is the good Christian thing to do but I know we don't believe in that stuff anymore.
The problem isn't that these factors are being measured, they're all valuable, it's as the good Dr said, that they are being mashed into one score that then doesn't really tell you anything about anything.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/...kings-explainer-what-changed-in-2024/3228595/
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Kind of like ranking "best restaurants" on quality of food plus low cost, which are likely negatively correlated. What does that ranking represent?
Spoken like a man who really does not get to Taco Mayo often enough.
It's more like "which is the best restaurant, a fine French restaurant, Taco Mayo or an ice cream shop?" How can you answer that? Do I have 3 hours and $500 or 20 minutes and $6? Is it me and my wife or do I have a van of 10 year old soccer players? Am I looking for a meal or something cold and sweet at the end of the day?
This goes back to Clayton Christenson's job to be done theory. Is a product good or bad? Well, it depends on the job that customer plans to do with the product, there is no good or bad without knowing the job to be done. Universities have lots of jobs to do and they can't always be reconciled in one number.
https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
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Yeah but you didn't say it in an a$$holey enough way
What is the statistical analysis where you don't look for factors but look for types or groups?The problem is that some people think for purely ideological reasons that we have to pretend that people's experiences or needs are all the same even if they are not. It's like "which product is better, a chainsaw or a recorder". Clearly the chainsaw is better. "But I want to give it to a child for their music class." Sorry, for political reasons we cannot acknowledge that children and adults have different needs, that's woke, so we can only say that the chainsaw is the better product. It's all fun and games until someone gets their arm cut off in the middle of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands".
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Cluster analysis.Yeah but you didn't say it in an a$$holey enough way
The problem is that some people think for purely ideological reasons that we have to pretend that people's experiences or needs are all the same even if they are not. It's like "which product is better, a chainsaw or a recorder". Clearly the chainsaw is better. "But I want to give it to a child for their music class." Sorry, for political reasons we cannot acknowledge that children and adults have different needs, that's woke, so we can only say that the chainsaw is the better product. It's all fun and games until someone gets their arm cut off.
Anyway I would venture a wild guess that the correlation between food quality and affordability is at least r = -.40. Far from perfect but enough to mess up a composite ranking.
Do we think cluster analysis is scientifically useful? My professors always thought it witchcraft but that's been 30 years ago. I used hierarchical factor analysis in my MA to create personality by situation factors to reconcile social and personality psychology, which alas history has not determined to be as brilliant as I thought it was (academicians are too woke to recognize my genius). Is that still a thing?
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It falls within the generally accepted definition of woke, "whatever I don't like".
BTW I would not have classified RT exactly that way so this must have been Minnesota.
Yeah, I stopped interacting with academicians decades before woke was a thing so I have no idea whether my professors were woke or not (tho definitely agreed on RT, and it's hard to imagine Phil Ackerman being woke given his generally high level of misanthropy).
No doubt RT is liberal. Just read his books and you can tell. But too hedonistic and commercially oriented to be called "woke" maybe? Though I am not sure what that means, if anything.
Anyway, apologies to everyone else. This should now be a PM exchange
LOL, I think you vastly underestimate how fascinating you and I areAnyway, apologies to everyone else. This should now be a PM exchange
I think of these backwaters of the underbelly of the free board like public access TV, you might sign on and find Mrs. McKnight's 4th grade class doing The Music Man or some random guy showing how he does wordworking. I always expect to find a video of BLA juggling tucked down at the end of some General board thread
You left out “while talking about Boston sports teams”
So, my son just got accepted to TU. Apparently TU has a process where if you submit your test scores and GPA and they meet a certain minimum threshhold, you are automatically accepted contingent upon TU getting a copy of your HS transcript and test scores. The acceptance also came with a pretty sizable scholarship.
Alas, he doesn't want to be anywhere near Oklahoma for school. He may not have much of a choice unless he finds some ways to help fund his dream school.
Alas, he doesn't want to be anywhere near Oklahoma for school. He may not have much of a choice unless he finds some ways to help fund his dream school.
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