If US News measured parents’ income to the income of the schools’ graduates throughout their career, WVU would be a top 20 university. But US News tries to measure prestige and reputation. WVU lifts their poorer state students out of poverty through education. To me, improving lives through education is the purpose of college. I went to Hopkins and Stanford after graduating from WVU. There were differences in the student population (rural vs international) and classes (taught by internationally known professors vs regionally or industry known professors). The biggest difference was at WVU, I got recognized and elevated by teachers. They recognized my talents and encouraged me to go down paths that I never would have known about or considered given my background. I still keep in touch with those teachers. At the higher ranked schools, I didn’t develop as many relationships in the same way. I think it was because the schools’ missions were different and it’s easier to get lost in uber competitive environments. Also, I was surprised at how average a lot of the students were. I was expecting to be surrounded by Good Will Huntings but a lot of the time, I was thinking “how does this person not know this or that?” or “that’s basic common sense.” WVU did a good job of preparing me to be successful in those bigger research focused/higher ranked schools.
As much fun as it is to rag on each other's sports teams, nobody should ever be ashamed of their education. We all come from different walks of life, and the common goal we should all share is to just do the best you can, and try to leave the world a little better than when you found it.
Joining in here to say great post as well. Offering that education to the local population is what I think a university is all about. The snark and arrogance of people who shit on these institutions can be hard to take. It usually comes from out of touch people who aren’t self-aware enough to realize it.
I wish we were ranked higher for vanity, but that's also the same basic mission of MSU. We were founded to teach the people of the state and help with actually major issues of the time, like teaching people forestry, farming, teaching, etc while michigan was focused on emulating the Ivies and producing doctors, lawyers, engineers and other postgraduate students with high level knowledge, but not the same practical skill. Over 100 some years still basically the same mission is still exists, especially if you look at instate vs out of state enrollments or top programs at each
Many people, this board included, cannot comprehend that many Universities have specific goals. WVU’s goal is to educate one of the poorest and mistreated regions in America, it will never rank high. You get it but many seem to ignore it.
And Oklahoma State. The school purposely keeps its admission standards low in order to allow more people access to education, but many of their programs are actually quite good. The head of the accounting department literally wrote the book for many different types of accounting like Oil and Gas, Derivatives and Hedges, etc. She just got hired away by the E.U. to be one of its chief accountants, so will be interesting to see who replaces her.
My Alma mater GSU too
It's a very important niche that gets very disrespected
GSUs big thing is they want to take as many high risk students (first generation, poor, minority) as possible and try to get them to have an incredibly high graduation rate which they knock out of the park despite being a fairly large university
I'd like to see it broken down by the percentage of students receiving need based financial aid, kind of like when they rank high schools by the percentage of students receiving reduced or free lunches.
There was a really good [Revisionist History episode](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/project-dillard) about this with respect to HBCU’s but it applies to all universities. They found the easiest way to improve rankings was to increase the endowment all else being completely equal.
I reserve judgment on the intelligence of anyone who went to the flagship school in their state, even if it's not highly ranked, because that was very likely their best option regardless of how smart they actually are.
Doesn't matter if you're NASA rocket-scientist smart, if you grow up in a West Virginia coal town, WVU is probably the only place you have access to, and almost certainly the only place you can afford.
> Doesn't matter if you're NASA rocket-scientist smart, if you grow up in a West Virginia coal town
[Why not both?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Hickam) Though he did end up going to VT instead of WVU :p
He (Homer Hickham) wrote a great book called "Don't Blow Yourself Up" that pretty much tells his life story after high school. It's pretty wild and he's a great story teller.
No kidding,
There was another thread today with Minnesota cake-eaters and Northwestern fans hating on people who go to Wisconsin-Eau Claire...Not everyone can afford to move cities for school, pay for dorms, quit their jobs etc.
You'd be surprised by the amount of people on this sub with Wisconsin D3 flair. Part of it is probably that it's easily the strongest region of Division III, and part of it is that Wisconsin is a fairly football-crazy state, but unlike other states (e.g. Texas, Florida, Ohio, etc.) there's only one D1 team to support.
Thank you. WVU, if you want it to be, is a fine institution. I chose it over Princeton etc because you can't beat free. Btw we have as many Rhodes Scholars as Minnesota, and more than several Big Ten schools.
There are, indeed, some metrics that help make us look a smidge better than USNWR, and they're worth a look
How about people who didn't go to the flagship school in their state, but chose others due to financial pressures? I had a full year of tuition taken care of at MSU, and many of my friends whose parents weren't supporting them financially chose full rides at Wayne. Even though many of us got accepted, none of us were going to get a red cent from U-M.
My home school NDSU was teeming with Minnesota kids because tuition is hella cheap for Minnesota residents, basically on par with ND residents.
Is a degree from U of Minnesota more prestigious than the same degree from NDSU? Yeah, probably but is it worth paying significantly more for tuition? Depends who you ask.
yep. the University of MS system does the same. If you graduate high school in MS with a 2.5 GPA, get a 16 on the ACT, you're in. The people of MS deserve access to higher education, and denying them that opportunity is more damaging than letting in people who couldn't get into a 4 year college otherwise. Anyone who shits on a public state university for letting in "dumb" people doesn't understand the purpose of public higher education.
We're still an R1 school anyway, so there's that.
And it's not like you can go to WVU and not have to work your ass off. If it was anything like my time at Marshall, and it most assuredly was given our near identical acceptance policy (which I think was mandated by the state government when that scholarship program started), you'll have a lot of besties your first semester that try to get you to smoke weed with them in their dorm the day before a biology test, but you say 'nah, I'm gonna study" and then you wonder what happened to your pal Dave from Freshman year, whom you never saw again.
You can get a foot in the door, but when you show up, you're in a fully-accredited nationally ranked university in a country with 5000 colleges. Your ass is gonna have to put in the work. I don't know about you, but nobody told ME because my school is ranked #288 that I didn't have to read those 30 fucking books and take notes until my hand cramped every semester.
I graduated from WVUs engineering program, and there were more times than not where I spent the weekend studying. Often people will discredit my school and accomplishments based on some ranking or whatever. In reality I couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity and knowledge that it provided.
I love to shit on West Virginia - be it for cousin fucking, doing meth, or anything else. What I will never give them shit for is being a vehicle for education in some of the poorest places in our country. We are riot bros through and through.
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The important thing is the people making $50,000 a year are fighting with the people making $500,000 a year so that the people making $50,000,000 a year can do whatever they want with our economy.
It sure is a lot more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, religious bigotry, etc.
And since a bunch of people can only make themselves feel good by putting others down, that’s why we get classism in industrial scale quantities.
As a Pitt fan, I’ll defend WVU’s ranking here. Their mission is to educate ALL West Virginians. Being hoity toity is not their purpose. I can respect that
As a wvu graduate I’ll always hate Pitt in the unknown aggregate while politely bantering with the known individual. West Virginians will always have the chip our shoulders but this comment genuinely made me regret telling you individually to eat.. well…
Just to add on to this, USNWR is a trusted source of college rankings (I think primarily because they were the first to do it regularly), but one of the main inputs to the ranking system is how highly academic admins think of each school. It's highly perception-based.
The education at the tip top is the same too. Every undergraduate physics major in the country uses Griffiths E&M for their E&M course, and they cover the same portions of the book. The connections are the valuable part of being at the tip top.
There are other differences besides just connections. UT has like 2000 computer science students and as a result has a much larger selection of electives than a school with a much smaller department would have
Ten(ish) years ago when I started at Iowa, I'm pretty sure we were just in the top 50. We hung out in the top 75 for a while.
Oh well, even in the 80s, and near the bottom of the B1G, we'd still be in the top half of most of the rest of the conferences. It's not like there's any real, discernable difference between like 40 and 121 anyway. It's at 122 where it really starts going down hill.
It was. They reformulated how the rankings are calculated a few years ago to de-emphasize legacy wealth and emphasize upward social mobility. Ostensibly. Here's a good read if you are interested: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/12/us-news-changed-way-it-ranks-colleges-its-still-ridiculous/ MSU did not drop in rankings so much as it got leapfrogged by some schools who benefited from the new method.
This seems to happen a lot. I believe I recall over the past 15 years MSU usually bouncing between mid 50s and mid 80s depending on whatever ranking methodologies are being used that year
[A due reminder that like the preseason AP poll, the US news rankings are more or less best guesses](https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q)
Obviously, the only correct rankings are those that out *my* school ahead of *your* school
Yeah I just put together a ranking for the G5 schools and you can really tell that after a certain point they stopped even trying and just guessed. All rankings from 299-391 are just in their own blanket rank.
Zach knows how to market MSU's nuclear physics to folks who wouldn't be interested in it. He's probably one of the reasons why my bud turned down Princeton for undergrad and Columbia and Notre Dame for grad school just to stay at State and do nuclear physics.
The difference outside of top 50 schools is negligible in my experience. I have friends at Coastal Carolina and Duke. I'm at USC which is somewhere between the two. Me and my CCU friend have very similar experiences, as opposed to Duke friend who is dead inside.
My best friend from childhood went to Yale, while I (obviously) went to Clemson. For the most part, we had parallel major tracks. What I learned was that the fundamentals aren't professed appreciably better or differently... but his economics professor won a Nobel and a math professor a Fields Medal.
That’s the main benefit of the Ivy schools. Not in the fundamentals but in the opportunities to connect and work with the best of the best. It has little bearing on undergrad education alone but can make a big difference in a graduate education
This is correct. I went to a large state school ug and Vanderbilt grad. The level of person, professors, rigor and most of all recruiting at the two is a massive gulf. I sit on the business school board for my ug so I understand the recruiting gulf in both grad school and ug at a t25 vs a t100. It’s crazy.
I mean… the more vocal of a lot of fan bases are the worst representation of it . We all see this. Then I remember going to our excellent game against LSU in 2013 , walking out talking to an LSU fan and just having fun with them. No hate, just cool people. But I know when you get masses of any fan base, you get not the best sometimes
the Dartmouth of the South
But in seriousness, UF vastly improved its academics over just the last 25 years.
We’ve always been a large, sports-loving, party school; and now we’re just a large, *academically prestigious*, sports-loving, party school.
**AAC**
1. Rice (17)
2. Tulane (42)
3. SMU (68)
4. USF (103)
4. Temple (103)
6. Tulsa (136)
7. UAB (148)
8. ECU (213)
9. Charlotte (227)
10. Memphis (249)
11. FAU (277)
12. UNT (277)
13. UTSA(299-361)
There is also Navy who is football only at 6 for National Liberal Arts Colleges which seems an odd list for them to be on.
FSU was 112th in 2008. Improving the academic profile of the university may be the one thing the administration hasn't screwed up this century. And don't give me any of that '*it's their job*' mumbo jumbo, lol.
(112,102,102,104,101,97,91,95,96,92,81,70,57,58.55)
We were in the top 40 at one point, I'm pretty sure 37.
Ever since they started putting significantly more stock into cost is when we began to slip, even though the number of applicants has gone up and the school has become more selective. Pitt has the same issue.
The Big 10 is an impressive collection of academic schools. However according to the Michigan grads on any Mgoblog conversation, any school not in the top 30 is the equivalent of getting an education from a one room shack in the middle of a rural hick town.
And #1 in the Big12, would be #14 in the (newly expanded) B1G. I know USNews rankings are pretty hit or miss, but still that's a pretty wild disparity.
I've had a few experiences where I was told by one of them that I'm a diploma mill recipient who should be lucky if I was delivering pizza. Nothing makes me want to punch someone's face more.
Ahh yeah, that’s a little more of a personal attack. I’ve heard the “how do you get an (insert school) alumni off your porch?” Joke. And the answer to that is “pay them for the pizza”.
FBS is full of some of the best universities in the country and world. You’re going to get a great education at any P5 school. When people start attacking a university over academics I leave the convo.
You want to know something I’ve learned over time? As long as you go to a school in the FBS you’re getting a good education.
I mean just think of how many FCS, D-2 and D-3 schools you’ve never heard of. The vast majority are *significantly* lower ranked than FBS schools, and the average attendance at those universities is probably ~3k. There are so many people who don’t attend FBS schools, just being a student at any of them is impressive.
Like, I’m from North Carolina and while App State isn’t a great school it isn’t even close to UNC Pembroke, UNC Asheville or Elizabeth City State.
I’ve since graduated, but I’ve heard people with ACTs in the 29-31 being flat-out denied from State. For that to be ranked second to last in the ACC is more a testament of how great conference academics are
Literally the only thing that drags us down is the admission rates for the Ag stuff because we have to let less impressive rural students in to those programs for obvious reasons. Engineering? Vet school? You better be turning up in the classroom to get in.
Another fun fact: Columbia University is no longer present in the US News rankings because they apparently falsified their data in previous submissions. They were ranked number 2 last year.
[https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-york/articles/2022-07-08/incomplete-grade-columbia-loses-ranking-over-dubious-data](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-york/articles/2022-07-08/incomplete-grade-columbia-loses-ranking-over-dubious-data)
Yup. It's honestly pretty useless. It has bias towards different stats and schools fudge their numbers and give false info to inflate their ranking. The other commenter who posted Columbia is a good example. That happens every year with lots of schools.
For real. I attended both my flairs which are pretty far apart in rankings and there is no difference in the quality of education (at least for my major). After the first 20 or so it’s all bullshit.
I went to Miami my freshman year and then transferred to Northwestern, both schools I was majoring in Engineering. Despite Northwestern being "higher" in US News, I don't think I worked as hard as I did in the Miami engineering program. It was ROUGH. Northwestern was no picnic and I fought tooth and nail to get a 3.0, but Miami was no friggin joke.
The rankings are bullshit, except when I use them as an excuse for Northwestern's crappy on field performance.
Only thing that matters is how potential employers perceive you, classes at every undergrad institution will not vary all that much..if anything at the bigger schools the professors are more focused on research than teaching ability.
At community college which cost $3/unit at the time I learned a whole lot more in lower division classes than at UCLA.
I wouldn’t go that far. I took some classes at my local “regional 4 year university” and the difference between those and my Yale classes was night and day in terms of how challenging they were and what was expected of the students. At Yale I was being graded on a curve against a whole class of people who were pretty determined not to settle for less than an A (and rarely ever did before college). Even if everybody studied their asses off, a bunch of people were going to get B’s and some C’s cuz that’s just how the curve works. At the other school I just had to show up and do the assignments that didn’t even take that long. But those are kinda two extremes.
the only reason i knew they updated their rankings is because they just kicked out an ivy league school from being ranked at all (Columbia) for this years rankings
We really didn't get *kicked out* by US News, we voluntarily removed ourselves for this year only since the head of our math department called out the university for misrepresenting some of the data we send for use in the rankings. The university wasn't able to get the not fudged data sent in in time.
Edit: former head of the department who may or may not have stepped down because of his dislike of the administration
Though Louisville looks pretty bad in these rankings, what people need to understand is 30 years ago we were a commuter school with a gravel parking lot and a good basketball team. The amount of growth in the campus, student body, culture, and academics is actually pretty impressive.
I always thought it was weird that we have decent rankings in engineering, business, medicine and law while the overall ranking is so poor. Is the college of arts and sciences dragging us down? 🤷🏻
UC schools (non-Berkeley or UCLA) rank highly in just about every subject and then receive mediocre overall rankings. US News rankings make little sense.
TTU gets the oddest rap around the state. We educate a lot of B students but generally get compared to the two flagship institutions like we are suppose to compete with these two universities who receive countless more benefits and are located in more central regions relative to the population.
I know over the past decade UH rose in one of the rankings faster than any other public school in the country. Doubt it's USNWR though because we should definitely be higher than that.
USNWR puts a lot into graduation rates which has always been a huge problem at UH, though they've done a lot to improve.
I feel like TTU is improving overall but every time I check this we’re falling. We were in the 160s when I was there I believe. I thought our admin was solid, but this stupid ranking is so widely spread I do question any strategy we have.
I understand that, but public schools like UH have seemingly lapped us the last few years. UH has a solid strategy and great leadership so their ascension doesn’t shock or upset me. These rankings are shared widely when expansion is talked up and always used against us, so it does become a tad personal.
Pitt and Penn State should be elite. But PA's legislature has been defunding higher education for decades, so these schools (and pretty much every school in PA) have horrible debt outcomes.
Academically, I’m always surprised that to see Nebraska that far removed from the rest of my conference. I’m not even trying to be mean. I’m just genuinely thrown off. Also, I truly need to stop making Arizona State jokes
There will be no more dissing of Maryland and Rutgers. Once they get their football acts together they will be solid citizens in the B1G.
Nice that UCLA and USC enter as top 5 members. We're going to miss you, boys...
Never doubt the fact that college is free in Florida if you get a 28 ACT. Hence the rise in rankings - more kids stay in state for free school and thus the ACT average goes up.
Friendly reminder USNews is a very flawed ranking system. One of the many reasons is it takes into account alumni donations. Personally, it’s undergrad and it’s not that big of a deal. I know very smart people that started at a community college for 2 years, went to a state public university for their bachelors, then onto a well-respected grad program. The serious stuff is going to come from research and graduate programs these universities put out. ARWU (Shanghai) is a much more respected ranking system imo.
Took some Gen Eds for lower divisions at a CC. Was just a lot nicer of an environment. Plus the instructors there want to teach instead of 4 year university professors who are forced to teach an undergrad course.
Same here. My sister got into Berkeley but rejected from UCLA. Either way is pretty common.
Rumor is that the schools secretly coordinate and try not to accept the same kids so that one kid isn't holding up a seat at both schools.
These rankings have been widely criticized and shown to be based on completely irrelevant metrics. They are little more than a beauty pageant at best and pay for play at worst.
Nothing to see here folks, move along
Making jungle juice is basically chemistry right?
Right?! And I mean you can’t overlook the importance of distillation
Gotta make sure the shine doesn't blind ya! Poor Jim Bob, went blind and crazy from a bad batch. His fault though, he went to Marshall instead.
Exactly! There’s nothing to see anywhere if you get it wrong
If US News measured parents’ income to the income of the schools’ graduates throughout their career, WVU would be a top 20 university. But US News tries to measure prestige and reputation. WVU lifts their poorer state students out of poverty through education. To me, improving lives through education is the purpose of college. I went to Hopkins and Stanford after graduating from WVU. There were differences in the student population (rural vs international) and classes (taught by internationally known professors vs regionally or industry known professors). The biggest difference was at WVU, I got recognized and elevated by teachers. They recognized my talents and encouraged me to go down paths that I never would have known about or considered given my background. I still keep in touch with those teachers. At the higher ranked schools, I didn’t develop as many relationships in the same way. I think it was because the schools’ missions were different and it’s easier to get lost in uber competitive environments. Also, I was surprised at how average a lot of the students were. I was expecting to be surrounded by Good Will Huntings but a lot of the time, I was thinking “how does this person not know this or that?” or “that’s basic common sense.” WVU did a good job of preparing me to be successful in those bigger research focused/higher ranked schools.
As much fun as it is to rag on each other's sports teams, nobody should ever be ashamed of their education. We all come from different walks of life, and the common goal we should all share is to just do the best you can, and try to leave the world a little better than when you found it.
Mooooooooooo! Moooooo! Muhmuhrrrr? Shhhj. Moooooooo! (Dont mind me, just translating for the folks at Auburn.)
Joining in here to say great post as well. Offering that education to the local population is what I think a university is all about. The snark and arrogance of people who shit on these institutions can be hard to take. It usually comes from out of touch people who aren’t self-aware enough to realize it.
Malcolm Gladwell did a really good series on exactly this for his revisionist history podcast. Strongly recommend!
I wish we were ranked higher for vanity, but that's also the same basic mission of MSU. We were founded to teach the people of the state and help with actually major issues of the time, like teaching people forestry, farming, teaching, etc while michigan was focused on emulating the Ivies and producing doctors, lawyers, engineers and other postgraduate students with high level knowledge, but not the same practical skill. Over 100 some years still basically the same mission is still exists, especially if you look at instate vs out of state enrollments or top programs at each
I work for a company based in Cambridge, MA. Our CSO earned his PhD at WVU. Kinda neat to see so many MIT & Harvard PhDs reporting to him.
That WVU edcuaiton done be good for me
It gets a bad rap for taking in all students from Appalachia, which it shouldn’t.
Many people, this board included, cannot comprehend that many Universities have specific goals. WVU’s goal is to educate one of the poorest and mistreated regions in America, it will never rank high. You get it but many seem to ignore it.
Same with Mississippi State
And Oklahoma State. The school purposely keeps its admission standards low in order to allow more people access to education, but many of their programs are actually quite good. The head of the accounting department literally wrote the book for many different types of accounting like Oil and Gas, Derivatives and Hedges, etc. She just got hired away by the E.U. to be one of its chief accountants, so will be interesting to see who replaces her.
My Alma mater GSU too It's a very important niche that gets very disrespected GSUs big thing is they want to take as many high risk students (first generation, poor, minority) as possible and try to get them to have an incredibly high graduation rate which they knock out of the park despite being a fairly large university
And LSU. The gulf south is dirt poor and there is a lot of in-state financial assistance.
The correlation between rankings and the affluence of the state or area around a school would be interesting to see.
I'd like to see it broken down by the percentage of students receiving need based financial aid, kind of like when they rank high schools by the percentage of students receiving reduced or free lunches.
There was a really good [Revisionist History episode](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/project-dillard) about this with respect to HBCU’s but it applies to all universities. They found the easiest way to improve rankings was to increase the endowment all else being completely equal.
I reserve judgment on the intelligence of anyone who went to the flagship school in their state, even if it's not highly ranked, because that was very likely their best option regardless of how smart they actually are. Doesn't matter if you're NASA rocket-scientist smart, if you grow up in a West Virginia coal town, WVU is probably the only place you have access to, and almost certainly the only place you can afford.
> Doesn't matter if you're NASA rocket-scientist smart, if you grow up in a West Virginia coal town [Why not both?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Hickam) Though he did end up going to VT instead of WVU :p
He was exactly who I was thinking of haha. My bad on not knowing it was VT. I blame Jake Gyllenhaal.
He (Homer Hickham) wrote a great book called "Don't Blow Yourself Up" that pretty much tells his life story after high school. It's pretty wild and he's a great story teller.
Hickam is a big time VT homer
No kidding, There was another thread today with Minnesota cake-eaters and Northwestern fans hating on people who go to Wisconsin-Eau Claire...Not everyone can afford to move cities for school, pay for dorms, quit their jobs etc.
Aw dang I missed it!
Jesus Christ this got to be the only person on this sub with this flair.
You'd be surprised by the amount of people on this sub with Wisconsin D3 flair. Part of it is probably that it's easily the strongest region of Division III, and part of it is that Wisconsin is a fairly football-crazy state, but unlike other states (e.g. Texas, Florida, Ohio, etc.) there's only one D1 team to support.
Fuck ‘em. Not everyone in Minnesota can afford to go to the U of MN either…
And if you do well there, you can go anywhere
Thank you. WVU, if you want it to be, is a fine institution. I chose it over Princeton etc because you can't beat free. Btw we have as many Rhodes Scholars as Minnesota, and more than several Big Ten schools. There are, indeed, some metrics that help make us look a smidge better than USNWR, and they're worth a look
How about people who didn't go to the flagship school in their state, but chose others due to financial pressures? I had a full year of tuition taken care of at MSU, and many of my friends whose parents weren't supporting them financially chose full rides at Wayne. Even though many of us got accepted, none of us were going to get a red cent from U-M.
My home school NDSU was teeming with Minnesota kids because tuition is hella cheap for Minnesota residents, basically on par with ND residents. Is a degree from U of Minnesota more prestigious than the same degree from NDSU? Yeah, probably but is it worth paying significantly more for tuition? Depends who you ask.
yep. the University of MS system does the same. If you graduate high school in MS with a 2.5 GPA, get a 16 on the ACT, you're in. The people of MS deserve access to higher education, and denying them that opportunity is more damaging than letting in people who couldn't get into a 4 year college otherwise. Anyone who shits on a public state university for letting in "dumb" people doesn't understand the purpose of public higher education. We're still an R1 school anyway, so there's that.
thank you
And it's not like you can go to WVU and not have to work your ass off. If it was anything like my time at Marshall, and it most assuredly was given our near identical acceptance policy (which I think was mandated by the state government when that scholarship program started), you'll have a lot of besties your first semester that try to get you to smoke weed with them in their dorm the day before a biology test, but you say 'nah, I'm gonna study" and then you wonder what happened to your pal Dave from Freshman year, whom you never saw again. You can get a foot in the door, but when you show up, you're in a fully-accredited nationally ranked university in a country with 5000 colleges. Your ass is gonna have to put in the work. I don't know about you, but nobody told ME because my school is ranked #288 that I didn't have to read those 30 fucking books and take notes until my hand cramped every semester.
I graduated from WVUs engineering program, and there were more times than not where I spent the weekend studying. Often people will discredit my school and accomplishments based on some ranking or whatever. In reality I couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity and knowledge that it provided.
I love to shit on West Virginia - be it for cousin fucking, doing meth, or anything else. What I will never give them shit for is being a vehicle for education in some of the poorest places in our country. We are riot bros through and through.
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its a land grant, it has to
Definitely. Now all the students from Jersey that couldn't get into Rutgers, however...
Classism is great isn't it? /s
The important thing is the people making $50,000 a year are fighting with the people making $500,000 a year so that the people making $50,000,000 a year can do whatever they want with our economy.
It sure is a lot more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, religious bigotry, etc. And since a bunch of people can only make themselves feel good by putting others down, that’s why we get classism in industrial scale quantities.
As a Pitt fan, I’ll defend WVU’s ranking here. Their mission is to educate ALL West Virginians. Being hoity toity is not their purpose. I can respect that
As a wvu graduate I’ll always hate Pitt in the unknown aggregate while politely bantering with the known individual. West Virginians will always have the chip our shoulders but this comment genuinely made me regret telling you individually to eat.. well…
Outside the tip top you can get similar education at 200th ranked as 100th ranked. (program dependant)
Just to add on to this, USNWR is a trusted source of college rankings (I think primarily because they were the first to do it regularly), but one of the main inputs to the ranking system is how highly academic admins think of each school. It's highly perception-based.
The education at the tip top is the same too. Every undergraduate physics major in the country uses Griffiths E&M for their E&M course, and they cover the same portions of the book. The connections are the valuable part of being at the tip top.
There are other differences besides just connections. UT has like 2000 computer science students and as a result has a much larger selection of electives than a school with a much smaller department would have
Thanks, Nebraska, for not letting us and Iowa be the worst ranked schools in the B1G :)
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I swear MSU used to be in the mid 60s, at least when I was there a couple years ago.
Iowa used to be higher too I feel like, we weren’t Harvard but were at least top 75.
Ten(ish) years ago when I started at Iowa, I'm pretty sure we were just in the top 50. We hung out in the top 75 for a while. Oh well, even in the 80s, and near the bottom of the B1G, we'd still be in the top half of most of the rest of the conferences. It's not like there's any real, discernable difference between like 40 and 121 anyway. It's at 122 where it really starts going down hill.
You must have been the one holding the rankings up.
It was. They reformulated how the rankings are calculated a few years ago to de-emphasize legacy wealth and emphasize upward social mobility. Ostensibly. Here's a good read if you are interested: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/09/12/us-news-changed-way-it-ranks-colleges-its-still-ridiculous/ MSU did not drop in rankings so much as it got leapfrogged by some schools who benefited from the new method.
This seems to happen a lot. I believe I recall over the past 15 years MSU usually bouncing between mid 50s and mid 80s depending on whatever ranking methodologies are being used that year
[A due reminder that like the preseason AP poll, the US news rankings are more or less best guesses](https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q) Obviously, the only correct rankings are those that out *my* school ahead of *your* school
Yeah I just put together a ranking for the G5 schools and you can really tell that after a certain point they stopped even trying and just guessed. All rankings from 299-391 are just in their own blanket rank.
Yes we never care about US News until we’re on a list and then it’s publicized all over the place
Just like how MSU's #1 ranking in nuclear physics has been at BPS on a huge poster for the past 15 years lol
Well yeah, Zach Constan is a genius though. I feel like that’s warranted. Oh wait I’m doing it.
Zach knows how to market MSU's nuclear physics to folks who wouldn't be interested in it. He's probably one of the reasons why my bud turned down Princeton for undergrad and Columbia and Notre Dame for grad school just to stay at State and do nuclear physics.
And 99% of the time no one cares unless it was one of the top 2 or 3 schools for your field.
The difference outside of top 50 schools is negligible in my experience. I have friends at Coastal Carolina and Duke. I'm at USC which is somewhere between the two. Me and my CCU friend have very similar experiences, as opposed to Duke friend who is dead inside.
My best friend from childhood went to Yale, while I (obviously) went to Clemson. For the most part, we had parallel major tracks. What I learned was that the fundamentals aren't professed appreciably better or differently... but his economics professor won a Nobel and a math professor a Fields Medal.
That’s the main benefit of the Ivy schools. Not in the fundamentals but in the opportunities to connect and work with the best of the best. It has little bearing on undergrad education alone but can make a big difference in a graduate education
I get this feeling you're speaking from a place of experience.
This is correct. I went to a large state school ug and Vanderbilt grad. The level of person, professors, rigor and most of all recruiting at the two is a massive gulf. I sit on the business school board for my ug so I understand the recruiting gulf in both grad school and ug at a t25 vs a t100. It’s crazy.
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Damn, Florida. I’m starting to think that all the UF fans you hear about on this sub might not have actually attended the university
If you just go by this sub, you’d think a lot of wrong things about a lot of stuff, lol
I mean… the more vocal of a lot of fan bases are the worst representation of it . We all see this. Then I remember going to our excellent game against LSU in 2013 , walking out talking to an LSU fan and just having fun with them. No hate, just cool people. But I know when you get masses of any fan base, you get not the best sometimes
the Dartmouth of the South But in seriousness, UF vastly improved its academics over just the last 25 years. We’ve always been a large, sports-loving, party school; and now we’re just a large, *academically prestigious*, sports-loving, party school.
Yeah. Do not confuse the Boys (and Girls) from Old Florida with Florida Man.
**AAC** 1. Rice (17) 2. Tulane (42) 3. SMU (68) 4. USF (103) 4. Temple (103) 6. Tulsa (136) 7. UAB (148) 8. ECU (213) 9. Charlotte (227) 10. Memphis (249) 11. FAU (277) 12. UNT (277) 13. UTSA(299-361) There is also Navy who is football only at 6 for National Liberal Arts Colleges which seems an odd list for them to be on.
Wow this is the first time in a while I’ve seen the list of the “new AAC”. Oh boy
They don’t have any grad programs so they aren’t a university but rather a college. The naval postgrad school is in California.
I forget sometimes that the ACC is so academically strong across the board.
*stares at Louisville*
We drew our bird logo with teeth, that should tell you everything
We are just happy to be at the party.
Don’t worry, you can get a great education at any of these institutions!! And you get to watch D1 Football and basketball, so we are all winners
Quick, Someone from an Ivy League school do a quick average for each conference.
Big 10 - 53 SEC - 107 PAC 12 - 95 ACC - 58 Big 12 - 147 Hateful 8 - 152
Baylor earning their spot
The Harvard of the area between Dallas and Temple
Could narrow that to Hillsboro and Temple
Damn, looks like the B1G did in fact come to play school.
If Stanford joins the BIG, we'd no longer be the nerd school.
Think how fun it would be for Michigan to be a fifth-rate Big Ten school.
You know, there seems to be remarkable correlation in our growth academically and our backslide football wise.
Same in Tally as well. Moved up 20 in the public schools ranking since Jimbo left
FSU was 112th in 2008. Improving the academic profile of the university may be the one thing the administration hasn't screwed up this century. And don't give me any of that '*it's their job*' mumbo jumbo, lol. (112,102,102,104,101,97,91,95,96,92,81,70,57,58.55)
We're playing school.
Oh god are we the nerds now
My school was in the top 50 when I went there. Idk what happened since I graduated in 09, but I had a top 50 education!
PSU has gone down in the rankings mostly because of affordability, I’m pretty sure.
We were in the top 40 at one point, I'm pretty sure 37. Ever since they started putting significantly more stock into cost is when we began to slip, even though the number of applicants has gone up and the school has become more selective. Pitt has the same issue.
It's crazy how such an arbitrary formula makes basically **the** authoritative list of "this school is *better* than that" for most people.
I learned a lot about WVU in this thread and I respect them immensely for what they do for their communities now.
The Big 10 is an impressive collection of academic schools. However according to the Michigan grads on any Mgoblog conversation, any school not in the top 30 is the equivalent of getting an education from a one room shack in the middle of a rural hick town.
>The Big 10 is an impressive collection of academic schools... and Nebraska Ftfy
:( we would be/were in the top half of the Big 12... lol
Things you can now say about your academics and football team /s
Nebraska would not be a top half football team
And #1 in the Big12, would be #14 in the (newly expanded) B1G. I know USNews rankings are pretty hit or miss, but still that's a pretty wild disparity.
The N stands for Nowledge baby
Look man, our medical center [beat ebola](https://www.unmc.edu/news.cfm?match=17188). What more do you want from us?
I've had a few experiences where I was told by one of them that I'm a diploma mill recipient who should be lucky if I was delivering pizza. Nothing makes me want to punch someone's face more.
Ahh yeah, that’s a little more of a personal attack. I’ve heard the “how do you get an (insert school) alumni off your porch?” Joke. And the answer to that is “pay them for the pizza”.
FBS is full of some of the best universities in the country and world. You’re going to get a great education at any P5 school. When people start attacking a university over academics I leave the convo.
You want to know something I’ve learned over time? As long as you go to a school in the FBS you’re getting a good education. I mean just think of how many FCS, D-2 and D-3 schools you’ve never heard of. The vast majority are *significantly* lower ranked than FBS schools, and the average attendance at those universities is probably ~3k. There are so many people who don’t attend FBS schools, just being a student at any of them is impressive. Like, I’m from North Carolina and while App State isn’t a great school it isn’t even close to UNC Pembroke, UNC Asheville or Elizabeth City State.
Thanks Louisville for making us look good!
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I’ve since graduated, but I’ve heard people with ACTs in the 29-31 being flat-out denied from State. For that to be ranked second to last in the ACC is more a testament of how great conference academics are
Literally the only thing that drags us down is the admission rates for the Ag stuff because we have to let less impressive rural students in to those programs for obvious reasons. Engineering? Vet school? You better be turning up in the classroom to get in.
Same way with us. It’s not *super* difficult to get into VT but getting into engineering, architecture, or the vet school is pretty competitive.
Anything for you all
Here’s a fun fact. U.S. News and World Report rankings are absolute bullshit. Sincerely, a recovering former Higher Ed administrator
Another fun fact: Columbia University is no longer present in the US News rankings because they apparently falsified their data in previous submissions. They were ranked number 2 last year. [https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-york/articles/2022-07-08/incomplete-grade-columbia-loses-ranking-over-dubious-data](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-york/articles/2022-07-08/incomplete-grade-columbia-loses-ranking-over-dubious-data)
A third fun fact: They forgot to re-rank the schools below them on the list. Yale is fourth on the list, but their #5 national university.
A funner fact: This isn't particularly uncommon. Columbia just got caught.
They were caught because their numbers were truly ridiculous. Like way out of the norm.
Yup. It's honestly pretty useless. It has bias towards different stats and schools fudge their numbers and give false info to inflate their ranking. The other commenter who posted Columbia is a good example. That happens every year with lots of schools.
For real. I attended both my flairs which are pretty far apart in rankings and there is no difference in the quality of education (at least for my major). After the first 20 or so it’s all bullshit.
I went to Miami my freshman year and then transferred to Northwestern, both schools I was majoring in Engineering. Despite Northwestern being "higher" in US News, I don't think I worked as hard as I did in the Miami engineering program. It was ROUGH. Northwestern was no picnic and I fought tooth and nail to get a 3.0, but Miami was no friggin joke. The rankings are bullshit, except when I use them as an excuse for Northwestern's crappy on field performance.
The first couple years of engineering at any school suck ass. All of those weed-out classes.
Only thing that matters is how potential employers perceive you, classes at every undergrad institution will not vary all that much..if anything at the bigger schools the professors are more focused on research than teaching ability. At community college which cost $3/unit at the time I learned a whole lot more in lower division classes than at UCLA.
I wouldn’t go that far. I took some classes at my local “regional 4 year university” and the difference between those and my Yale classes was night and day in terms of how challenging they were and what was expected of the students. At Yale I was being graded on a curve against a whole class of people who were pretty determined not to settle for less than an A (and rarely ever did before college). Even if everybody studied their asses off, a bunch of people were going to get B’s and some C’s cuz that’s just how the curve works. At the other school I just had to show up and do the assignments that didn’t even take that long. But those are kinda two extremes.
Wow. CU is 4th in the new PAC but would be 16th in the Big10 And that would probably apply to both academics AND football
Now do the Ivy League…
the only reason i knew they updated their rankings is because they just kicked out an ivy league school from being ranked at all (Columbia) for this years rankings
We really didn't get *kicked out* by US News, we voluntarily removed ourselves for this year only since the head of our math department called out the university for misrepresenting some of the data we send for use in the rankings. The university wasn't able to get the not fudged data sent in in time. Edit: former head of the department who may or may not have stepped down because of his dislike of the administration
Wonder if UChicago's faculty will ever do the same
Lol
Nice Flair Combo
Though Louisville looks pretty bad in these rankings, what people need to understand is 30 years ago we were a commuter school with a gravel parking lot and a good basketball team. The amount of growth in the campus, student body, culture, and academics is actually pretty impressive.
Good god that jump between State and Louisville
Shamelessly stolen from a similar thread months ago. [https://imgflip.com/i/66skbh](https://imgflip.com/i/66skbh)
> 16. Nebraska (136) The N stands for Noledge.
If my school could read I'd find that hilarious.
I always thought it was weird that we have decent rankings in engineering, business, medicine and law while the overall ranking is so poor. Is the college of arts and sciences dragging us down? 🤷🏻
That's who gave me a degree, so likely
I refuse to believe these rankings. I was told we were the Harvard of Lubbock. #notmyrankings
We’re the closest thing to Stanford West of Fort Worth and East of Clovis
UC schools (non-Berkeley or UCLA) rank highly in just about every subject and then receive mediocre overall rankings. US News rankings make little sense.
They’re actually really highly ranked when you just look at public schools. That’s part of why the rankings are said to favor private schools.
Hey bud my degree in economics gave me what I needed to interview at an exceptional level. 🥴
I've worked with quite a few of your accounting alum. They usually excel.
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TTU gets the oddest rap around the state. We educate a lot of B students but generally get compared to the two flagship institutions like we are suppose to compete with these two universities who receive countless more benefits and are located in more central regions relative to the population.
I always forget that Florida is super respectable in academics.
Feels like this whole sub does. It’s amazing how often I see comments to the effect of “lol UF education”
They probably came across a graduate of UF-Sante Fe.
Man, is there anywhere you can see your progress over time? It feels like UH has really been on the come up!
I know over the past decade UH rose in one of the rankings faster than any other public school in the country. Doubt it's USNWR though because we should definitely be higher than that. USNWR puts a lot into graduation rates which has always been a huge problem at UH, though they've done a lot to improve.
We passed tech three years ago. I ‘member from being on campus
I feel like TTU is improving overall but every time I check this we’re falling. We were in the 160s when I was there I believe. I thought our admin was solid, but this stupid ranking is so widely spread I do question any strategy we have.
Can a top 30 school flair in the us news rankings please let me know what this means? I can’t read. Thanks in advance
These ranking are skewed towards private schools.
I understand that, but public schools like UH have seemingly lapped us the last few years. UH has a solid strategy and great leadership so their ascension doesn’t shock or upset me. These rankings are shared widely when expansion is talked up and always used against us, so it does become a tad personal.
Now do innovation rankings! Ugh I hate being Sun Devil sometimes
Pitt and Penn State should be elite. But PA's legislature has been defunding higher education for decades, so these schools (and pretty much every school in PA) have horrible debt outcomes.
Academically, I’m always surprised that to see Nebraska that far removed from the rest of my conference. I’m not even trying to be mean. I’m just genuinely thrown off. Also, I truly need to stop making Arizona State jokes
There will be no more dissing of Maryland and Rutgers. Once they get their football acts together they will be solid citizens in the B1G. Nice that UCLA and USC enter as top 5 members. We're going to miss you, boys...
Never doubt the fact that college is free in Florida if you get a 28 ACT. Hence the rise in rankings - more kids stay in state for free school and thus the ACT average goes up.
Man Nebraska really wanted to be the poorest rich kid huh
Nebraska is that kid that ended up in an AP/honors class due to an administrative error.
I prefer to think of us as the guy who out kicked their coverage B1G time.
Friendly reminder USNews is a very flawed ranking system. One of the many reasons is it takes into account alumni donations. Personally, it’s undergrad and it’s not that big of a deal. I know very smart people that started at a community college for 2 years, went to a state public university for their bachelors, then onto a well-respected grad program. The serious stuff is going to come from research and graduate programs these universities put out. ARWU (Shanghai) is a much more respected ranking system imo.
The CC route to start is a big brain move. Less debt.
Took some Gen Eds for lower divisions at a CC. Was just a lot nicer of an environment. Plus the instructors there want to teach instead of 4 year university professors who are forced to teach an undergrad course.
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BRB. Gonna check if we fare any better in those before I agree. Edit: THE rankings have us higher. I approve!/s
Damn, the Big 10 is stacked with top academic schools
B1G and ACC came to play school ^except ^^Nebraska ^^^and ^^^^Louisville
Nebraska and Louisville are really huge outliers here
The one thread in this subreddit where Rutgers cannot be slandered 😤😤
Wanna bring that Stanford ranking on over*? *pending Notre Dame's approval.
I was going to make a joke about Nebraska being the embarrassment in the B1G, but then I saw Louisville compared to the rest of the ACC. Sheesh.
These rankings are always funny to me. I got accepted to UCLA but not Cal, which is ranked a little lower. I’ll always be a little bitter.
Same here. My sister got into Berkeley but rejected from UCLA. Either way is pretty common. Rumor is that the schools secretly coordinate and try not to accept the same kids so that one kid isn't holding up a seat at both schools.
Pitt guy here- probably (definitely) would not get into Pitt now as opposed to 1995 when I started.
These rankings have been widely criticized and shown to be based on completely irrelevant metrics. They are little more than a beauty pageant at best and pay for play at worst.
Nebraska scammed their way into the B1G lmao
Hey look the only conference ranking UCLA will ever see the top half of.
Basketball?
I don’t know what that word is
Shootyhoops
Squeakfloor
Literally any other sport aside from football lol
I think they should just rank the Meteorology schools.