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Post by longsuffering on Feb 22, 2022 10:42:06 GMT -5
The Hamilton Post Office must groan when the sacks of rejection letters arrive on their small loading dock. Somehow Colgate branded itself as being as close to Ivy you can get without actually getting into an Ivy. It will be interesting to see how PVR maneuvers to scoot past some of the fine institutions above us in the USNWR national liberal arts rankings. As nimbly as a Kyrell Luc drive to the basket I hope. I agree with much of this but would add that Colgate’s significant application overlap with a few Ivies (Dartmouth and Cornell, for example) is one we’ll never see (for obvious reasons). And certainly the fact we’re in the same sports league as Colgate and are the same size and the same undergraduate liberal arts focus does not mean we have a significant application overlap with Colgate (we don’t). Focusing on HC for a moment, others have correctly noted that our name and very obvious Catholic identity are increasingly limiting factors in the context of today’s applicant numbers. Further, our strict focus on undergraduate liberal arts is another increasingly limiting aspect for those eyeballing Catholic schools. Taken together, those two forces are QUITE a challenge in the context of attracting and enrolling the quantity and quality of applicants necessary to regain our academic reputation. (This is not to suggest Catholic schools in general are not up to the challenge and this is not to say undergraduate liberal arts schools in general are not up to the challenge. Clearly Notre Dame, BC and Nova are doing fine - - as are Colby and Colgate.) It's going to be easier for Kyrell Luc to help us scoot past the 350 or so D-1 MBB teams ahead of us than it is for PVR to help us scoot past the 25-30 or so national liberal arts schools ahead of us, but the fun is in the chase so let the race begin.
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Post by sader1970 on Feb 22, 2022 11:22:33 GMT -5
I know you’re joking. But you know as well as I that we were there once before in the top 25 but ran a string of presidents who didn’t think it was important to do “the necessaries.” We have one now.
[edit: On re-reading your post L/S, if you mean be the #1 national liberal arts college, not just the top 25, you have a talking point that I missed the first time. Keeping the sports theme, we do have a better chance being the #1 football FCS national champ than #1 liberal arts college.]
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Post by mm67 on Feb 22, 2022 11:56:33 GMT -5
I remember a time very early in the USNWR popularity contest. HC was ranked at 18. Naively, I had expected HC to move uo to the top 10. AS others have learned to game the rankings more effectively than HC, the school's ranking has gone down. Case & Birnbaum at one time the Bible of school evaluations had HC rated at their highest Most Selective +. Their metrics were different than USNWR, a failing publication which juiced up the field of rankings. Whatever, USNWR has captured the public's imagination. College counselors who I know, do not place much credence in USNWR rankings but have had to bend to the wishes of parents & their children. No doubt HC will shortly move up in the rankings. Everyone will be happy & proud. The school needs to diversify out of the ethnic oft times bigoted Catholic ethnic bubble. This has been a main point of my communications to the school over many decades starting with the great Fr. Brooks. And, we agreed about the need for increased diversity. May God Bless his beautiful soul.
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Post by longsuffering on Feb 22, 2022 13:11:34 GMT -5
I know you’re joking. But you know as well as I that we were there once before in the top 25 but ran a string of presidents who didn’t think it was important to do “the necessaries.” We have one now. [edit: On re-reading your post L/S, if you mean be the #1 national liberal arts college, not just the top 25, you have a talking point that I missed the first time. Keeping the sports theme, we do have a better chance being the #1 football FCS national champ than #1 liberal arts college.] I mentioned 350 D-1 schools ahead of us, but I wasn't thinking #1 overall in either BB or the USNWR rankings. Your mention of FB does make sense where we have an outside shot at #1. Because the path to move up significantly in sports is less complicated than in academics (more transparent in sports, you are what your record says you are) it's good that PVR and TPTB have gotten firmly behind Coach Chesney's push towards excellence. Academics can be a deep confusing maze for the public to evaluate and public perception turns almost generationally slowly, so let Sports be the front door of the college and keep the porch light on to welcome people in.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Feb 22, 2022 13:36:08 GMT -5
Success in sports always helps raise a school's visibility. Beyond that, the days of a college sitting in its ivory tower patting itself on the back over it's wonderful academics are over. You need some real world marketing, outreach, creative thinking. I'm extremely confident that PVR gets it and that he will return HC to top 25 status. As artificial as these rankings are people look at them and they become self-sustaining. I marvel at what Northeastern has done, basically deconstructing the USNWR rankings and shamelessly gaming each component; boy, did it work.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Feb 28, 2022 9:11:51 GMT -5
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Post by Chu Chu on Mar 7, 2022 18:55:45 GMT -5
Interesting. It seems that the lack of transparency that alumni experience (my impression) is something that other constituencies have also felt. I already sense quite a difference under President Rougeau.
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Post by mm67 on Mar 7, 2022 19:31:21 GMT -5
"A lack of clarity"?" "Severe & potentially debilitating trust issue"? As per Chu Chu a "lack of transparency"? These are extremely serious critiques of HC I don't get it. Is it due to decades of entrenched poor administrators. Is it cultural? In the long ago past I used to joke about the black smoke/white smoke emanating from Mother Kimball before announcing the selection of a new HC president to the city and to the world. Maybe, I wasn't far off. If HC wants to rejoin the front ranks of American higher education, it is going to have to change in many areas and this change must come from the inside out.
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Post by Crucis#1 on Mar 7, 2022 21:21:24 GMT -5
It’s been a trend for over 25 years.
Hope that PVR is not just a breath of fresh air, but a gale force wind to usher needed change on Mahogany Row.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Mar 8, 2022 7:34:01 GMT -5
Several observations: > The members of the accrediting commission. I took note of the significant number of provosts who are members. www.neche.org/about-neche/the-commission/[/urll]> The review was done in 2020, a time when the academic environment was greatly disrupted. The usual channels of communication were upended, with so many working partly / mostly / entirely from home.. > The college may have become a nest of organizational silos, with little integration and poor communication between them. > The 'governance' problem was considered to be so serious that the commission has scheduled a follow-up evaluation in 2023 devoted entirely to what the college did to correct it.
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Post by timholycross on Mar 8, 2022 8:11:12 GMT -5
It was abundantly "clear" that there was no "shared governance" under Father Brooks! Overall, the college thrived under his leadership.
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Post by princetoncrusader on Mar 8, 2022 9:49:28 GMT -5
Getting back to the USNWR rankings, there was a fascinating piece in the on-line WSJ yesterday, by columnist James Freeman called "What Happened to Sportsmanship" . The first part of the column focuses on the final game of coach K. The second part was about a story in the Daily News about how Columbia Univ. appears to be gaming the rankings:
While this column is on the subject of reviewing media narratives about academic institutions, a Columbia professor is questioning his own university’s high ranking in a widely quoted assessment. Michael Elsen-Rooney reports in the New York Daily News:
A Columbia University math professor took his red pen to the numbers that vaulted his school to a second-place ranking on the U.S. News and World Report list of best colleges — and argues the digits don’t add up. In a lengthy article posted last week, Columbia math professor Michael Thaddeus sifted through data the university provided to U.S. News for its annual rankings and concluded “several of the key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.” ... Columbia spokesman Scott Schell said the university “stand by the data we provided to U.S. News and World Report.” The university quarrels with a number of the professor’s arguments but one in particular may be difficult to rebut. Mr. Elsen-Rooney reports:
Thaddeus was... suspicious of the eye-popping $3.1 billion the university claimed to spend on “instruction” during the 2019-20 school year — another metric in the U.S. News rankings. “This is a truly colossal amount of money,” he wrote. “It is larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.” Combing through the university’s financial records, Thaddeus concluded that Columbia’s $3.1 billion number must have also included the cost of providing patient care in the university’s hospitals — an expense he argues would be a stretch to classify as “instructional.” Other universities, including NYU, explicitly left the cost of patient care out of the sum they reported spending on instruction, Thaddeus added. Columbia officials didn’t explain how they arrived at the $3.1 billion figure. According to the Daily News report, the Columbia prof isn’t just criticizing his own institution over the lofty ranking:
“If the institution in second place is shown to have inaccuracies, that really sheds some doubt on the value of the entire rankings,” Thaddeus said, adding that the magazine “should be vetting the tops schools very thoroughly.” U.S. News chief data strategist Robert Morse said “we rely on schools to accurately report their data and ask academic officials to verify that data.” The professor writes a lengthy analysis on the Columbia website which reads in part:
A selling point of the U.S. News rankings is that they claim to be based largely on uniform, objective figures like graduation rates and test scores. Twenty percent of an institution’s ranking is based on a “peer assessment survey” in which college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans are asked to rate other institutions, but the remaining 80% is based entirely on numerical data collected by the institution itself. Some of this is reported by colleges and universities to the government under Federal law, some of it is voluntarily released by these institutions to the public, and some of it is provided directly to U.S. News... Can we be sure that the data accurately reflect the reality of life within the university? Regrettably, the answer is no.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Mar 8, 2022 10:11:38 GMT -5
A guy I worked with many years ago had worked in administration at a well-regarded ACC school in the South. He said that school lied on the data it reported to USN&WR and laughed and said "all schools do".
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Post by mm67 on Mar 8, 2022 10:52:03 GMT -5
Unlike some, for many years, I have seriously questioned the validity of these money making rankings. In discussions with various academics two areas of concern were mentioned. 1. Instructional support. Clearly this metric favors schools which are in high cost areas such as NYC, Boston. Also, it penalizes schools which keep expenses relatively low, run a tight ship. Efficiency is penalized. 2. The peer assessment survey is an open door to bias and encourages old boy networking. Basing 20% of a school's ranking on peers assessment truly distorts the results. Also, there is the whole question of course offerings, athletics which are used to increase applications without any real benefit to the quality of academics. The correlation between applications and academics is specious. Correlation is not cause & effect. Additionally, I have discussed the USNWR with various HS college advisors. Universally, they are skeptical of its validity. "Niche" "Princeton Review" and others are simply dismissed as ridiculous. Nonetheless, through smart and in my view misleading marketing, these rankings are quite popular. No doubt there are some of the unknowledgeable who will continue to blindly trumpet public rankings.
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Post by Chu Chu on Mar 8, 2022 13:36:29 GMT -5
I think that the biggest flaw of the USN&WR rankings is that "reputation" counts for 25% of the score. It could not be more subjective and prone to inertia.
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Post by hcpride on Mar 8, 2022 14:01:37 GMT -5
USN&WR currently lists Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago as the top 7 National Universities. Doesn’t sound completely nutty.
Of course, college rankings such as these have an element of subjectivity and they are not gospel and they can be ‘gamed’.
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Post by princetoncrusader on Mar 8, 2022 17:06:00 GMT -5
Agree with you, HCpride on the reasonableness of the ranking as well as your second point. Back when FV was interim president, I recall him saying at a PC event that there was a degree of anti-Catholic bias in higher education in regard to these rankings. I doubt that has changed much since then and may even have gotten worse.
As an aside, a few months ago I got an email from Northwestern noting the university's 9th place ranking in the USNWR poll. So it seems clear that some schools, even top ones, care about these rankings.
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Post by mm67 on Mar 18, 2022 16:22:13 GMT -5
Today's on-line New York Times(3/18) has an interesting piece, "US News Ranked Columbia No.2, Math Professor Has His Doubts" by Anemona Hartocollis, Mar. 17 in the News Subsection. I don't know how to place it on this site. It is well worth the read.
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Post by lou on Mar 18, 2022 16:26:45 GMT -5
Today's on-line New York Times has an interesting piece, "US News Ranked Columbia No.2, Math Professor Has His Doubts" by Anemona Hartocollis, Mar. 17 in the News Subsection. I don't know how to place it on this site. It is well worth the read. NYTimes: U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts nyti.ms/3IjiPHM
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Post by mm67 on Mar 18, 2022 16:28:08 GMT -5
Today's on-line New York Times has an interesting piece, "US News Ranked Columbia No.2, Math Professor Has His Doubts" by Anemona Hartocollis, Mar. 17 in the News Subsection. I don't know how to place it on this site. It is well worth the read. NYTimes: U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts nyti.ms/3IjiPHMWow! I am truly impressed.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Mar 18, 2022 16:28:25 GMT -5
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