You can find various lists of universities by the salaries of their graduates, either starting salaries or mid-career salaries. Those lists include the ones like MIT or Caltech (or Rensselaer) that graduate lots of engineering and science majors. There may even be lists that compare the cost of attendance to the expected salaries, to see which are the best bargains.
MIT was excluded because it didn’t have a football team at the time. The other two were probably too far away.
It would be good if there were a list of colleges ranked by the percent of graduates working in their chosen field within, say, 2 years. Or another metric measuring how long it takes recent grads to earn the amount equivalent to the total cost of the degree. Something more practical than having world-renown professors or nice facilities.
If they cure a disease, I consider that university to be a great one for the next generation of two. The Salk polio vaccine was enough for me to think that the University of Pittsburgh must be good, but now they, IMHO, ruined their reputation for science by starting up a chiropractic school.
Wherever Albert Einstein taught is likely to be good. Seriously. His teaching there helped attract other good physicists who taught the next generations of excellent researchers.
As for undergraduate education (and, in the U.S., sports), they need that to build up a donor community funding their research mission. Sports may lose money, but the kind of alumni, who still go to the games – or at least wish they had time to – are donors.
Serious high school students may think that they are picking a school on the basis of how good the teaching is. But if it wasn’t for some long-ago research home run, they never would have heard of the school.
Less serious high school students, who apply to places that earn national football or basketball titles, may better understand what their parents are buying for them.
I also believe some smaller liberal arts colleges excel in a specific area - often related to local employer needs. For example, I recall reading that one tiny college excelled in some insurance-related field of study - maybe actuary. With excellent placement stats.
Regarding the OP, and seeing from inside from a very sought-after department within a fairly famous school, I have a couple of things to add.
First off, my department is very aware of, and sensitive to, the relative rankings of the school, department, and other aspects. They cite a number of public rankings including (partial list) US News, QS and even “Shanghai Rankings.” The school itself is “top 8 public school” in the US, the department is like top 3 in the nation for its undergrad program, etc. But what are these rankings? They seem to be an odd mixture of subjective and objective stuff that isn’t really factual or the truth, but people still believe it–so it matters to us.
Second, we really do have some good people on the faculty, staff and particularly, students. One of the only controls we’ve got to throttle the number of incoming students every semester is GPA, and entrance requirement is set way up at 3.9 / 4.0, whatever that really means. This applies only to this department, as I understand it. There are of course other criteria for even getting admitted to this school, such as being super motivated and involved in a variety of activities outside of the classroom. When I heard that the requirements for being a student in my department had gone even higher, while the total number of students kept climbing, I figured we were in for a treat. It’s always fun to work with higher quality students.
A good university must have a solid reputation, a good sense of itself, a majority of high quality people everywhere you turn, and (my take) have enough graduates to make a tangible footprint / impact on the world.
Wealth of the undergraduate class is usually the biggest indicator of the reputation of “good” university.
Basically, are you surrounded by rich kids? If yes, then the university is considered good.
Wealth = exclusive = good
You may be right. But being able to understand and apply 3D rotational math or complex thermodynamics theory is a different kind of exclusive.
Or, from a less mercenary perspective, the percentage of graduates leading happy, fulfilled lives. Universities are not trade schools.
Very well stated (as I’d expect from an esteemed faculty member of such a fine institution! ;))
How good of a predictor/measure do you consider HS GPA? I presume you do not consider GPAs independent of the school they come from. For that matter, do you perceive any grade inflation at your college? In another thread, folk discussed the stresses related to grade attainment. Do you feel that an issue for incoming and current students?
Thanks for your perspective.
When I was applying to colleges forty years ago, the admissions staff at the colleges were familiar with how various high schools graded, in terms of how GPAs compared from one school to another. I think they even knew that certain teachers were tough graders, or others were easy ones.
(BTW, when I was in high school and considering where to attend college, the guidance counselor was able to advise where to apply, so that I could safely expect to be admitted to these schools, while others I might not be accepted, but I should try anyhow (“stretches”) and a couple in the middle. I don’t know if they still do that for students today.)
I don’t know about in Germany, but in the US Einstein never taught. He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, not Princeton. (Though it is close to Princeton.) It was very rare for people to be at both places, my academic grandfather John von Neumann is the only one I can think of.
Not to mention that brilliance in a field is not the same as being a great teacher in the field.
The reason that MIT didn’t have a football team was that someone got injured playing in 1899 and they decided it was a bad idea. If they have one now it never makes the alumni news. They did have a champion tiddly wink team the year before I got there, though.
Scorn for the new school at Pitt is undeserved. It will be evidence based and clinical science centric.
… Major drivers of this program include an accumulation of scientific evidence showing that chiropractic care is a safe and effective approach to the treatment of pain and the important role it can play in mitigating opioid use for back and neck pain through nonopioid interventions,” said Michael Schneider, a professor in SHRS and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Pitt, who will be the program’s acting director…
[from pittwire.pitt.edu]
They actually do; the current iteration of MIT football began play as a club sport in 1978, and became a varsity sport in 1987. They compete in Division III (as do most of MIT’s varsity sports teams), and play in the NEWMAC conference.
The UK ranking systems attempt this, and shows rankings by a whole load of different metrics, however, it’s got some obvious flaws.
I’ve attended multiple universties, including an agricultural university. They loudly boast that they have one of the highest rates of student employment in their sector of any university in the UK!!
Of course, most of them are already working in the sector before they start, because they were the kids who were training to take over the family farm, and most of 'em go back to working on the same farms, but…
The same place also ranked the ‘student experience’ really highly.
Ye gods that place had a terrible student union. There was no beer in the student bar. Really, none. All they had was these pre-mixed artifical fruit flavour things, which were foul. There were also almost no student societies, and those which did exist were more than 10 x the cost of the equivalent at other universities. It was cheaper to join the hot air ballooning society, or SCUBA society at my previous uni than it was to join the board games society there.
But… most of those doing the rankings were farm kids. They didn’t have to get up at 5am! They could stay up late, and there was even an -extraordinarily bad- nightclub in the nearby town! There were people to hang round with in the evenings that they weren’t actually related to! It was great!
How many students actually study at enough different universities to meaningfully compare stuff like the teaching standards anyway?
They do have one now. And because of the recent focus on traumatic brain injury, they are talking about eliminating it again. Who knows, maybe they even will.
I think a hundred years ago, the Ivy League schools were nationally competitive in (American) football and in the years before that, they were defining the game. Later, I think they stopped offering football scholarships and really aren’t thought of as football powerhouses. Plus the intersection of those who can play football at a national level and are academically qualified for the Ivy League or MIT is tiny. Perhaps non-existent.
There are a few modern (i.e., Super Bowl era) examples of guys who played football at an Ivy, and then had significant NFL careers: quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick (Harvard), fullback Kyle Juszczyk (Harvard), linebacker Zak DeOssie (Brown), center Matt Birk (Harvard), safety Gary Fencik (Yale), kicker Nick Lowery (Dartmouth), and punter/wide receiver Pat McInally (Harvard), but not many more.
Another I remember is Rich Diana of Yale, though (Googling) only one season with the Miami Dolphins. His fallback position? Orthopedic surgery.
Great question. I am not sure what this 3.9 refers to, so I’ll try to find out. High schools vary across the country and internationally, and not everyone has the same grading scale, so some kind of conversion factors would be needed. Better would be looking at a student’s performance during first year engineering (FYE) classes, where they learn most of their math, physics, chem, drafting, coding…things they’ll need once the real engineering classes begin. Most students admitted into the department will have gone through these same classes, so it’s a lot easier to compare students on the basis of grade performance.
Grade inflation? Yeah. A student can take a class again if they don’t like their current grade. I think it’s 3 times maximum, and (a little fiendishly) the last time they take it is the grade they get. So it’s possible to take it a third time and do worse than the previous time(s). But most students know how to stop when they’re ahead.
Yes, students are always stressed about grades. We get a lot of regrade requests and begging for points.