US News 2006 Rankings

[Nevada Hoya]

I interviewed a student for Georgetown several years ago, and he ended up going to Penn, only because he got into Penn and got waitlisted at GU.

[Guest]

I never noticed any Ivy envy when I was at GU (I graduated '03). I turned down Penn and one of my roomates turned down Harvard. I think kids I know that turned down Ivies to go to GU felt that GU would be a great education with more fun (more social stuff and better sports) than the Ivies.

Building off of Nevada's comment, a girl that graduated from my high school this year was waitlisted at GU and accepted at Duke. The college admissions process is bizarre.

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

College admissions is a gigantic crap shoot because of differences in high schools meaning that most schools take high school transcripts and reweight GPA, the arbitrary awarding of points for essay strength and extra-curricular strengts (do you give someone who played Tuba 4 years more points than someone who did 5 extra-curriculars but none longer than 1 year?), and other factors.

However, I have never noticed Ivy-envy at GU and I am currently a senior - I presonally turned down Emory, University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and Princeton because I really liked my tour of GU and had a very positive experience on campus as a part of a summer program. GU is definitely more fun (athletics, culture in DC, arts in DC, free museums, etc.) than many of those other schools, but it also strikes a good balance with working very hard to earn your degree.

[SoCalHoya]

The Ivy-envy I saw at GU has definitely declined over the years, as far as I can tell from the alumni interviews I conduct. Nowadays the students certainly seem to see GU as far different, better in most respects, than about half the Ivies. They usually choose GU over Penn, Brown, Cornell, but will turn us down, not always but a fair amount of the time, for Yale or Harvard.

[Jack]

There is no doubt that there are several hundred students in every class who choose Georgetown over at least one of the schools ranked ahead of GU in the USNWR ranking. Many of those students choose GU over an Ivy or Duke. The idea that Ivy-envy is pervasive in the culture seems far-fetched. Even so, there is also no doubt that there are a few students who are concerned about prestige and would like to "trade up" if they could. That type of envy applies more to the top echelon of the Ivy league than to the entire ancient eight. Among the Ivies, GU almost always loses to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; competes with but loses more often than wins with Columbia, Brown, and Penn; beats Cornell slightly more often that loses, and has a small overlap with Dartmouth which is a very different type of school.

[DFW HOYA]

How does it lose to Columbia and Brown? Female students?

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

Not from what I've seen of the femal population at Columbia and Brown ... BAZING!

[thebin]

I can see Gtown losing out to Columbia, its a school whose intellectual history is outstanding....but Brown? Its the last Ivy I would go to by a mile.

[hoya01]

Really? You'd go to Cornell before Brown? That's a hard one for me.

[Cambridge]

hilltopper2000 said:

I'd never heard of the "college confidential" website so after Hoyabliu posted the link I browsed a little and stumbled on this thread:

talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=85415

Anybody else find this somewhat depressing? I know when I was at GU (in the 1990s) there was a certain amount of "Ivy-envy" but I think the vase majority of us were quite grateful to be there and had turned down U.S. News favs like Penn and Duke to attend. For those who are currently students, do you sense a real insecurity within the student body regarding GU's standing in the rankings and general name recognition (which I've always thought was incredibly good)?

I graduated from Gtown in 2002. I turned down Chicago, Emory, UVA and Cornell to attend Gtown and have never felt inferior.

[RBHoya]

tinypic.com/aw6t0l.jpg Edit: This may be subscription info which I'm not supposed to post, but I really dont know as I just found the link on another college's sports message forum.

Trying to link y'all to some more detailed data I found. It's a small spreadsheet with a lot of data, so you should expand it and view it in a full size window.

Our peer assessment score was a 4.0, compared to 4.3, 4.3, 4.5, and 4.2 for the 4 public schools ranked with and right behind us (UVA, UCLA, UofM, and UNC). Emory and Vandy also got 4.0s and Notre Dame had a 3.9.

In graduation and retention rate, we finished tied for 9th.... Notre Dame somehow tied for 3rd?

Our faculty resources rank was 45, much lower than most of the schools ahead of us.

85% of our faculty are full time, which seems comparatively low.

Selectivity rank was 15th, with places like Northwestern, Cornell, Hopkins, Chicago, Notre Dame, Vandy, Emory, and CMU all less selective (despite being ranked ahead of us). I'm thinking that's a big help for us.

Our 25-75th SAT was a bit lower than a lot of the schools ahead of us... Maybe opting for a more diverse/well-rounded student body hurts us there?

Financial resources rank was 29th-- holding us back? Alumni giving rank was 17, with a rate of 33%.


Just thought I'd provide this for those of you who are into analyzing stats like me... Make some of you can make some sense of it and figure out why we fall where we do and what we need to/could do to move up.

[Jack]

The Peer Assessment score is one of the most frustrating and seems like an almost useless measure, except that is typically weighted pretty heavily. It is based on a survey of college presidents and deans of admission, many of whom know next to nothing about their so-called peers. It is telling that the two Catholic universities in the top 25 rank lower than almost everyone else- there is still a bias there, whether people want to admit it or not. Ultimately, the schools with the highest peer assessment rating typically have the strongest graduate/PhD programs, which may have something to do with the kind of education undergraduates receive, but might actually have a negative impact if the best resources are going to the grad students.

The low percentage of full time faculty also hurts Georgetown for reasons I cannot really comprehend- it seems to me that having prominent part-time professors drawn from the DC political, media, and business community is one of GU's advantages, not something to hold against.

[fsohoya]

Thanks for the data RB. I am actually surprised our almuni giving ranking is so high, as well as our financial resources ranking.

I am not sure to what extent GU takes a hit on peer assessments because it is Catholic. I suspect that it is mainly because outside of political subjects we don't chase after a lot of "celebrity" professors. I am also certain our relatively weak sciences play into it. That said, my understanding is that smaller and smaller percentages of college presidents are repsonding to the US News surveys because they think the peer assessments are bogus.

As far as SATs go, is there any chance the Nursing school brings those scores down, while our compeititors typically don't have such programs?

[fsohoya]

I just looked at the Nursing school and the SAT's seem comparable to the overall average, so that theory is out.

[thebin]

hoya01 said:

Really? You'd go to Cornell before Brown? That's a hard one for me.

Yes I would. I have spent considerable time in Providence. It blows. If they moved Brown to Newport....then Cornell would be my last Ivy.

[reformation]

Jack, a couple of thoughts on your peer assessment comments:
1)I agree with your view that most univ presidents(including our own BTW don't really have a clue in this regard) and that there is probably some lingering anti catholic bias or pro IVY, big ten etc kind of voting.
2)I think that GU + ND are also hurt however by the fact that relatively few students from these institutions pursue PHD's or any type of non professional grad school training, therefore GU gets less exposure than other schools. I'd bet if you asked the deans of law schools re: the relative quality of GU undergrads you'd probably get a much more favorable response than you get from a more random academic sampling, e.g.,.
3)I think that the actual quality of GU's programs is much better than what the peer assessment gives us credit for, but is probably not as good as GU thinks of itself. From my own experience teaching at two of the ivies, the faculty at these places spent a lot more effort reviewing what their competitor schools teach in detail and trying to make sure that their respective institutions constantly offered state of the art curriculum than GU does. In simple terms both the admin/faculty at a number of the really top schools think and act much more competitively than GU.

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

Another thing that hurts GU is that we have a lower number of full time faculty than other schools in the top 25 - but that number is misleading because many of our faculty who aren't full time are people who have some pretty important jobs in DC (one of my classes a year ago was taught by the editor of the National Review - cool guy) and I don't think we should be penalized for drawing on the resources that our community offers us.

Along those lines I think we also shouldn't be penalized for our library - some publications hold it against us that we don't have the impressive billion volume collections of Harvard and Yale - but the Library of Congress is down the street and I would say 90% of the classes that I have turned in term papers for made going there a requirement - again drawing on the resources of DC.

[tgo]

I had a class that met in a house office building that was taught by the chief of staff for the ranking minority member of the appropriations committee. This is of course a negative in the eyes of these rankings since this professor taught one class every other semester but was likely the most rewarding class I had at GU.

[fsohoya]

To add to the anecdotes, I took a journalism class from an editor at the Washington Post magazine. For a school that doesn't even have a journalism department, that strikes me as pretty impressive. As far as the rankings are concerned, though, he probably would have counted as just another part-time professor, and worse, one who didn't even have a Ph.D.

[TrueHoyaBlue]

Similarly, I took a course last semester from Alice Rivlin, who was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, and at other points in her career, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, and later chair of the D.C. Control Board. Now she has a chair at Brookings and a seat on the board of the N.Y.S.E.

And yep, she counts against us in the full-time professor ranking.