DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Sept 9, 2019 7:25:33 GMT -5
Down from #22 in 2018. GW also took a step back, now #70. www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universitiesKey changes? Acceptance rate is out of the formula and peer assessment has been cut. Georgetown did very well with both in prior surveys. Pell Grant graduation rates are in (2.25% of total vs. 0% in 2018). Georgetown doesn't get a lot of Pell Grant recipients.
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Post by happyhoya1979 on Sept 9, 2019 11:05:26 GMT -5
What hurts in this is the gap versus Notre Dame which has historically been 1 to 3 places is now a chasm with the Irish at 15th place.
(Columbia is the real story in this rating-they have been top 5 now for something like six years and have been above Stanford for a couple. The Ivy League Big 3 of HYP has become a Big 4 of HYPC.)
(The other big story is UCLA blowing past UC Berkeley and into the top 20).
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Sept 9, 2019 11:55:14 GMT -5
Universities are doing whatever they can to game these rankings, as they have taken on a life of their own.
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Post by reformation on Sept 9, 2019 14:30:50 GMT -5
Would seem we are at risk of falling out which I think would be very bad for us regardless of the validity of the rankings--hopefully this does not happen.
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Sept 9, 2019 16:37:57 GMT -5
It’s been a slow slide for over two decades now. We are close to dropping out of the top-25, which would be a disaster. Like it or not, many different constituencies value the rankings.
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Post by hilltopper2000 on Sept 9, 2019 17:03:48 GMT -5
It's not a slide. We've never been higher than 17th or lower than 25th. We've just bounced around in that band as US News tinkers will its formula. But I agree that the administration should take it seriously. Other schools have obsessively gamed the system; I get the feeling we have not, but I hope we aren't ignoring it completely, because people do pay attention.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Sept 9, 2019 18:01:46 GMT -5
It’s been a slow slide for over two decades now. We are close to dropping out of the top-25, which would be a disaster. Like it or not, many different constituencies value the rankings. Fact check: 1989: 17 1990: 25 1991: 19 1992: 19 1993: 17 1994: 17 1995: 25 1996: 21 1997: 23 1998: 21 1999: 20 2000: 23 2001: 23 2002: 22 2003: 24 2004: 23 2005: 25 2006: 23 2007: 23 2008: 23 2009: 23 2010: 23 2011: 21 2012: 22 2013: 21 2014: 20 2015: 21 2016: 20 2017: 20 2018: 22 2019: 24
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Sept 9, 2019 18:50:16 GMT -5
World of difference between 25 and 26. Seems like the schools with large endowments have done the climbing. I don’t consider schools like Wash U, Emory, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame better academically than GU.
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nbhoya
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Post by nbhoya on Sept 9, 2019 20:26:14 GMT -5
I am very concerned about this. We have to take the rankings system seriously. Yes, everyone realizes that schools are gaming the system to ascend, but that doesn’t make the rankings meaningless.
Prospective students and advisors are looking at these rankings. I hope that our administration will take steps to better ourselves.
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Post by reformation on Sept 9, 2019 21:15:00 GMT -5
I would bet that at most univ's presidents would lose their jobs if their school fell out of top 25 for more than yr or two. We really don't have an option to focus more on rankings since falling out would have real negative effects regardless of the rankings quality. People/companies, Wall Street firms especially etc game all sorts of rankings , this is not unique.
Also its not just a question of gaming rankings--some of the schools have made major upgrades relative to gtown--Duke and Northwestern and to some degree Columbia for ex.Those schools also are very concerned with the rankings, especially the first two. Another school that is way underhanded besides GU(arguably more so, is Cornell, which is also not too concerned re rankings)
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Post by reformation on Sept 9, 2019 21:17:45 GMT -5
Also Gtwn has been getting pretty negative ratings from places such as the WSJ/NYT which came out a week ago--Univ admin should be concerned/doing something short & long run. My sense is that Gtwn's own strategic planning does not incorporate rankings which is a big miss.
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Post by happyhoya1979 on Sept 9, 2019 22:41:00 GMT -5
Georgetown has always punched higher than its weight because we have always been perceived as being among the very top schools. Even though we were at the low end of the top 20, straying a bit outside it from time to time, we always were perceived as a top 10 to 15 level school with the SFS being able to compete (not necessarily win) with the tippy top. We have always been able to win head to head admission yield smack downs with the 11 to 25 range.
What is now killing us is, our relative position today with the upper middle class. As I paraphrase comments from another thread "Socio-economically, a very sizeable portion of (Georgetown's pool of applicants ), (my words) is in " that upper-ish middle class tier that is most challenged by the current system of high tuition coupled with expansive financial aid. Where the 1% can afford sticker price, and those in the lower stratum of the middle class on down get pretty generous aid, the families in the middle get squeezed in a way that leads them to look elsewhere." If we fall from the top 25 (and with it the top 10-15 perception) we will no longer be able to command the allegiance of upper middle class families willing to make sacrifices for full weight tuition. We now also trail the much cheaper, but more highly ranked , University of California schools in one of the states most represented in our freshman class.
And if we lose the patina as being one of the two best Catholic schools, particularly as the campus strays to the left politically and becomes less welcoming to what I would call the "large C Catholic" constituency, we have a marketing/branding crisis. If Notre Dame was still parked at number 18-20 or so, and if we still beat all the state schools, these rankings would be a challenge, but not a crisis. With Notre Dame in the top 15 (I believe for the second time in 3 years) this is now truly a crisis for us. We are now close to losing both the "one of the top schools" and "one of the two best Catholic Schools" marketing perceptions. There are now, more highly rated, cheaper state school options as well.
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Post by Problem of Dog on Sept 9, 2019 22:49:27 GMT -5
World of difference between 25 and 26. Seems like the schools with large endowments have done the climbing. I don’t consider schools like Wash U, Emory, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame better academically than GU. This is said literally every year. Those exact schools.
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Post by aleutianhoya on Sept 10, 2019 6:04:35 GMT -5
I don't disagree with Happyhoya, but the school has factors working in its favor also. And those aren't going away. To wit: GU is the top-choice school in the DC metro area. That's incredibly appealing for lots of kids for lots of reasons. Always has been...always will be.
And that won't change regardless of our USNEWS ranking.
To those who say "school X is worse" than GU, I ask, based on what? That's the challenge with these rankings and their never ending changes of methodology. You can add objective criteria all you want but at the end of the day, much of it is completely subjective. So why is GU better than, say, Wash U (to pick a school I don't know much about)? Just because we think it is? Application/acceptance rate? What?
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Sept 10, 2019 7:28:27 GMT -5
The rankings give your school brand equity. If you work close to HR at an ultra competitive firm, you see how the resumes of applicants get whittled down.
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Post by happyhoya1979 on Sept 10, 2019 8:46:43 GMT -5
I don't disagree with Happyhoya, but the school has factors working in its favor also. And those aren't going away. To wit: GU is the top-choice school in the DC metro area. That's incredibly appealing for lots of kids for lots of reasons. Always has been...always will be. And that won't change regardless of our USNEWS ranking. To those who say "school X is worse" than GU, I ask, based on what? That's the challenge with these rankings and their never ending changes of methodology. You can add objective criteria all you want but at the end of the day, much of it is completely subjective. So why is GU better than, say, Wash U (to pick a school I don't know much about)? Just because we think it is? Application/acceptance rate? What? The DC thing gets us to "GW on steroids" or "NYU on the Potomac." It does not get one to "one of the elite universities in America whose graduates hold 5 to 8 of the 25 most important positions in the US government." The thing I have always questioned is how from a marketing standpoint, we fail to communicate just how extensive the success of our alumni is and has been over the past 50 years or so. That is the key to addressing your second point. Washington U. does not have a U.S. President or Supreme Court alumnus. Washington U has not graduated a foreign King or an AFL-CIO president. Our dominance of the foreign policy community (Foreign Service , CIA etc.) should put the SFS in a position wholly akin to West Point and Annapolis with the military (with the same perception the general public has of West Point and Annapolis). To be number 24 knowing what we have been and are is a crisis.
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Post by aleutianhoya on Sept 10, 2019 9:11:51 GMT -5
I don't disagree with Happyhoya, but the school has factors working in its favor also. And those aren't going away. To wit: GU is the top-choice school in the DC metro area. That's incredibly appealing for lots of kids for lots of reasons. Always has been...always will be. And that won't change regardless of our USNEWS ranking. To those who say "school X is worse" than GU, I ask, based on what? That's the challenge with these rankings and their never ending changes of methodology. You can add objective criteria all you want but at the end of the day, much of it is completely subjective. So why is GU better than, say, Wash U (to pick a school I don't know much about)? Just because we think it is? Application/acceptance rate? What? The DC thing gets us to "GW on steroids" or "NYU on the Potomac." It does not get one to "one of the great elite universities in America whose graduates hold 5 to 8 of the 25 most important positions in the US government." The thing I have always questioned is how from a marketing standpoint, we fail to communicate just how extensive the success of our alumni is and has been over the past 50 years or so. That is the key to addressing your second point. Washington U. does not have a U.S. President or Supreme Court alumnus. Washington U has not graduated a foreign King or an AFL-CIO president. Our dominance of the foreign policy community (Foreign Service , CIA etc.) should put the SFS in a position wholly akin to West Point and Annapolis with the military. To be number 24 knowing what we have been and are is a crisis.I don't disagree with any of that (except that I think crisis is a fair amount of hyperbole and plenty of other schools ranked similarly or higher than we can point to similar levels of output successes). All I'm saying is that for those interested in government, diplomacy, etc, we always will be in the very top tier. And that in turn will always lead to highly credentialed applicants, low admissions rates, and output successes within that area. Our challenges have long been and remain mostly structural. We have an incredibly low endowment relative to our peers (and even now that we fundraise competently, all that allows us to do is tread water since our peers do too). And we have real estate issues that limit opportunities even with sufficient capital investment.
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Elvado
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Post by Elvado on Sept 10, 2019 9:29:26 GMT -5
The DC thing gets us to "GW on steroids" or "NYU on the Potomac." It does not get one to "one of the great elite universities in America whose graduates hold 5 to 8 of the 25 most important positions in the US government." The thing I have always questioned is how from a marketing standpoint, we fail to communicate just how extensive the success of our alumni is and has been over the past 50 years or so. That is the key to addressing your second point. Washington U. does not have a U.S. President or Supreme Court alumnus. Washington U has not graduated a foreign King or an AFL-CIO president. Our dominance of the foreign policy community (Foreign Service , CIA etc.) should put the SFS in a position wholly akin to West Point and Annapolis with the military. To be number 24 knowing what we have been and are is a crisis.I don't disagree with any of that (except that I think crisis is a fair amount of hyperbole and plenty of other schools ranked similarly or higher than we can point to similar levels of output successes). All I'm saying is that for those interested in government, diplomacy, etc, we always will be in the very top tier. And that in turn will always lead to highly credentialed applicants, low admissions rates, and output successes within that area. Our challenges have long been and remain mostly structural. We have an incredibly low endowment relative to our peers (and even now that we fundraise competently, all that allows us to do is tread water since our peers do too). And we have real estate issues that limit opportunities even with sufficient capital investment. I think this is spot on.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Sept 10, 2019 9:49:26 GMT -5
The DC thing gets us to "GW on steroids" or "NYU on the Potomac." It does not get one to "one of the great elite universities in America whose graduates hold 5 to 8 of the 25 most important positions in the US government." The thing I have always questioned is how from a marketing standpoint, we fail to communicate just how extensive the success of our alumni is and has been over the past 50 years or so. That is the key to addressing your second point. Washington U. does not have a U.S. President or Supreme Court alumnus. Washington U has not graduated a foreign King or an AFL-CIO president. Our dominance of the foreign policy community (Foreign Service , CIA etc.) should put the SFS in a position wholly akin to West Point and Annapolis with the military. To be number 24 knowing what we have been and are is a crisis.I don't disagree with any of that (except that I think crisis is a fair amount of hyperbole and plenty of other schools ranked similarly or higher than we can point to similar levels of output successes). All I'm saying is that for those interested in government, diplomacy, etc, we always will be in the very top tier. And that in turn will always lead to highly credentialed applicants, low admissions rates, and output successes within that area. Our challenges have long been and remain mostly structural. We have an incredibly low endowment relative to our peers (and even now that we fundraise competently, all that allows us to do is tread water since our peers do too). And we have real estate issues that limit opportunities even with sufficient capital investment. Three thoughts: 1. We can complain about the rankings but they also play in Georgetown's favor. The US News methodology is skewed towards coastal, mostly private universities with selective admissions, less so for schools with more investment in faculty. That Pepperdine is ranked higher than Purdue or that Texas is neck and neck with Lehigh illustrates the problem. There was a time when the early US news rankings favored the applied sciences (Wisconsin was #8 in the first rankings) until the Ivy League made the case that H-Y-P was more prestigious than the CIC. The Top 25 ratings have calcified as a result. And how many Novel laureates have taught at GU? Wash U claims 23, Illinois can claim 30. 2. I tend to disagree on the context of the "low endowment relative to our peers"; first we must ask whom are our peers? Fifty years ago it was BC, Holy Cross, Fordham, St. Joe's, so Georgetown does exceptionally well against them. When it realigned its peer schools, it was suddenly the smallest kid on the block. It treads water because like many liberal arts schools, it lacks the firepower of gifts from those with significant capacity (nine figures and above) because that group aren't doctors or lawyers. Tangentially, it also lacks firepower because unlike BC and USC, Georgetown is not closely aligned with the corporate business leaders of its region. 3. Selling diplomacy and international affairs will always reach only a small subset of the student population. SFS is less than 25 percent of the GU base. Remember, to Gen Z, Bill Clinton has always been an old man with a checkered past, and very few students are discussing about foreign kings or union presidents. Will the leaders of the 2020's be coming from places like Georgetown? Of the 20+ presidential candidates this season, 14 went to Ivy schools. One is a GU Law alumnus (John Delaney) and none come from the undergraduate ranks. Perhaps more importantly, will the next generation of global leaders be coming from Georgetown? PS: if I were a school like George Washington, I would be really concerned. GW has fallen to #70 (trailing Maryland, alongside Clemson and Minnesota, and not far ahead of American). Steven Trachtenberg's considerable push to bring GW to overtake Georgetown in the 1990's has stalled out in a major way, and with a new Johns Hopkins SAIS campus coming to downtown DC, the model at GW is going to show strain.
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Post by aleutianhoya on Sept 10, 2019 11:40:40 GMT -5
I don't disagree with any of that (except that I think crisis is a fair amount of hyperbole and plenty of other schools ranked similarly or higher than we can point to similar levels of output successes). All I'm saying is that for those interested in government, diplomacy, etc, we always will be in the very top tier. And that in turn will always lead to highly credentialed applicants, low admissions rates, and output successes within that area. Our challenges have long been and remain mostly structural. We have an incredibly low endowment relative to our peers (and even now that we fundraise competently, all that allows us to do is tread water since our peers do too). And we have real estate issues that limit opportunities even with sufficient capital investment. Three thoughts: 2. I tend to disagree on the context of the "low endowment relative to our peers"; first we must ask whom are our peers? Fifty years ago it was BC, Holy Cross, Fordham, St. Joe's, so Georgetown does exceptionally well against them. When it realigned its peer schools, it was suddenly the smallest kid on the block. It treads water because like many liberal arts schools, it lacks the firepower of gifts from those with significant capacity (nine figures and above) because that group aren't doctors or lawyers. Tangentially, it also lacks firepower because unlike BC and USC, Georgetown is not closely aligned with the corporate business leaders of its region. That's a different argument, DFW. The entire discussion here involves these particular rankings and whether we ought be ranked higher. Thus, the rankings (and those schools somewhat higher than us) are our "peers" for purposes of this discussion. And we lag behind all of them. Considerably. Here are the five schools immediately in front of us: Wash U: $7.5B UCLA: $5.0B Emory $7.2B Cal: $4.6B USC: $5.5B Georgetown's is less than half any of them. That's a huge, huge difference. I'm not making a value judgment about whether we are really shooting above our weight given our historic antipathy to fundraising, our liberal arts background, etc, etc. It is what it is. And what it is is not likely going to meaningfully change -- at least anytime soon. All of those schools presumably are fundraising competently at present, getting nice returns on their money, etc. So, sure, we are "richer" than St. Joe's and Holy Cross, but we're also well above them in these rankings. On edit: Endowment size admittedly is an imperfect number. You'd really want to analyze something more like "usable endowment per student." If you have 1B but it's all in the form of fully mortgaged real estate, that doesn't do you a ton of good. And all things being equal, a 1B endowment for 3K students is a lot more valuable than 1B for 20K.
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