Schoolview

School Rankings Madness

2003-12-31T07:54:00.000-08:00

A factoid I surfed across related to problems with school rankings: "In the 2001 US News and World Report ranking of best engineering programs among US universities that offer Ph.D. programs in engineering, the ranking used only academic reputation in its methodology. Harvard University was ranked in the 27th position and Virginia Tech was ranked in the 17th position. The ranking looks very bizarre because Harvard students had a SAT score ranging from 1400 to 1590 while Virginia Tech students only had a SAT score ranging from 1060 to 1270 --- even the highest SAT score of Virginia Tech students was still far below the lowest SAT score of Harvard students. This seems counter-intuitive to the US News ranking that ranked Virginia Tech 10 spots higher than Harvard. This is a good example of people's perception which can be very subjective. That is, a "Tech" institution should be better in engineering simply because it has the word "Tech" in its university name, which in reality may or may not be true. This is also the case for some other "Tech" institutions in the same ranking." MORE

Tuition Myths

2003-11-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article that sheds just a little light on my question about why college tuition is rising so fast.

The point that is just touched on in the article, and bears examination, is that schools operate inefficiently. Here's a radical notion: how about having schools specialize a bit, so that liberal arts colleges don't offer as elaborate a science curriculum as they do? Or having neighboring schools offer complementary courses -- the small liberal arts school could host students from the nearby technical school, and vice versa, at some agreed-upon transfer pricing rate? Students could shuttle back and forth on special buses, letting schools cut their overhead nicely. Just a thought.

A Strange Funny Way To Learn About Schools

2003-10-29T12:40:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across a unique type of site (US Colleges Info), and I'm not yet sure what to make of it. The site collects and organizes thousands of Usenet (newsgroup) posts about colleges, and arranges them by state and a phrase that someone might use to search for information about them. For example, if you click on "Florida Colleges" you'll see a couple of dozen newsgroup posts allegedly about that phrase. Some are on target, some are completely off the wall.

Is it useful? I don't know. Maybe. But it's interesting, and that counts for something.

What Do They Spend It On?

2003-10-24T17:05:00.000-07:00

(or maybe it is more correctly: "On What Do They Spend It?")

It never fails to bring me up short, this relentless increase in college tuition in the US. (See, for example: "Tuition and fees at four-year public colleges have soared an average of 14.1 percent in the last year, while the portion of financial aid going to the neediest students has dropped over the last decade, according to two reports released yesterday by the College Board." MORE)

I can see how particle physicists and medical students might burn through outlandish amounts of money in learning all there is to learn about their chosen field, but of course most college students aren't in such capital-intensive fields. Can't the typical college student get by with a dog-eared copy of Jane Austen, a blackboard, a portion of an underpaid associate professor, and a bagful of late-night burgers? Liberal arts study should be dirt-cheap, even at the best schools, right? After all, what do most students need besides cheap furniture and lots of talk?

We need a full accounting, by field of study, of the ways in which college tuition is spent.

Here's an idea: how about setting tuition by field of study, so that, e.g., chemistry students pay more tuition than history students? After all, they stand to earn more...