(04-16-2017 10:30 PM)billybobby777 Wrote:  

(04-16-2017 10:15 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  

(04-16-2017 06:30 PM)jrj84105 Wrote:  

(04-16-2017 06:21 PM)GiveEmTheAxe Wrote:  

(04-16-2017 05:40 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  Is UCSD's academic ceiling really below <insert non-USC/UCLA/Stanford/Cal/Washington PAC school here>?

Did you mean SDSU? Because UCSD is already above the bottom half of the Pac. And their ceiling is even higher.

UCSD would be the highest ARWU ranked school in the B1G, ACC, SEC, and BigXII. It would be #4 in the PAC and #6 in the Ivy. That's why it would get invited to the PAC before SDSU.

ARWU is close to meaningless, as it places a very heavy emphasis on research, and one school's research doesn't impact another's.

But do your own sanity check. Do you really think that the university of Minnesota is a better overall school than Vanderbilt and several Ivy's?

I get that the PAC pretends to care about the ARWU, but I have a very hard time believing anything other than that their alleged fixation is based off of the fact that the PAC schools randomly happen to be good using that metric. And, it's better to pretend to care about the metric that you're good at than to pretend/admit to care/ing about the metric that you're "eh" at.

My point is that the top 5 schools in the PAC are fantastic. The bottom 7 aren't. I honestly don't know a lot about either SDSU or UCSD, but I'd be amazed if either had ceilings tangibly below the PAC median.

For one thing San Diego is R1 Research. San Diego St is not. The PAC doesn't have any schools that aren't R1. I don't think San Diego or San Diego St will ever go to the PAC in our lifetimes. One doesn't have the academics; the other the athletics.

I think that's more correlation than causation. Why would one school care about another school's research performance? One doesn't impact the other. I think that the PAC is the west coast's premier athletic conference, and big land grant schools tend to field formidable athletic teams and they tend to be good at research.