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

(04-16-2017 06:30 PM)jrj84105 Wrote:  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 find it credible. Without doing any checking, I can imagine that Minnesota, a large well-funded public university in a historically left-liberal state, is outperforming the lower half of the Ivy League, which is underperforming and living off of the reflected prestige of Harvard-Yale-Princeton.

Better overall than Vanderbilt, no, but "better on certain metrics"? Sure.

Quote: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.

You may have answered your own question here. All of the Big Ten schools were AAU, so AAU took on an outsized importance. PAC rocks the ARWU rankings, ARWU is the real measuring stick. C7 was all big-city mid- to high-ranking Catholic schools--we meant to do that all along.

(I've been surprised at how much Georgetown is going along with the Big East "Catholic Ivy" thing. I'd expect them, as a top 20 school, to be pushing the line "Those guys? Peers? Nah, they're just some guys I know from the gym")

But just because it's somewhat random doesn't mean it isn't very, very real. Ask VCU and Saint Louis about their relative chances of ever getting a Big EAst invite.

Quote: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.

Unless a conference is backfilling, they want schools that raise their average/median, not just meet it.

(04-17-2017 08:39 AM)nzmorange Wrote:  By what meaningful metric is SDSU materially worse than OSU as is?

It's not a state flagship/land-grant, and it ain't never gonna be.
And again, Oregon State is already in the club. If Georgetown or MIT or UVa wanted to make a push for Ivy status, "just as good as Brown/Dartmouth" isn't going to cut it.

NZMOrange, I think you have a point about research numbers being over-rated by a lot of posters, at least slightly.

Research dollars, US News rankings, SAT/ACT profiles are different ways to measure what schools are looking for in partner institutions, not the thing itself. The thing itself is reputation, sometimes among the general public, sometimes among academics, sometimes a mixture of the two.

Yes, apart from being a Cal State, SDSU is comparable to Oregon State. But Oregon State wouldn't be getting into the PAC today either if it were applying.

The reality is that SDSU isn't a "UC", and UCSD doesn't have a serious athletic department, so it's not going to be considered for PAC membership in anything like the current environment. (SEtting aside scenarios of radical change--California is subdivided into multiple states, CalExit, P5 secession while expanding to 80-100 members).

SDSU had/has an outside chance of getting into a conference like the Big 12 (or the New Big East RIP), which can't be as choosy as the PAC.

On the other hand, sometimes things change rapidly. Garfunkel and Oates, 29 and 31