http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreview...iversities

On many levels rankings mania is silly and harmful. Having said that, I think we were in the top 10 my freshman year (88-89) and I now fear us dropping out of the top 20, as we've dropped to 19.

When I was looking at schools, Vandy was not in the same category as Rice. Now it's ahead of us. We really need to figure out how to get back up to 15 or so. We can say all we want how these are not important, but dropping out of the top 20 would be very bad for us...

Yes, when I applied to Rice in the fall of 1991, it was ranked #12. Since then, it's been a gradual decline. I have to think that the current ranking of #19 is the worst ranking Rice has had since USNWR has been doing them.

Yes, yes, yes, let's get this out of the way now: rankings are stupid, the college decision depends on many personal factors, etc.

But like it or not, rankings matter to a university's brand and the value that university's degree confers on its alumni.

Whatever Rice is doing, or not doing, it's not doing it as well compared to other universities as it used to.

By the way, I predicted/feared that Rice would drop out of the top-20 within this decade. The bad news is that I am on course for being right.

What seems to stand out in Rice's numbers is its poor "graduation in 6 years" rate. It seems that all the top schools have percentages in the high 90s, like 98% or so. Rice has the lowest 6-year graduation rate in the top-20. Rice also has one of the highest acceptance rates in the top-20.

The problem is that Rice's yield is historically pretty terrible. Only about 35-36% of kids who get accepted into Rice actually decide to matriculate at Rice. For many, sadly, Rice is a backup to the top-10 schools. And it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon: the worse Rice continues to do in the rankings, the less likely it is a first choice among qualified high school seniors.

If Rice wants to stop and perhaps reverse its slide in USNWR, it needs to do something different. I have no idea what that is. Acquiring Baylor College of Medicine would have been a really good first step, but that ship as sailed.

What I find most irritating is that this ranking blatantly ignores things like quality of life, student happiness, etc. Too much importance is given to this one single ranking. Improving Rice's ranking is undoubtedly a tough task, I wish USNWR, being the highest profile ranking system, included a few more factors, as I believe that would probably boost Rice.

But yeah, sucks that Rice keeps dropping, even though I'm pretty confident Rice is just as good of a school as when I matriculated in 1997 (and probably just as good as when others matriculated when Rice was at peak ranking.

(09-09-2014 10:02 AM)Barrett Wrote:  What seems to stand out in Rice's numbers is its poor "graduation in 6 years" rate. It seems that all the top schools have percentages in the high 90s, like 98% or so. Rice has the lowest 6-year graduation rate in the top-20. Rice also has one of the highest acceptance rates in the top-20.

The problem is that Rice's yield is historically pretty terrible. Only about 35-36% of kids who get accepted into Rice actually decide to matriculate at Rice. For many, sadly, Rice is a backup to the top-10 schools. And it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon: the worse Rice continues to do in the rankings, the less likely it is a first choice among qualified high school seniors.

The converse of this is probably true as well. Before USNWR received lots of attention, Rice was a great school that functioned with a certain anonymity. This meant fewer people used Rice as a backup school because they just hadn't heard about it adn didn't realize it was a really good school if they didn't get into their top choice. As college rankings received more attention, more people began to apply to Rice, many because it was a legitimate option for them, but others because it was a great fall-back option. So Rice's drop in the rankings was possibly precipitated by increased attention due to Rice's great ranking. But because Rice never had quite the same elite branding as Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc., it never became the #1 school for a critical mass of applicants.

Tough situation to be in, as there is no real good way to weed out the applicants viewing Rice as a fall-back from those that really want to go to Rice. Too often the bridesmaid instead of the bride.

Here is a ranking to be proud of:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/...0002&abg=0

Rice is 14th (out of all universities with a 75%+ graduation rate) in economic diversity, a measure of the university's success in enrolling lower income students.

From what I heard, there was a new committee in the Board of Trustees to address this. Formed last year, I believe. The Rice Annual Fund/Alumni Office are also pushing a lot of resources lately to increase the alumni participation category.

I definitely understand the concern in terms of optics of having our ranking start with a 2. I would think a lot of students look at this list in terms of top 10, top 20, etc, not comparing exact rankings. We do have a bit of a gap between us and #20 (UC Berkeley), so I would hope we could keep our ranking in the teens.

I do like that we are still one of the lowest tuitions in the top 25.

I would imagine our acceptance rate isn't helping things either. But, mrbig has pointed out the issues there with being the bridesmaid and I'm not sure how we would fix that without uprooting the school to the Northeast.

As others in this thread have mentioned, the USNWR is important and Leebron has to be concerned about this, but there are other rankings that have value in terms of student choice. Our great results in Princeton Review do help ease the issue with USNWR.

(09-09-2014 10:55 AM)dragon2owl Wrote:  From what I heard, there was a new committee in the Board of Trustees to address this. Formed last year, I believe. The Rice Annual Fund/Alumni Office are also pushing a lot of resources lately to increase the alumni participation category.

Good to hear. Improving alumni participation, while a small component in USNWR, will be positive beyond just this ranking stuff.

I can't remember all of the criteria used, but I also wonder what the effect of being one of the 4 smallest schools is? If I remember correctly, the largest component of the ranking is academic reputation, as judged by peers from other institutions. What advantages do schools twice the size of Rice (or more) have in this measure due to the fact that their faculty simply has more connections w/in the academic community? Generally speaking, I am more likely to speak/rank highly a university where I am personally connected to a professor/department in some capacity.

This doesn't even take into account the self-perpetuating nature of the rankings where higher ranked schools are more likely to be ranked highly in the survey of academic reputation.

(09-09-2014 11:22 AM)picrig Wrote:  I can't remember all of the criteria used, but I also wonder what the effect of being one of the 4 smallest schools is? If I remember correctly, the largest component of the ranking is academic reputation, as judged by peers from other institutions. What advantages do schools twice the size of Rice (or more) have in this measure due to the fact that their faculty simply has more connections w/in the academic community? Generally speaking, I am more likely to speak/rank highly a university where I am personally connected to a professor/department in some capacity.

This doesn't even take into account the self-perpetuating nature of the rankings where higher ranked schools are more likely to be ranked highly in the survey of academic reputation.

Here is how they calculate it:

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-col...s-rankings

You are correct about the academic reputation.

(09-09-2014 09:52 AM)JustAnotherAustinOwl Wrote:  http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreview...iversities

On many levels rankings mania is silly and harmful. Having said that, I think we were in the top 10 my freshman year (88-89) and I now fear us dropping out of the top 20, as we've dropped to 19.

When I was looking at schools, Vandy was not in the same category as Rice. Now it's ahead of us. We really need to figure out how to get back up to 15 or so. We can say all we want how these are not important, but dropping out of the top 20 would be very bad for us...

Very sad and frustrating.

That said, it's not clear to me that dropping below any Xth USNews spot would be much worse than X+1th. What's terrible is dropping in brand. I remember when I'd ask high-achieving kids at a tutoring center I worked at where they planned to apply to college, hardly any of them had heard of/considered UofChicago or Northwestern, even though UofChicago is currently 4th. And yet all of them heard of USNews rankings. There is certainly a demographic of kids that applies to schools based largely on the numerical ranking, but my impression is that a much, much larger demographic applies based on reputation/brand.

And as far as brand, here in Chicago it's pretty much non-existent. The only people I come across who've heard of Rice are high up in academia or they say, "Oh, they got a great baseball team!"

In my ideal world Rice would invest heavily into sports. (Imagine if instead of investing $1B into Baylor we put it into sports...).

And it would invest heavily into departments the graduates of which make money (i.e. business school).

On the large gifts side, Booth (business school at UofChicago) got a $400M gift from an alum; Northwestern is making $1B this year off a patent by one of its medical faculty, Harvard just got a $300M gift to the school of public health.

Long story short, this is all very frustrating.

(09-09-2014 11:12 AM)d1owls4life Wrote:  

(09-09-2014 10:55 AM)dragon2owl Wrote:  From what I heard, there was a new committee in the Board of Trustees to address this. Formed last year, I believe. The Rice Annual Fund/Alumni Office are also pushing a lot of resources lately to increase the alumni participation category.

Good to hear. Improving alumni participation, while a small component in USNWR, will be positive beyond just this ranking stuff.

Agreed. It's a tangible way to express your appreciation for the experiences and knowledge you gained while at Rice and it looks pretty crappy if we're stuck in the 30 percent range, while so many other elite schools are in the 40s or even the 50s.

This little thing doesn't look too kindly on us: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/...g=1#s=1058

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Yeah, seems like evaluation by administrators at peer institutions and by high school counselor ratings could both be self-perpetuating for "brand" schools. And other schools probably benefit greatly for having a "brand" that might not necessarily apply to most of the programs at the school (Baylor and Johns Hopkins, not knocking those schools, but most people know of those schools because of their medical programs). Rice is #22 in high school counselor rankings, tied with Tufts, Emory, NYU, UNC, UVA, and UCLA. Baylor is tied for 45th in reputation, but 71st overall.

Also, I haven't tracked this, but I assume Rice's acceptance rate increased when the administration was trying to increase the size of the undergrad enrollment, and has probably decreased now that undergrad enrollment is being held steady?

I wonder if schools with a greater focus on engineering programs are at a disadvantage for 6-year graduation rates. Not wondering necessarily because of Rice, but because MIT and Cal Tech are the lowest in the top 10 (along with Chicago).

It would be very interesting to have access to the full data and see how different schools rank within different regions. Is Rice a top 10 school in Texas and outside the top 25 in the northeast?

I understand the justification for increasing tuition costs (there is a general perception that you get what you pay for, so more expensive schools were viewed as better just because of their costs, kind of like a luxury car). But increasing tuition to become more in line with peer institutions (even if Rice is still a little lower) might have taken away one of the unique appeals of Rice. When I applied to Rice, the school had an actual brand as the best bang for the buck amongst top 20 schools (I think it was #1 when I applied). Rice is still in the top 10 for best value, but Rice is now behind Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and all the other schools that are ahead of Rice on the full rankings. So not only has Rice lost its brand, but it has fallen behind the schools we like to compare ourselves to!

If anything, Rice's new brand probably relates to quality of life and student happiness. If Rice could somehow recapture its brand as "best bang for the buck" while also maintaining its brand for "quality of life / student happiness," then I bet those would help drive Rice up the overall rankings (because it would affect the number of applications, the enrollment percentage, and the subjective factors that are influence by branding and word-of-mouth).

Quote:In a separate ranking of “Great Schools, Great Prices,” Rice is No. 9 among national universities. These best-value schools were determined by academic quality, as reflected by a high ranking from U.S. News, and the 2013-14 net cost of attendance for a student who received the average level of need-based financial aid.

Rice was also singled out on a list of 32 schools noted for offering outstanding undergraduate research/creative projects that allow students mentored by a faculty member to do intensive and self-directed research independently or in small teams. College presidents, chief academic officers and deans of admissions were invited to nominate up to 10 stellar schools, and schools that were named the most often made the list (in alphabetical order rather than a ranking).

Rice made several other lists in the new U.S. News college guide:

* Rice is tied for No. 7 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the list of national universities demonstrating economic diversity, as determined by the percentage of undergraduates receiving federal Pell Grants. Eighteen percent of students at Rice received Pell Grants, which are awarded to low-income students.

* Rice is No. 11 on the list of national universities whose students graduate with the least debt and No. 8 among private universities on the list.

* Among the best undergraduate engineering programs whose highest degree is a doctorate, Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering is tied for No. 18 with Duke University, Pennsylvania State University-University Park and University of California-Los Angeles.

* Rice and six other schools are tied for No. 22 on the list of top picks by high school counselors, whose opinions are factored separately from the ratings by college admissions deans, provosts and presidents as part of the academic assessment.

Thinking about this some more, if I was Rice, my primary goals would be:
(1) Recapture the #1 spot for Best Value and hold it in perpetuity. Rice used to have a national brand because of this (that is why I heard of Rice in Alaska in the 1990's). And market the heck out of it.
(2) Maintain top 3 in quality of life and student happiness, including coming in #1 for one of these. And market the heck out of it.
(3) Improve the football and basketball programs and use the increased name recognition that comes with those high-profile programs to market the heck out of Rice's Best Value, Happiest Students, Quality of Life, and overall elite education.

I think doing these 3 things would increase Rice's overall ranking, but would be a more "unconventional wisdom" approach. It is much harder to "out-Stanford" Stanford, "out-Harvard" Harvard, and "out-Princeton" Princeton than it is to just be Rice, and be the absolute best Rice we can be.

(09-09-2014 11:27 AM)ChicagoOwl (BS 07) Wrote:  In my ideal world Rice would invest heavily into sports. (Imagine if instead of investing $1B into Baylor we put it into sports...).

And it would invest heavily into departments the graduates of which make money (i.e. business school).

I think that Rice should be making the world a better place by:

1) Providing a great education to diverse student body
2) Doing great research
3) Promoting great policy

Being successful in sports can help the university fulfill this mission. Unfortunately, placing high in these stupid rankings can also help.

Investing $1B in sports would do more harm than good by taking resources away from other things.

The idea of investing heavily in a business school so that our grads make more money makes me feel ill.

In my mind, improving our ranking is only worth while if it has a net positive on our overall mission.

(09-09-2014 01:01 PM)temchugh Wrote:  In my mind, improving our ranking is only worth while if it has a net positive on our overall mission.

What is our overall mission?

(09-09-2014 02:05 PM)ChicagoOwl (BS 07) Wrote:  

(09-09-2014 01:01 PM)temchugh Wrote:  In my mind, improving our ranking is only worth while if it has a net positive on our overall mission.

What is our overall mission?

See my full post, above.

(09-09-2014 02:05 PM)ChicagoOwl (BS 07) Wrote:  

(09-09-2014 01:01 PM)temchugh Wrote:  In my mind, improving our ranking is only worth while if it has a net positive on our overall mission.

What is our overall mission?

To make alums feel superior over there work colleagues who went to "lesser" schools, or at least not feel inferior to their work colleagues who went to "better" schools.

(If not obvious, that is a joke)