(09-22-2014 10:21 AM)Antarius Wrote: Also, Im not sure our USNWR ranking is suffering due to C-USA. What makes people think that?
I don't think it is C-USA per se; instead, I think it would be more accurate to blame the relegation to the minor leagues in general that started 20 years ago. Not as the whole reason for the slippage, but certainly a reason.
None of our USNWR peers has ever had to combat that type of public rejection. The Ivies and the University of Chicago rejected big-time athletics, not the other way around as happened to us. MIT, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, and WashU were never in; it's never been part of their brands, so they've never had to deal with the loss. Vandy, Duke, Notre Dame, Northwestern, and Stanford are still in. For the last 20 years, we have been unique amongst the top 20, and not in a good way - and those chickens are finally starting to come home to roost.
As I have stated elsewhere, I believe our alumni giving rate would be better if we were still in the major leagues - that would directly help our ranking. And our overall reputation/Q rating would be better. USNWR
surveys high school counselors from the top high schools in the country, and those rankings factor into the overall rankings. (We are T-22 on that list - tied with NYU, Emory, and Tufts.
) Well, those rankings are obviously subjective, and if you are a counselor your views are probably most influenced simply by where you see the best students from your HS choose to go to college. I believe that over the past 20 years we very likely have been slowly but steadily increasingly losing what are essentially recruiting battles for students to Vandy, Duke, Northwestern, and Notre Dame because those schools can still offer something that we no longer can. And then that gets reflected in the HS counselor rankings.
Now, to top it all off, the ignominy of our minor league surroundings has now gotten even worse, to the point where we have nothing, zero, nada in common with every other school in C-USA: not even SMU, Tulane, and Tulsa around to provide cover. But no, I don't think our situation would be fundamentally different if we were in the AAC or MWC. The minor leagues remain the minor leagues.