(05-14-2018 09:40 AM)BearcatMan Wrote: (05-13-2018 10:38 AM)BearcatsUC Wrote: (05-11-2018 07:51 AM)BearcatMan Wrote: (05-11-2018 07:24 AM)CliftonAve Wrote: The latest college rankings are out-- UC is #133, up from #135 last year. Our rankings shot up over a decade ago, and once went as high as #129, but it seems to me that shooting up any further will require significant changes. IIRC, I thought UC had a goal at one time of getting into the #100 range. Seems like the 130 range might just be who we are at this point.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/uni...nnati-3125
Getting up to that point would require something we just will not get...additional state support.
If Miami can be #78, so can UC.
We focus on far too many majors to be ranked that high. Money spread across 11 colleges does not go nearly as far as money spread across 5. I agree that in an ideal world,
we could get to that point...but we're wroking with a stacked deck against us.
The financial differences are mixed. The best way to look at the endowment is on a per student basis. Theirs is 23K/student, while ours is 29K (OSU is 85K/student for comparison). In their favor, while they get the same student subsidy as us, they do get the new bonus money for retention and grad rates from the state. They also have a lot more money coming in from out of state tuition, which is 35% of their student body (an entire quarter of their freshmen classes are coming from Chicago). We have only 10% oos enrollment, but half that is from the tri-state counties which get reciprocal tuition, so really only 5% true out of state students.
I think we suffer a great deal from a perception that we're not a national univesity. DAAP and the Conservatory are great, but they're not the kind of things that drive a university's image nationally. It's the way that the journalism school doesn't really do all that much to boost the overall perception of OU. We've historically focused way too much on the med school, and that goes back to our days as a municipal university where the agenda was being set by local corporations and wealthy families.
Secondly, Miami has a 40 year head start on being a selective university over UC, which drives USNWR rankings a great deal. OSU overtook them quickly simply because OSU's forced open admissions were not a natural thing but rather mandated by a hostile Governor. Essentially what happened after the mid-80s vis-a-vis Miami and OSU was a return to the state's historical norm. We can't count on that. We need to do much better recruiting throughout the state while upping our out of state enrollment to at least 15% (not counting the reciprocal tri-state counties) and devote more resources into strengthening the engineering, business and arts and sciences colleges.
None of that is going to happen overnight, but I think cracking the top 100 in the next dozen years is a somewhat realistic goal with the right leadership. Banking on AAU membership is putting the cart before the horse. We need to do these things to get AAU membership, then I think we catch and surpass Miami because I just don't see any upside for Miami improving. They can't compete for in-state students with OSU, and there's a ceiling for the number of out of state students that will be interested in a rather one-dimensional school for preppy, conservative business majors located in the middle of nowhere. They've maxed out their appeal as Chicago's safety school, and I don't see them pulling in huge numbers of OOS students from outside the Great Lakes.