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quo vadis Offline
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Post: #21
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 12:58 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 12:20 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  Interesting that all of the AAC, MAC, and CUSA schools are ranked in USNWR.

And because others have commented on it: USNWR is easily the most important ranking system because it's the one the media focuses on. None of the others mean basically anything. A school president can see his school drop down in WSJ and Carnegie etc. and not get fired.

If you tumble in USNWR, you get fired.

07-coffee3

Yes, I agree. The USNWR rankings are important because the consumers (prospective parents and students) deem them to be important. Many (nearly all?) administrators may hate the USNWR rankings and find them quite flawed (which is a totally valid concern), but nevertheless can't ignore them because the marketplace cares about them. I've said this before, but I think the reason why the USNWR rankings are used by consumers so much is that they generally pass the "smell test" of which schools are hardest to get into for undergrad. No one trusts a ranking where Harvard and Stanford are ranked #20 because that doesn't reflect the reality in the marketplace of college admissions (where those two schools are the toughest to gain admission to even for applicants with perfect stats, test scores and extracurricular activities). Now, whether that means that the USNWR are simply reflecting the "confirmation bias" of its readers is a fair question.

That's right - the USNWR rankings are respected by the public (somewhat ironically, as it is a case of the tale wagging the dog) because it most closely tracks what people intuitively believe are the best schools. The common belief is that schools like Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT are among the very best schools, and they are always in the top 10 of US News.

Other ranking systems that produce counter-intuitive results, like your example of some system ranking Harvard #20. smell fishy and beggar belief, like some CFB computer that ranks an unbeaten G5 team at #3 ahead of P5 heavyweights, even if the latter method actually has sounder underlying statistics or whatever.

And for that reason, the same administrators who curse under the breaths about the tyranny and facile nature of US News rankings will be the first to issue a trumpeting press release if their school moves up 10 spots in the latest rankings.
(This post was last modified: 06-19-2020 03:25 PM by quo vadis.)
06-19-2020 03:20 PM
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Post: #22
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 12:20 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  Interesting that all of the AAC, MAC, and CUSA schools are ranked in USNWR.

And because others have commented on it: USNWR is easily the most important ranking system because it's the one the media focuses on. None of the others mean basically anything. A school president can see his school drop down in WSJ and Carnegie etc. and not get fired.

If you tumble in USNWR, you get fired.

07-coffee3

But in terms of conference realignment, its just about the last system they look at.
06-19-2020 05:24 PM
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pjm.2021 Offline
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Post: #23
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 08:40 AM)usffan Wrote:  
(06-18-2020 08:57 PM)pjm.2021 Wrote:  Every once in a while, when people talk about conference realignment they discuss the “academic fit” of a university in a certain conference. Because I had some time on my hands I decided to compile an average 2020 ranking of the universities that make up a number of conferences. I used two major undergraduate college rankings, US news and WSJ/Times Higher Education. Interestingly enough, while those two rankings use different inputs and differ from each other drastically on individual schools, for the most part the conferences end up in the same order regardless of which service you use.
If the school fell into a ranking range (i.e. 601-800) I used the average of that range as the school’s ranking (in the example above the school would be ranked 700).

A few conferences had some schools not ranked in the US news national rankings. Those schools were either ranked as a regional university (offer a full range of undergraduate programs and some master's programs but few doctoral programs) or a liberal arts universities (emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study). As these designations do not have anything to do with quality and there is no way to compare a US news regional/liberal arts ranking to a national ranking, I simply left those schools out of the US news average for the conference. For extra info I marked how many schools were not counted in the US news average ranking (does not impact the WSJ ranking).

There were 5 schools for who I could not find a WSJ 2020 ranking (4 of them in the Sun Belt). They were USAFA, Arkansas State University (ranked >800 in 2019), Louisiana-Monroe (ranked >800 in 2019), Troy, and UT Arlington.

Finally, for this analysis Uconn is in placed in the Big East. I also put the independents in their Olympic sports conferences: Notre Dame-ACC, BYU-WCC, UMASS-A10.

Conference-----WSJ avg------US News Avg--#of schools not in US News
Ivy League----------7-------------------7
ACC---------------104-----------------58
Big 10-------------107----------------63
Pac 12-------------122----------------82
WCC---------------151----------------80-------------2
Big East-----------188----------------96-------------3
A10----------------228---------------117------------5
SEC----------------258---------------113
CAA----------------266---------------112------------2
Big 12-------------285----------------141
AAC----------------330----------------160
MW----------------393----------------238------------2
CUSA--------------507----------------268
MAC---------------537-----------------237
Sun Belt----------631-----------------323------------3

Very interesting - thank you for posting, including your rationale for your decisions. While I would probably quibble with your decision to simply withhold regional colleges from the rankings, which skews the results higher for those conferences by removing the "lowest ranking" members, your point about how they stack up similarly enough in the WSJ rankings is a compelling argument against that.

USFFan

Yes, it was not ideal to withhold regional/liberal arts colleges from a conferences’ US News average, but I just couldn’t think of another way to do it. In general schools that did not have a US News national ranking were in the lower half of the conference (per the WSJ ranking) but there were exceptions. For example, in the A10 two of the schools without a US News national ranking were actually the top-rated schools in the conference per the Wall Street Journal (Davidson College and University of Richmond).
06-19-2020 05:46 PM
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Post: #24
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 11:10 AM)CitrusUCF Wrote:  The #1 metric most professional academics care about is the Carnegie Foundation classification. Then, of those schools, the AAU is more prestigious. While university administrators have to care about US News, ARWU, Shanghai, WSJ, Forbes, etc., because of admissions, when we talk institutional fit, we are talking about what the faculty at-large, the Faculty Senate, the Provost, and such are likely to feel about a prospective member. Look at Carnegie, AAU, and Federal research funding first and foremost. Then you can consider issues like institutional mission/orientation; land/space/sea grant; other research group affiliations; university budget & endowment; faculty in national academies; doctoral degrees awarded; and other such things. But US News & such aren't taken real seriously by faculty in assessing the quality of other institutions.

Obviously there is more to the concept of institutional fit than just the view of academics. It also matters that a university makes sense in the eyes of the fans and conference. Is it an institution that is going to be seen as similar culturally? Is it going to attract interest from fans to play that school? Those are factors that matter as well when you assess a prospective institution holistically as a "fit" too. This is a reason why I don't think Texas will ever legitimately join the B1G or PAC-12...the fans have no connection those areas or the schools there. The cultures are very different, even if UT-Austin as an academic institution is a lot more similar to UCLA than it is to Oklahoma State.

Carnegie Classification
Big 10 All 14 very high
Pac 12 All 12 very high
SEC All 14 very high
ACC 13 very high, 1 high (Wake Forest)
Big 12 8 very high, 2 high (TCU, Baylor)
AAC 6 very high, 4 high, 1 other (Navy)
MWC 5 very high, 4 high, 3 other
CUSA 7 very high, 5 high, 2 other
MAC 1 very high, 11 high
SB 1 very high, 5 high, 4 other
06-19-2020 07:04 PM
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bill dazzle Offline
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Post: #25
RE: Conference Academics
There are many ways we can assess which DI league is "superior" to the others.

It does seem (to me, at least) that the Ivy, Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are superior to the others.
06-19-2020 09:23 PM
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Post: #26
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 09:23 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  There are many ways we can assess which DI league is "superior" to the others.

It does seem (to me, at least) that the Ivy, Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are superior to the others.

And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.
(This post was last modified: 06-19-2020 11:31 PM by bullet.)
06-19-2020 11:30 PM
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BruceMcF Offline
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RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

Though that "is even closer" is about 10 days away from being a "was even closer", so it seems a bit of a moot point.
06-20-2020 07:39 AM
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bill dazzle Offline
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Post: #28
RE: Conference Academics
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 09:23 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  There are many ways we can assess which DI league is "superior" to the others.

It does seem (to me, at least) that the Ivy, Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are superior to the others.

And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

That's a good point. The AAC is very solid academically from top to bottom, though I'm sure ECU, Memphis and Wichita drag it down a bit. Losing UConn hurts from an academic perspective, but the American will remain respectable academically.
06-20-2020 07:52 AM
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Post: #29
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 07:39 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

Though that "is even closer" is about 10 days away from being a "was even closer", so it seems a bit of a moot point.


The loss of UConn will clearly hurt the AAC in the USN&WR rankings. But the league still offers a number of very solid examples of academic strength.
06-20-2020 07:55 AM
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Post: #30
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 07:52 AM)bill dazzle Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 09:23 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  There are many ways we can assess which DI league is "superior" to the others.

It does seem (to me, at least) that the Ivy, Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are superior to the others.

And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

That's a good point. The AAC is very solid academically from top to bottom, though I'm sure ECU, Memphis and Wichita drag it down a bit. Losing UConn hurts from an academic perspective, but the American will remain respectable academically.

It was actually when I was inputting the rankings for the AAC that I got interested in the variance between the rankings different conference members. The AAC really stuck out to me because they have a set of schools that rank really high (Tulane [40] & SMU [64]), a set that rank pretty high (Temple [104, tie], USF [104, tie], and Tulsa [121]), a group of schools in the middle, and then a set that do not fair too well in the rankings. I think this is a good time to point out that I don’t consider a school that is ranked low a “bad” school. What students are looking for in a school varies greatly, so if I’m trying to determine if a school is good or bad, my only criteria is if the debt students take on can be paid off by the jobs an average graduate obtains. I use college scorecard for that analysis.

People probably are not interested, but just in case you are, here are those same conferences but ranked by the size of standard deviation present in their rankings. The G5 in general (minus the Sun Belt) show the greatest variety in rankings

MAC: 87.5
CUSA: 87.2
AAC: 85.8
MW: 62
CAA: 58
Big 12: 56.2
SEC: 53.3
PAC 12: 51.2
Big East: 48.1
ACC: 42.1
Sun Belt: 39.6
A10: 38.6
Big 10: 29.3
WCC: 23.1
Ivy League: 5.8
06-20-2020 09:43 AM
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BruceMcF Offline
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RE: Conference Academics
Well, the AAC is a set of fine schools on the world stage from the top through the bottom of the middle, at any rate.

This is Go5 schools in the 2019 ARWU ... since ARWU is a purely results oriented ranking, it can show a little volatility from year to year, so a four year average would be better, but I don't have the time for that.

95. Rice. CUSA

151-200. UMass. Independent/A10

201-300. Colorado St. MWC
201-300. UConn. Independent/BigEast
201-300. Hawaii. MWC
201-300. Houston. AAC
201-300. USF. AAC

301-400. Temple. AAC
301-400. UNM. MWC
301-400. Buffalo. MAC
301-400. UCF. AAC
301-400. Cincinnati. AAC

401-500. BYU Independent/WCC
401-500. Florida Int'l. CUSA
401-500. Tulane. AAC
401-500. North Texas. CUSA
401-500. Wyoming. MWC
401-500. Utah State. MWC

501-600. Georgia State. SBC
501-600. Kent State. MAC
501-600. SDSU. MWC
501-600. SMU. AAC

601-700. Old Dominion. CUSA
601-700. UTSA. CUSA
601-700. Nevada - Reno. MWC

701-800. ECU. AAC
701-800. Ohio. MAC
701-800. Nevada - Las Vegas. MWC
701-800. UTEP. CUSA

801-900. Akron. MAC
801-900. Toledo. MAC

901-1000. Florida Atlantic. CUSA
901-1000. NMSU. Independent/WAC
901-1000. UNCC. CUSA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Making, ranked by number of top 500 schools in the world (number of top 1,000 reserved as a tie breaker)

AAC 6(8)/11
201-300. Houston, USF
301-400. Temple, UCF, Cincinnati
401-500. Tulane.
501-600. SMU.
701-800. ECU.

MWC 5(8)/12
201-300. Colorado St., Hawaii.
301-400. UNM.
401-500. Wyoming, Utah State.
501-600. SDSU.
601-700. Nevada - Reno.
701-800. Nevada - Las Vegas.

CUSA 3(8)/14
95. Rice. CUSA
401-500. Florida Int'l, North Texas.
601-700. Old Dominion, UTSA.
701-800. UTEP.
901-1000. Florida Atlantic, UNCC.

MAC 1(5)/12
301-400. Buffalo.
501-600. Kent State.
701-800. Ohio, Akron, Toledo

SBC 0(1)/10 -- note it rises to 0(3)/12 with non-FB full members.
501-600. Georgia State.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
151-200. UMass. Independent/A10
201-300. UConn. Independent/BigEast
401-500. BYU Independent/WCC
901-1000. NMSU. Independent/WAC
(This post was last modified: 06-20-2020 04:16 PM by BruceMcF.)
06-20-2020 10:45 AM
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Post: #32
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 10:45 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  Well, the AAC is a set of fine schools on the world stage from the top through the bottom of the middle, at any rate.

This is Go5 schools in the 2019 ARWU ... since ARWU is a purely results oriented ranking, it can show a little volatility from year to year, so a four year average would be better, but I don't have the time for that.

95. Rice. CUSA

151-200. UMass. Independent/A10

201-300. Colorado St. MWC
201-300. UConn. Independent/BigEast
201-300. Hawaii. MWC
201-300. Houston. AAC
201-300. USF. AAC

301-400. Temple. AAC
301-400. UNM. MWC
301-400. Buffalo. MAC
301-400. UCF. AAC
301-400. Cincinnati. AAC

401-500. BYU Independent/WCC
401-500. Florida Int'l. CUSA
401-500. Tulane. AAC
401-500. North Texas. CUSA
401-500. Wyoming. MWC
401-500. Utah State. MWC

501-600. Georgia State. SBC
501-600. Kent State. MAC
501-600. SDSU. MWC
501-600. SMU. AAC

601-700. Old Dominion. CUSA
601-700. UTSA. CUSA
601-700. Nevada - Reno. MWC

701-800. ECU. AAC
701-800. Ohio. MAC
701-800. Nevada - Las Vegas. MWC
701-800. UTEP. CUSA

801-900. Akron. MAC
801-900. Toledo. MAC

901-1000. Florida Atlantic. CUSA
901-1000. NMSU. Independent/WAC
901-1000. UNCC. CUSA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Making, ranked by number of top 500 schools in the world (number of top 1,000 reserved as a tie breaker)

AAC 6(8)/11
201-300. Houston. AAC 6(8)
201-300. USF. AAC
301-400. Temple. AAC
301-400. UCF. AAC
301-400. Cincinnati. AAC
401-500. Tulane. AAC
501-600. SMU. AAC
701-800. ECU. AAC

MWC 5(8)/12
201-300. Colorado St. MWC
201-300. Hawaii. MWC
301-400. UNM. MWC
401-500. Wyoming. MWC
401-500. Utah State. MWC
501-600. SDSU. MWC
601-700. Nevada - Reno. MWC
701-800. Nevada - Las Vegas. MWC

CUSA 3(8)/14
95. Rice. CUSA
401-500. Florida Int'l. CUSA
401-500. North Texas. CUSA
601-700. Old Dominion. CUSA
601-700. UTSA. CUSA
701-800. UTEP. CUSA
901-1000. Florida Atlantic. CUSA
901-1000. UNCC. CUSA

MAC 1(3)/12
301-400. Buffalo. MAC
501-600. Kent State. MAC
701-800. Ohio. MAC
801-900. Akron. MAC
801-900. Toledo. MAC

SBC 0(1)/10 -- note it rises to 0(3)/12 with non-FB full members.
501-600. Georgia State. SBC

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
151-200. UMass. Independent/A10
201-300. UConn. Independent/BigEast
401-500. BYU Independent/WCC
901-1000. NMSU. Independent/WAC

Thanks for taking the time to organize this info! I especially like seeing ARWU in conjunction with the US News Rankings. I believe contemporary universities have two primary goals, the production of knowledge, which in my opinion is what the metrics used by ARWU are trying to measure, and educating students, which US News is trying to measure. Seeing them together gives a better picture of the achievements and focus of different institutions.

US News metrics: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-co...e-rankings

ARWU metrics: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU-Meth...-2017.html
06-20-2020 11:32 AM
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Post: #33
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 07:39 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

Though that "is even closer" is about 10 days away from being a "was even closer", so it seems a bit of a moot point.

On the ARWU, I think they ended up tied with UConn in the calculation. And they aren't that far behind the Big 12 and SEC.

That's a good part of the reason why when the Big 12 looked at expansion targets, 7 of the 11 were AAC.
(This post was last modified: 06-20-2020 11:42 AM by bullet.)
06-20-2020 11:41 AM
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Post: #34
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 11:41 AM)bullet Wrote:  
(06-20-2020 07:39 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

Though that "is even closer" is about 10 days away from being a "was even closer", so it seems a bit of a moot point.

On the ARWU, I think they ended up tied with UConn in the calculation. And they aren't that far behind the Big 12 and SEC.

That's a good part of the reason why when the Big 12 looked at expansion targets, 7 of the 11 were AAC.

That depends on what ranking you allocated to the NR schools.
06-20-2020 04:17 PM
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Post: #35
RE: Conference Academics
(06-20-2020 04:17 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  
(06-20-2020 11:41 AM)bullet Wrote:  
(06-20-2020 07:39 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  
(06-19-2020 11:30 PM)bullet Wrote:  And at least as regards FBS academics, there is a P6. AAC is even closer to Big 12 and SEC with UConn in its numbers.

Though that "is even closer" is about 10 days away from being a "was even closer", so it seems a bit of a moot point.

On the ARWU, I think they ended up tied with UConn in the calculation. And they aren't that far behind the Big 12 and SEC.

That's a good part of the reason why when the Big 12 looked at expansion targets, 7 of the 11 were AAC.

That depends on what ranking you allocated to the NR schools.

That's pretty arbitrary which is why I followed the OP's lead and left them out. Navy, Tulsa, Memphis and TCU are a pretty diverse group.
06-21-2020 12:07 AM
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Post: #36
RE: Conference Academics
(06-18-2020 08:57 PM)pjm.2021 Wrote:  Every once in a while, when people talk about conference realignment they discuss the “academic fit” of a university in a certain conference. Because I had some time on my hands I decided to compile an average 2020 ranking of the universities that make up a number of conferences. I used two major undergraduate college rankings, US news and WSJ/Times Higher Education. Interestingly enough, while those two rankings use different inputs and differ from each other drastically on individual schools, for the most part the conferences end up in the same order regardless of which service you use.
If the school fell into a ranking range (i.e. 601-800) I used the average of that range as the school’s ranking (in the example above the school would be ranked 700).

A few conferences had some schools not ranked in the US news national rankings. Those schools were either ranked as a regional university (offer a full range of undergraduate programs and some master's programs but few doctoral programs) or a liberal arts universities (emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study). As these designations do not have anything to do with quality and there is no way to compare a US news regional/liberal arts ranking to a national ranking, I simply left those schools out of the US news average for the conference. For extra info I marked how many schools were not counted in the US news average ranking (does not impact the WSJ ranking).

There were 5 schools for who I could not find a WSJ 2020 ranking (4 of them in the Sun Belt). They were USAFA, Arkansas State University (ranked >800 in 2019), Louisiana-Monroe (ranked >800 in 2019), Troy, and UT Arlington.

Finally, for this analysis Uconn is in placed in the Big East. I also put the independents in their Olympic sports conferences: Notre Dame-ACC, BYU-WCC, UMASS-A10.

Conference-----WSJ avg------US News Avg--#of schools not in US News
Ivy League----------7-------------------7
ACC---------------104-----------------58
Big 10-------------107----------------63
Pac 12-------------122----------------82
WCC---------------151----------------80-------------2
Big East-----------188----------------96-------------3
A10----------------228---------------117------------5
SEC----------------258---------------113
CAA----------------266---------------112------------2
Big 12-------------285----------------141
AAC----------------330----------------160
MW----------------393----------------238------------2
CUSA--------------507----------------268
MAC---------------537-----------------237
Sun Belt----------631-----------------323------------3

Big West-----------187----------------67------------5

Using your approach the Big West is definitely a top 10 although probably not a top 5 academic conference. It's hard to gauge because six members are very high research national universities (the UC system schools plus Hawaii) while the other five are Cal State schools that don't emphasize research but have strong regional rankings (average USNWR ranking of 31st out of 128 western regional universities).

Looking at the ARWU, the Big West's six national universities all rank in the world's top 300 and four rank in the top 100:

18 UC San Diego
48 UC UC Santa Barbara
80 UC Irvine
90 UC Davis
151-200 UC Riverside
201-300 Hawaii
(This post was last modified: 06-21-2020 04:54 AM by HawaiiMongoose.)
06-21-2020 04:12 AM
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Post: #37
RE: Conference Academics
(06-21-2020 12:07 AM)bullet Wrote:  That's pretty arbitrary which is why I followed the OP's lead and left them out. Navy, Tulsa, Memphis and TCU are a pretty diverse group.

Yeah, but leaving them out is giving them the same rank as the average of the ranked schools, which is a pretty big bias.

For the ARWU, I guess I'd switch to US rankings, then treat any schools in the balance of Carnegie "very high research" as coming right after and the Carnegie "high" as coming after that, and give them a rank equal to the middle of their tier.

But at a bare minimum, give the "NR" schools a ranking one after the last ranked school, because they are certainly no higher than that ... that it still biased, but it is less biased than giving them a ranking equal to the average, which is a big inflation of the average.
(This post was last modified: 06-21-2020 06:31 PM by BruceMcF.)
06-21-2020 04:38 AM
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Rob3338 Offline
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Post: #38
RE: Conference Academics
(06-18-2020 09:45 PM)SkullyMaroo Wrote:  I always heard after the very top those rankings don’t mean anything and it’s just a way for the ranking services to make money from the schools.

Wrong once again. However there are some college rankings which a school must pay a fee to be listed in. These are suspect. However none of those are mentioned in this post.
06-21-2020 06:13 PM
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SkullyMaroo Offline
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Post: #39
RE: Conference Academics
(06-21-2020 06:13 PM)Rob3338 Wrote:  
(06-18-2020 09:45 PM)SkullyMaroo Wrote:  I always heard after the very top those rankings don’t mean anything and it’s just a way for the ranking services to make money from the schools.

Wrong once again. However there are some college rankings which a school must pay a fee to be listed in. These are suspect. However none of those are mentioned in this post.

Wrong once again? Lol - I’ve not had any interactions with you and you've never corrected me on anything. And I’m not sure you’re exactly proving me wrong here considering I’m just stating what I heard about college ratings.
06-21-2020 06:30 PM
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miko33 Offline
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Post: #40
RE: Conference Academics
Is this a discussion on how conference academic rankings affect conference expansion? Simply put - it has zero bearing. It's all about whether a school has a large enough fan base willing to spend the money to prop up the conferences - whether it's consuming the content digitally, on site or through donations to the schools athletic departments themselves. The secondary consideration would be whether adding the potential school would cause heartburn due to diverging values - i.e. adding BYU to the PAC12 for example.

Everything else is verbal masturbation to pass the time.
06-22-2020 11:08 AM
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