Betsy Hammond in the Oregonian, here. The report, here, paints the Association of American Universities (Bob Berdahl, former President) as an outdated old boys club, and calls for a “New AAU”. Dave Frohnmayer, UO President from 1995 to 2009 and now a noted tobacco company attorney, blames UO’s decline over his years in charge on falling state support – but why did OSU do so well over the same time period?
A huge amount of grants automatically pour into OSU because it is a land, sea, space and sun grant institution. These are generally for applied research. As you know, the UO is not a technical institution. We are advancing discovery which then is applied by schools like OSU. As I hope you also know, unlike OSU, the UO competes for nearly every dollar it receives in research grants. I do not expect Betsy Hammond to know this (although she should, if her beat is higher education). I do expect people who care about the UO, as you obviously do, not to take the bait.
Actually, what is interesting about this “New AAU” report is that it emphasizes many things other than research dollars – e.g. low cost high quality undergraduate education in its ranking scheme. That said I agree Betsy’s brief story did not capture this. The report is worth reading.
I see Yale sandwiched nicely between Florida International University and Unversity of Missouri. Maybe the administrators at Yale will see these rankings and figure out how they can be more like Florida International University.
Is UO on the list for being Yale-like or FIU-like?
I guess it helps if you’re a 50,000+ juggernaut!
Just a couple of ratios, consistent with stuff I have bitched about before here:
Compare UW with UO
UW: %PHDS = PHDs/BS =703/7590 –> 9.2%
UO: 161/3831 = 4.2%
Fed Research/BS degrees:
UW = 619K/7590 = 81.5
UO = 61L/3831 = 15.3
I realize most readers/responders to this thread will think that the above two ratios are merely arbitrary. To me, they explain why the UO is at the bottom of this list.
By any perspecitve, the UO is primarily an undergraduate institution and no longer a graduate research University,
Of course UW is the #1 public grant getting institution in the country and has a medical school and an engineering school. Probably not the best comparator (i.e., we can’t be UW for many, many reasons).
Doesn’t invalidate your point, but still.
I am just comparing number 1 with number last
to show differences in scaling.
I guess this is an interesting read, but it definitely has a different slant on excellence in education than most people. In particular, the more selective a school is, them more it is penalize in the rankings. So a school that admits 100% of applicants receives the highest scores on this criterion. Unless you are Arizona State, a school can not simply growth without bounds, so if a lot of students want to come to your school, then some are not going to be admitted. This one criterion makes me suspicious of the motivations of this whole study.
Also, far be it for uomatters to try to always cast the UO in the worst possible light, but the UO actually makes the “New AAU” on this list (probably because of high admissions rate and low cost of education). Many other AAU schools, including some of our “peers” and many privates, drop off the list entirely. Why isn’t your headline, “UO far outranks NYU on list of top US universities”?
The social education agenda described in this report might be interesting, but it obliquely related to academic excellence in the traditional sense (which I guess is the whole point). The relative rankings of the UO and OSU on this thing are completely meaningless.
In general, this is fairly typical for this site, in which there is a kernel of interesting information embedded in a giant filter of personal agenda. Why not rise above the latter? Must every interaction be an ad hominem?
“why did OSU do so well over the same time period?”
Just read back through UOMatters’ archives. UO and and many of its administrators (and faculty too!) have focused on aping the characteristics of top universities (AAU membership, rankings, own police force, faculty pay, “University of” title, athletics) instead of on the basics of teaching and research. Cargo cult doesn’t work any better in academics than it did for Pacific Islanders post-WWII.
See also the disdain for lesser institutions (Anonymous@1:23pm “UO is not a technical institution” but other examples abound here and elsewhere).
How would changing the name from “University of Oregon” have helped? Not having done something about faculty pay? (Which UO has done, notwithstanding a lot of nonbelief among faculty).
What could UO have done to get a medical school, an engineering school, a natural resources school?
If you read the methodology, you will see that they started with 203 Carnegie “high” and “very high” research schools, but ended up with 80 by dropping Canadian schools, schools without undergraduate programs, and any school that scored below the UO, the lowest-ranking current AAU member school.
This methodology dropped some real dogs (no offense, Dog) right off the list, like Dartmouth, Brown, and Princeton. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
The methodology strongly favors what baseball statistics nerds call “counting stats”: size of school, number of Ph.D.s granted, number of this, number of that. That means that if two schools are equal in all measures on a per capita basis, but school A is twice the size of school B, school A will score twice as high. That doubling is clearly based on size alone, not on any measure of quality of research or of education. The small, selective schools listed above have low counting stats (and high selectivity), lowering their scores substantially.
A competent, unbiased researcher would find a way to normalize these counting stats.
Actually, it’s impossible to do this sort of ranking in any sensible way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem and replace “voters” or “individuals” with “stats” or “measures”.
In any case, the goal of these sorts of rankings isn’t really to rank schools, it’s to get people thinking about which measures are important and open up the debate to new ideas.
Having got my education in part at an elitist east coast prep school and ivy league college, and in part at a land grant ag school, I’ve got plenty of respect for both systems, and their problems.
you can only “normalize” counting stats if the events are independent. UOmatters below is essentially correct, the co-variance between many of these measures makes such normalization difficult. Clearly non-linearity occurs with med and engineer schools are included and yes the rankings are clearly based on numerical output. Nonetheless, the variance in some of the per capita ratios that can be derived can point institutions to
strategies that can improve that ratio and to me, that is the *only* value of lists like this.
This approach has dropped schools with small outputs due to size limitation, but I would certainly argue that Brown and Princeton are among the finest research Universities we have.
In fact, the real litmus test for me on this list is the fact that
Carnegie Mellon (CMU) is dropped and John Hopkins (JHU) has moved way down.
If you look at the ratio of fed dollars to undergrads,
JHU is greater than 100 !!
So it lists top research universities in the country, doesn’t list Carnegie Mellon. Wow. Maybe it’s just my field, but that’s absolutely unthinkable
Any methodology that leaves Princeton off the list is downright silly.
Wow! we are out of touch. Dog speaks the truth now, as he has in the past, yet we do not listen and we fail to act responsibly. We are first in line to be cut from the AAU and our last best hope for survival recently left for a BIG promotion to a top 15 university on the same list. It seems she cast her ballot of no confidence in us and we deserve it.
UO has lived off its laurels far too long. The world is much more practical and “applied” than it was in the 60’s This blog is nothing more than a peculiar exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or more accurately,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RcVzevWX4U
Get a grip folks, we are an academic anachronism that became an ochlocracy in 2012, whose primary function is to chew up administrators as though they were members of the Nixon administration, in favor of Union thugs. Shame on us.
Union thugs? Send me an email and I’d be happy to meet and try and persuade you that UAUO is thug-free. Meanwhile lets all keep the trolliness to a minimum.
LOL at Union Thugs. Good Lord. What’s next? Mud pies?
That was an overly optimistic endorsement of KE but parts rang true for sure. The thugs in JH are far more worrisome than anything the union has at the present. Either way, junior faculty in STEM have need for worry at UO; the research enterprise as a whole is in disarray and despite individual successes, it is headed for a crash.