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SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next decade

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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby ponyboy » Wed Jan 05, 2022 2:09 pm

The main problem with the Carnegie classifications is that they create the incentive for educational malinvestment on a grand scale. When a university’s administration seeks to move from R-3 to R-2 or R-2 to R-1, they churn out more doctorates and hire more faculty than the market demands.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/05 ... -the-fuss/

Again, what’s our mission?
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby Mustangs_Maroons » Fri Jan 07, 2022 11:39 pm

ponyboy wrote:
The main problem with the Carnegie classifications is that they create the incentive for educational malinvestment on a grand scale. When a university’s administration seeks to move from R-3 to R-2 or R-2 to R-1, they churn out more doctorates and hire more faculty than the market demands.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/05 ... -the-fuss/

Again, what’s our mission?


Fine - then what’s your plan for what the mission should be? Please enlighten us.

If it’s not to aspirin to be a top academic institution what would you say the mission should rather be? Being R1 under Carnegie is not the be-all and end-all but it surely a great objective and while not everything is perfect, it’s much better to be in it than out of it. It’s like being in P5 or not, you’d rather be in that circle. Love to hear your mission statement…
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby CBpony » Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:00 am

Keep throwing money down the football black hole. This is why we are getting spanked. Even UTD is passing us by
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby tristatecoog » Thu May 26, 2022 12:24 pm

SMU just hired the Dean at Memphis who was the architect of getting them to R1 category. Hired Robin S. Poston as the new dean of the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies and Associate Provost for Graduate Education effective August 15, 2022

“She was a lead architect behind the University of Memphis’ 2021 rise from R2 to R1 in the Carnegie rankings.”
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby AfricanMustang » Thu May 26, 2022 1:24 pm

tristatecoog wrote:SMU just hired the Dean at Memphis who was the architect of getting them to R1 category. Hired Robin S. Poston as the new dean of the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies and Associate Provost for Graduate Education effective August 15, 2022

“She was a lead architect behind the University of Memphis’ 2021 rise from R2 to R1 in the Carnegie rankings.”


Saw her profile, seem underwhelming.

https://www.smu.edu/News/Featured/acade ... ed-studies
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby tristatecoog » Thu May 26, 2022 5:33 pm

Well, you know her objective and the Moody Family may have approved. Penn undergrad with UCF MS Acctg and PhD in Business from Michigan State. Not sure why she chose UCF and MSU after Penn but must be some career reasons. If she can spearhead Memphis to get Tier 1 research designation, I have high confidence she can do the same at SMU.
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Re: SMU thinks can reach Carnegie R1 status in the next deca

Postby rodrod5 » Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:13 pm

There are a number of inaccuracies in this topic that should be corrected.

1. I would encourage everyone to take a look at what The Carnegie Foundation stated in their FAQs prior to handing their university CLASSIFICATIONS over to Indiana which then handed them off to The American Council on Education

This is a link to the web archive of the FAQs from Carnegie

http://web.archive.org/web/201204291002 ... s/faqs.php

I would encourage everyone to read #2, 4, 9, 25

Here is the current FAQ

https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/links.php

Once again point #2 makes things very clear. These are not rankings nor should they be used as rankings. And going with the argument made by fans of a university that is currently in the AAC and that is soon leaving the AAC that "everyone looks at them like they are rankings so they are rankings" just shows that idiots can obtain a college degree. The funny thing is their university was one of the ones that really got things stirred up with "tier 1" and I told them at the time that using false rankings and made up criteria to try and differentiate themselves from the universities they are lumped ion with would come back to haunt them. Then it was only a year or two later that UNLV (mentioned in this thread) started to make the same "self defined" "tier 1" metrics and magically "achieved" "tier1!!!!" and the great race was on for every university to be "tier 1". And thus the ones that really got it kicked into high gear find themselves right back wading in the same pool they desperately wanted out of.

These are not rankings, they do not even look at the quality of research just total dollars, they define NOTHING about faculty or teaching quality, and they are not normalized for faculty counts. The are strictly a measure of research dollars and some graduate student production with ZERO measure of the quality or usefulness or need for any of it.

2. Next the "tier 1" by The State of Texas has again been abused and has strayed far away from it's intentions. In 2009 when the NRUF and TRIP programs were started for Texas public universities the definition they used for "tier 1" was AAU MEMBERSHIP and nothing else. When they counted "tier 1" universities in other states they strictly counted AAU members period.

The real stupidity started with using the idiots term "tier 1" which is meaningless and what a fool uses to discuss academics. Next the NRUF endowment and qualifications to participate in funding from that endowment was a START towards "tier 1". Qualifying for that extra funding was not a signal of obtaining (mythical and stupid) "tier 1" it was a START towards becoming an AAU member of to have "AAU like metrics" across the university.

At the time it was stated that it would take $50 to $70 million dollars per year, per university in additional funding (mostly directed towards specific types of research) to elevate any single Texas public university to "AAU like metrics". The AAU has always made it clear they despise universities that come out with frequent talks about how "they are going to get into the AAU" and "how they compare to AAU members" specifically because they are not interested in universities that pick and choose things to throw money at and that try and buy in National Academy Members and researchers from specific areas to try and "meet some metrics". The AAU also normalizes factors to faculty count and looks at the entire mission of the university in addition to comparing "peer universities" like those that are public with a med school to similar or public without a med school to similar and same with private schools. They also look at the ability of a university to be selective or not. In Texas with 35 public universities come can be very selective while in a state with three (Iowa, Arizona. Nebraska) they cannot be that selective.

The AAU wants you to DEVELOP a university not buy in metrics and then say "hey we have 2,000 faculty and do slightly more research than a private school with 900 faculty let us in!!!" And PS we bought in 9 National Academy members recently let is in!

The State of Texas realized this, but more importantly obtaining what amounts to under $10 million in 2022 dollars from the NRUF endowment when it was stated that in 2009 it would take $50 to $70 million to move a university to AAU like metrics and what was stupidly defined as "tier 1" does not mean you are "tier 1" when you get that under $10 million in additional funding in 2023 and beyond. It just means you have idiots for administrators that have lost sight of what the goals were when the NRUF was started and that The state of Texas has done a poor job of providing the required funding to even try to reach those goals and instead they have let morons with advanced degrees that run universities claim false and meaningless "accolades" and then they can hang a billboard and go back to glad-handing each other.

3. Lets look at the US News rankings criteria

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-c ... nd-weights

I will not break those down at this time (maybe later), but a great deal of those have little to do with overall education quality and none of them have anything to do wot research productivity or STEM fields. I would say that "academic reputation" has something to do with that, but it will be very difficult to change that metric since most of those being surveyed for that metric are really not qualified to have anything to do with that type of survey and they are not going to bother to stay up to date on any particular university or university they are going to go with the old standbys and mail it in.

Unfortunately some of those that should be qualified are also the ones that have used their position to "game the system" by ranking other universities low and helping their university move students around for class size in order to appear better while caring little about what it means to students in the classroom.

Students getting PELL Grants and how they perform is not an academic metric it is a social justice metric and is meaningless.

I would argue alumni giving is actually meaningful. I base this on the argument that no one with a brain or money says "my time at SMU totally sucked and was meaningless to my life I want to give back to them so that others can have that same craptastic meaningless waste of 4 or 5 years". I would say the fact that graduates of your university have the means and desire to give back after spending at least some of their money or a lot of their money to get a degree signifies they felt that time was very meaningful in their life and in their success. Even if a graduate was on a full ride because of prior generosity I would think the urge to "give back" would not be as strong if they felt like they wasted their time or were just shoveled a load of crap for 4 or 5 years.

There are a number of other flaws with those metrics and they have been gamed time and again and at this point and time they strongly favor private schools over public and they are starting to have a strong bias towards "struggle university" and against schools that have successful alumni that wish for their own offspring to obtain the same education they did.

4. Texas Tech does not have a medical school. The Texas Tech System has two medical schools, but they are independently accredited institutions that are not a part of Texas Tech university and they never have been. Texas Tech back when the system was only Texas Tech and Texas Tech Medical School-Lubbock looked at merging the two institutions, but because of how formula funding works in Texas and the differences for medical schools vs. four year universities there would have been a significant loss of state funding that would not have been made up for with any administrative cost savings and in fact not even close.

While a medical school as a part of SMU (or any other university) would help with doctoral degree generation and research funding which would help to get a different CLASSIFICATION from Carnegie it would really not help with the AAU. Because the AAU evaluates based on having or not having a medical school, This was one of the lies when Nebraska was booted that they did not have a medical school to help them. Well being the only major university in the state and the wildly popular one there was NOTHING that prevented merging the UN-Medical School under the administration of UNL, but the reality is their medical school is not a research powerhouse and making that merger would have the AAU now evaluate them against peer universities with medical schools and their evaluation probably would have gotten worse not better because the medical school is teaching-centric not research-centric. They only had TEN YEARS to make that happen and never saw fit to do so because it would not have helped at all and probably would have hurt.

I would not be surprised in the future with UT, UTRGV, UH, and SHSU all having medical schools as a part of the main campus if the funding issues are not looked at by the state and more medical schools are merged under main campuses like Texas Tech and the TTUHSC-Lubbock, UTSA and UTHSC-SA. There was a look at merging UTSA and UTHSC-SA back when the NRUF program first started, but at that time the program was new and the idea was for universities to actually TAKE MEANINGFUL ACTIONS to qualify for the funding not just find a way to half [deleted] their way into it and the study concluded that UTSA needed to elevate their profile in order to better match the reputation of UTHSC-SA. I think the real concern was that UTD and UTA then probably would have both eyed UTSW and that would be an issue for the UT System and at the same time north Texas state was looking to half [deleted] their way to gain the funding and thinking of merging their D.O. school in Fort Worth with the Denton campus. The D.O. school has never wanted anything to do with that and still does not so that was a no go plus I think The state of Texas was telling all of them the program was set up for them to actually EARN funding not just back their lazy asses into it.
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