U.S. News & World Report

[Planter's Punch]

Everything SMU has done is to get smarter students, build departments, fund more students, fund more research, and give students a better learning environment. If you look at what schools like BU did to jump the rankings, it takes basically a marketing campaign to raise peer review of programs to help game the rankings. Honestly, I am sure like lobbying it gets a "great return" but I would rather see the money focused on real academic growth. I could see RGT doing this once the campaign is over, and he has all the new facilities, research, professors, and endowments to sell. If you really want to go up in rankings, sadly you cannot just focus on making a better university.

[gostangs]

last year was a 5 way tie at 58, so I don't think we moved at all actually.

giving is important, but is only about 5% of the total. I think where we lose some is reputational (relative to some of these other schools). Clemson being where they are is crazy - nothing vs them but there is no way they offer what we do in the classroom.

we will always fight the east coast/west coast battle on reputation. That is why you have to really hand it to Rice who hangs on at the top in this state despite that.

We also have real work to do. totally agree on the business school. We need to throw a really nice retirement party for Al and turn the page to a dynamic person who will focus on more than just accounting and get SMU connected to Dallas in a much higher profile way. We should be generating 30 million a year in research out of cox alone.

Enough buildings. Time to grow the endowment. Quickly.

[CoxMustangFan]

last year was a 5 way tie at 58, so I don't think we moved at all actually.

giving is important, but is only about 5% of the total. I think where we lose some is reputational (relative to some of these other schools). Clemson being where they are is crazy - nothing vs them but there is no way they offer what we do in the classroom.

we will always fight the east coast/west coast battle on reputation. That is why you have to really hand it to Rice who hangs on at the top in this state despite that.

We also have real work to do. totally agree on the business school. We need to throw a really nice retirement party for Al and turn the page to a dynamic person who will focus on more than just accounting and get SMU connected to Dallas in a much higher profile way. We should be generating 30 million a year in research out of cox alone.

Enough buildings. Time to grow the endowment. Quickly.

A lot of good ideas in this post.

[CoxMustangFan]

3 out of 4 alumni still aren't giving anything - that is insane to me.

Agree 100%. Complete head scratcher to me since it includes any amount.

[RebStang]

On the bright side, Forbes has Cox ranked #37. That's ahead of Vanderbilt, Georgetown, USC and Rice... but behind Aggy and Texas.

[PonySnob]

SMU graduates too many entitled AHs who have the attitude of "I paid the school so much when I was there, why would I give back?"

Have heard this numerous times from alumni.


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[friarwolf]

This is old but when I lived in South Carolina in the '80's, I can't tell you the number of cars I saw on the road with an orange sticker that said IPTAY. This was Clemson's fundraising club. Back then it stood for I Pay Ten A Year. Wish we could get all alums to do the same thing..........

[coloradoStang]

SMU graduates too many entitled AHs who have the attitude of "I paid the school so much when I was there, why would I give back?"

Have heard this numerous times from alumni.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

same from brand new young alumni

[SoCal_Pony]

SMU graduates too many entitled AHs who have the attitude of "I paid the school so much when I was there, why would I give back?"

Have heard this numerous times from alumni.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

same from brand new young alumni

All well and good, but that is not the reason we are currently ranked #61

I graduated from SMU 30 years ago. At the time we were ranked in the low 50's. 30 years later, after all the growth that has occurred in the city of Dallas, SMU has managed to move to the low 60's.

I won't speak to the growth in SMU personally because as we agree most schools are advancing, just at different rates. Apparently us at a slower pace to our peers. Crazy.

[couch 'em]

But hey, we're world changers with engineering gender parity.

[CalallenStang]

This is old but when I lived in South Carolina in the '80's, I can't tell you the number of cars I saw on the road with an orange sticker that said IPTAY. This was Clemson's fundraising club. Back then it stood for I Pay Ten A Year. Wish we could get all alums to do the same thing..........

IPTAY started a long time ago and it still exists. Clemson has fostered a fantastic culture of giving back amongst its alumni.

[RebStang]

This is old but when I lived in South Carolina in the '80's, I can't tell you the number of cars I saw on the road with an orange sticker that said IPTAY. This was Clemson's fundraising club. Back then it stood for I Pay Ten A Year. Wish we could get all alums to do the same thing..........

IPTAY started a long time ago and it still exists. Clemson has fostered a fantastic culture of giving back amongst its alumni.

That's true but, to be very clear, IPTAY is an athletics only program... A donation to IPTAY doesn't directly help the school - it helps the athletic department.

I don't know how US News and other rankings that consider alumni giving factor that part in. I mean, a school like LSU probably has pretty huge alumni giving numbers if you include football donations, baseball donations, etc but nobody is going to seriously call LSU a great school just because they raise a lot of money for sports (especially given the fact that there was concern not that long ago that the university itself might have to declare bankruptcy).

[rodrod5]

1. I am not sure why one would only count undergrad enrollment when comparing enrollments and endowment dollars since the US News rankings are for the entire university.

2. If you want to know why the rankings are what they are you need to look at the methodology.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-co ... ngs?page=2

Undergrad reputation (22.5%)
Retention (22.5%)
Faculty Resources (20%)
Selectivity (12.5%)
Financial Resources (10%)
Graduation Rate (7.5%)
Alumni Giving (5%)

Each of those is further broken down as shown above.

So lets discuss a few of them like academic reputation. Most HS counselors are not qualified to be much of anything much less an arbiter of what is a quality university especially since it has been about 3 decades since the function of a counselor was getting kids into school instead of trying (poorly) to handle problem children that should probably be in reform school.

As for the academics (higher ed people) well even though it mentions "dedication to teaching" really their rankings are going to be based on number of well known faculty, total research dollars, publications and the like with little consideration given to teaching. That is just how it is going to be. And SMU is not high in research productivity nor are they high in well known faculty members or published research.

There is surely some bias with the HS counselors as well because of location and cost. East coast and west coast schools can charge what they charge because "they are so in demand" and "look at the cost of living there" while a school outside of those areas that has a high tuition is going to be viewed as "people paying a lot because they can". Never mind the numbers related to how many SMU students get financial aid and the number that get nearly a full ride for free with financial aid.

So in this metric SMU is not going to score as well as they probably should and really SMU is probably relatively low in total research and recognized faculty and published research for a university the size of SMU and with the resources. That is not what the criteria is SUPPOSE to be, but that is positively what "academics" are judging based upon.

Retention

Here 20% goes to 4 year graduation rate and 80% to 6 year rate. Here SMU is probably right in line with most similar private schools and probably behind some of the major "known" private schools on the east and west coast. The main issue for SMU is the fact that at the 6 year mark where 80% of this metric comes from many of the better public schools will probably be getting close to the same level as SMU so SMU is not getting a major boost from having a lot of students that graduate in 4 years especially and at the 6 year mark the metrics start to even out.

Faculty Resources

This includes one specific metric class size that Clemson specifically has been known to manipulate (and others as well), but Clemson was exposed for it in a well published report from a number of years ago. Clemson (and others) were also shown to have manipulated the first criteria of reputation.

The class size was manipulated by looking at all the classes and making sure that classes that were close to having fewer than 20 students were shifted around so that more of them had fewer than 20 students and classes that had over 50 students were either shifted to be under the 50 student mark or the were allowed to grow extremely large because there is no difference between a class of 51 and a class of 400 in the metric. So if you had two sections of a class with 58 students in each well you could actually do BETTER by having one section of a class with 116 students and the other professor that taught the section that was no longer offered was free to teach a class of under 50 students or perhaps even teach one under 20 students. So the goal was make more sections with under 20 students and make fewer sections with over 50 students that could include merging two sections over 50 students into one. And as a "neutral" as long as you had sections under 50 you could do things like merge two sections of 22 students into one and the again free a professor to teach a "special section for honors students" of under 20. This is probably something that is easier to accomplish at a larger university VS a smaller one and while a school like SMU should be in the position to have a lot of classes under 20 students if they are not actively managing that especially in popular majors like business classes that are often larger classes well you might find others have manipulated themselves to be closer to you than they should be.

Faculty Salary is another component of this metric. So again no consideration for east coast cost so there is where UConn, Northeastern, and Pepperdine especially are going to have an advantage over SMU. Add in that state schools that are land grant like Clemson have a ton of long term, tenured, full professors and they can manipulate pay with grant funding in some cases and again they can have a pretty good overall average pay rate even relative to a private school. Business professors are generally high paid relative to others, but again one would need to know what the faculty to student ratio is at Cox and if that helps or hurts SMU and also engineering, hard and physical sciences professors also get paid well relative to others and SMU is much smaller in enrollment in these areas than a larger state land grant or flagship school would be and arts and liberal arts are generally on the lower end of the scale and I would imagine because of cost of living and other factors SMU can pay a bit lower than some east and west coast private schools and at state schools especially on the east and west coast and larger "research oriented state schools" well those faculty can attempt to demand pay closer to their hard and physical science peers especially if they do have to publish and conduct research for tenure.

So again I would say there SMU is probably not benefiting as much as they should in that portion of the criteria.

Selectivity

SAT scores I will let others look those up if they desire to compare between the listed schools and SMU or any other, but SMU should do well there.

Top 10% of HS class. I would imagine SMU might not do quite as well here simply because of auto admissions in Texas for top 10% and also because there are a lot of private school students that could be 11% to 40% in class rank from a competitive school that could pull a high SAT score and that could get letters of recommendation and have other factors that help them get into SMU while there are probably thousands upon thousands of public school students from low quality public schools (shout out to most of DISD high schools) that would not consider going to SMU at all and that would pull a terrible SAT and yet would waltz right into A&M as a 10%er or UT as an 8%er even though they will probably struggle at best if not wash out completely and a top 8% HS class rank and a 978 SAT would not get them into SMU anyway.

So again what seems should be an SMU advantage is really something that is probably a "wash" when considered relative to the number of 10% students that look at SMU Vs the numbers that do not and the number of 25% to 11% private schools students that do look at SMU.

Acceptance Rate is a MEANINGLESS NUMBER period and always will be. It is similar to HS class rank with no consideration for the competitiveness of the HS. The difference is the university has ZERO control over the total number of applicants and they have ZERO control over the quality of the applicants. The ONLY way to decrease the acceptance ratio is to recruit more students that YOU WILL REJECT which is asinine and a waste of time and money and reflects nothing about the students that you do admit.

Here I will compare the schools listed

SMU 52.4%, Clemson 52.8%, Northeastern 32.2%, Miami 38.2%, Pepperdine 35.5%, UConn 50%

So here we see what I was talking about. Schools that are public like Clemson and UConn are simply getting a massive number of applicants (IPEDS will have the numbers) relative to SMU and thus they simply reject a hell of a lot more applicants than SMU does even if they admit a lot more students that SMU would not admit. Pepperdine and Miami benefit from being Pepperdine with that amazing location near a MASSIVE city with a lot of wealth and Miami is in Miami. Northeastern is a major "fall back" school for east coast private school kids and private university aspirants so they probably get a ton more applications than SMU.

TCU was 49.8% and Baylor was 55.4% so my advice is play better football and recruit more students that are not qualified and then reject them! (all numbers from US Snooze)

Financial Resources

Here SMU needs to remember that schools like Clemson and UConn that are both flagship state schools and UConn that are land grant are going to get a high level of state funding and that will more than make up for the endowment numbers. For every $50 million in state funding that a public school gets a private school would need to have $1 billion in endowment dollars paying off the "standard" 5% of corpus. I would imagine Clemson and UConn are getting in the range of $400 million in state funding annually so that equals about an $8 billion dollar endowment.

These numbers also specifically include research. So we can look at where SMU stands relative to those listed schools here.

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site ... herd#a2477

Clemson $152 million
Miami $345 million
Northeastern $116 million (lower than I expected)
Pepperdine $2.4 million (WAY lower than expected)
SMU $22.5 million
UConn $242 million

So between state funding and research dollars that pretty much takes any SMU endowment advantage out of that equation for all but Pepperdine.

Graduation Rate Performance

I will let you read how that is calculated and it is basically made up BS numbers that have little or no meaning to anything at all.

Alumni Giving....I am sure SMU does well, but I would imagine all those listed do well also and it is only a small factor of the overall equation.

So what it means for SMU is that in a number of areas where SMU should have an advantage over public schools there are reasons that advantage still does not become a major factor specifically because of some manipulation of things like class size and surely because of those being ask to "rate" a school ignoring factors like actual teaching and class size and how that should factor into a university experience and instead thinking about what faculty reputation is and what research numbers are and what well known faculty teach there.

Other factors like finances even out with state funding or SMU lags in research relative to those above them. Graduation rates are probably marginalized because of the much larger % at the 6 year mark VS the 4 year mark in the scoring.

So really it comes down to this for SMU. You need to ramp up the research, hire more national academy members, make people more aware of the fact that most students do not come close to paying "rack rate' for tuition and win more at football so you get a larger pool of unqualified applicants. and if you want to be more aggressive be less honest in your own peer evaluations and open up the Excel, SAS, SPSS or People Soft and manipulate class sizes t make sure you are cutting down the number of classes with 51-55 students (SMU probably has few if any over that) and also make sure to try and cut down those classes of 21-24 students to 19 students if possible.

Really the research, publications and better known faculty would probably do most of the work along with winning football.

[gostangs]

Thanks Rod - very good synopsis. It is also a rolling 5 year average on most of those metrics so hopefully our reputational piece is on the rise. Also hear we went below 50% on our acceptance this year so that should help going forward.

Research is where we really lag - so we desperately need to align better with a medical facility and get in that loop.

Any idea how Tulane jumps 11 spots in a year? Their average SAT is not that different than ours - so feels like some cooked books to me. Don't think I have seen that happen for anyone before - maybe USC a couple of years ago.

[CalallenStang]

This is old but when I lived in South Carolina in the '80's, I can't tell you the number of cars I saw on the road with an orange sticker that said IPTAY. This was Clemson's fundraising club. Back then it stood for I Pay Ten A Year. Wish we could get all alums to do the same thing..........

IPTAY started a long time ago and it still exists. Clemson has fostered a fantastic culture of giving back amongst its alumni.

That's true but, to be very clear, IPTAY is an athletics only program... A donation to IPTAY doesn't directly help the school - it helps the athletic department.

I don't know how US News and other rankings that consider alumni giving factor that part in. I mean, a school like LSU probably has pretty huge alumni giving numbers if you include football donations, baseball donations, etc but nobody is going to seriously call LSU a great school just because they raise a lot of money for sports (especially given the fact that there was concern not that long ago that the university itself might have to declare bankruptcy).

That is true about IPTAY. I believe SMU includes Mustang Club donations as donations to the school - not sure if there is a set practice or not.