SoCal_Pony wrote:AfricanMustang wrote:SMU US News & World Report Rankings
We have increased 14 points from 15 years ago (On Average a point each year); though we are three points lower than we were 7 years ago in 2011 - it seems we have stagnated over the last decade.
2019 - 59
2018 - 61
2017 - 56 (Tied for highest US News Ranking Ever)
AA, thanks for the numbers, but as I stated earlier, during the Pony Express years, SMU was ranked somewhat higher. I believe in the low 50’s.
I posted this awhile back and none other than Stallion agreed with me. I can’t find the thread on PF’s, but here is what Stallion said (I actually saved it).
Stallion - “I got SoCalPony's back on this one-SMU was definitely ranked in the low to mid 50s circa 1985 before the DP and then the Pye debacle. After DP the SATs, GPAs and acceptance rates dropped dramatically. SMU didn't want you to know how far so they stopped publishing them right about 1988-I actually researched this in the 1990s in order to determine the effect of DP/Pye on the university. I was able to get all the pertinent information each year from a particular SMU publication-and then it just stopped being made public”
So while SMU has improved over the past 20 years, you are correct we have stagnated over the past decade but even worse, we have gone backwards over the past 30 years.
IMO a very poor reflection on the leadership of this school.
Unless you mean by another publication other than U.S. News & World Report - whose rankings commenced in 1983 and SMU has never been in the top 50 of U.S. News and World Report - though the NYT notes below our endowment was at one time 27th largest in the nation - in the 1980s and then the death penalty happened. We are now around 70th largest.
U.S. News World Report Rankings (1983-2007)http://web.archive.org/web/200709081424 ... ts/usnews/http://publicuniversityhonors.com/tag/u ... -rankings/SMU, TCU lust for top rankings - Sep 29, 2002In a cover story in its latest issue, U.S. News & World Report magazine ranks Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University in the second tier behind the nation's best universities.
But both Metroplex schools have set out to boost their reputations and crack that top echelon - an elite list of 50 colleges that this year has Princeton No. 1, with Harvard and Yale close behind.
Dallas-based SMU believes it took a step closer to that goal this week when it disclosed statistics showing that its student-acceptance rates have declined to a record-low 66% over the last decade. The more selective a college is, the better chance it has of cracking the top 50.
In 1993, nearly 90% of SMU applicants were accepted.
"We would like to see the acceptance rate go even lower," Murfin said. "To get to our short-term goal, which is an SAT average of 1,200 (from students entering their first year), it will probably have to drop down to somewhere between 66% and 50%."
Rice University in Houston, which tied with Johns Hopkins University for 15th place, and the University of Texas at Austin, which tied with several universities for 47th place, are the only Texas institutions in the magazine's top 50.
Besides SMU and TCU, Baylor University in Waco and Texas A&M University in College Station also are in the second-tier ranks of 78 schools.
The annual U.S. News survey ranks more than 1,400 schools in all. It spells out the top 50, then lists the rest in one of three lesser divisions in alphabetical order.
Exactly what causes U.S. News to rank SMU higher than, say, the third-tier-ranked University of Texas at Dallas, or the fourth-tiered-ranked University of Texas at Arlington, is something of a mystery, even to those within academic circles.
While Fort Worth-based TCU has no formal plan in place to boost its ranking, acceptance rates for the private institution have dropped from 79.4% in 1997 to approximately 71% this year.
Baylor University has lowered its acceptance rates from 88% in 1998 to 81% this year.
Under its 10-year plan begun in 2000, expectations are that student retention will increase from 83% to 93% by 2012, a health science center will be developed and the university will have a $2 billion endowment to provide support for five academic chairs and professorships.
https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stor ... tory3.html SPECIAL REPORT: SMU’s $350 Million GAMBLE - January 1998 But Turner’s most lasting footprint at SMU will be a face lift of the campus. Coinciding with the strategic plan, Turner has initiated the Centennial Master Plan, projected completion in 2015. He shows off the binder of the master plan just as a parent shows a treasured photo album. His eyes widen as he points out new projects. As funds are raised and buildings are renovated and constructed, the Hilltop will no longer be just an inlet of University Park, but, he hopes, an integral part of Dallas.
It all comes down to the classroom. SMU can raise all of the money it wants to raise, build all of the buildings it wants to build, be as pretty as it wants to be. Disregard how loud the voices sing Turner’s praises. Never mind who’s on the board of trustees. Forget the football team. Nothing matters but the classroom. At the core of the university, professors teach and students leam. “The rest of us are helpers,” says Turner.
SMU has yet to experience a University Moment, a solo performance in the scholastic spotlight of nationwide notice. In the ’30s. Jacques Brazun launched Columbia to prominence with a solid curriculum and renowned professors such as Mark van Dor-en and Lionel Trillin. Similarly in the ’60s, Harry Ransom established UT Austin on the scholastic map by recruiting such stars as philosopher John Silber and classicist William Arrowsrnith. SMU. on the other hand, has been somewhat respected but certainly not rigorous. The reputation of “’party school” lingers, where students are more adept at socializing than sociology.
The trick is not to enroll more students, just better ones. Bean-counters can worry about numbers, but the administration must consider quality. Make SMU a nicer, more attractive place to go to school, the thinking goes, and more students will want to go there. If more apply, admissions can be more selective. SMU’s target first-year class is 1,200 students, and SMU currently fills it at an acceptance rate of 80 percent. For comparison’s sake, Vanderbilt’s acceptance rate is 60 percent and Emory’s is 44.
The better the student is, the more likely that student is to stay at SMU, and the second priority after attracting good students is keeping them. Drop-outs and transfers become costly. If a student leaves after one year, after taking a valuable, someday-coveted spot in the first-year class, and assuming that student would have paid full tuition and room and board for the three remaining years, the school loses a hypothetical $60,000. For an institution that is pleased with its size, which at SMU hovers around 9,500, the retention rate becomes a scrutinized statistic. SMU’s is 84 percent, while Vanderbilt and Emory have 91 and 92 percent, respectively.
Murfin says that good faculty follow good student bodies, that professors prefer to teach where students are intelligent and interested. But the argument quickly becomes circular: Better faculty create better programs, better programs attract better students. better students attract better faculty.
Here’s where money can step in. A bigger endowment can fund more scholarships, in addition to the already successful President’s Scholars program, to draw brighter students from other institutions. With scholarships, the university is not merely waiving fees to attract students, it is paying the bills.
Money can also upgrade the campus. In this Information Age. a program must be in the forefront of technology. The chalkboard and ruler have become anachronistic. Classrooms are now virtually cable-ready computer terminals with uplinks to cyberspace. To keep up, SMU must have top-notch facilities (read: a master plan).
And, money can support endowed chairs for superstar faculty. Professors that not only teach students to learn, but also teach other teachers to teach. It is up to Murfin to seek out. recruit, and nurture such leadership.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Currently at SMU, that man is Gerald Turner. In the future, his legacy may outlast his tenure. Only time will tell. The president, echoing Emerson, acknowledges the gradual process of improving higher education. “It’s a lot like planting trees,” he says quietly in his slight Southern drawl. “You’ve got to be willing to do your work and enjoy a little bit of it, but the real shade may fall on someone else.”
Shields officially took office as the eighth president of SMU on January 5, 1981. Financially, the university enjoyed a considerable amount of progress during his time in office. By 1986 SMU’s endowment had reached nearly $300 million (up dramatically from $100 million when President Zumberge left office).
SMU, according to President Shields, had the potential of joining the ranks of the nation’s most prestigious private universities within a decade. Believing that "We would be knocking on the prestigious doors of Rice and Vanderbilt," President Shields emphasized greater efforts at fundraising for academic improvement. The Design for the Third Generation fundraising campaign, begun in 1977 with a goal of $153 million, was concluded in May 1983 with nearly $120 million in gifts and pledges. In a report to the university in October 1983, Shields highlighted where the money was directed: enlargement of SMU’s endowment, establishment of 19 new professorships and/or chairs, scholarships, library funding, and general university operations and physical plant improvement.
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/ ... on-gamble/Is There Life After Football? - 1987Last year was supposed to be a celebration of the 75th anniversary of S.M.U.'s remarkable growth from a school chartered on a shoestring in 1911 to a major university with a $325 million endowment, total assets of $586 million, and aspirations to become a university of national stature.
Instead it was, as the student newspaper proclaimed in screaming type, ''A Hilltop Nightmare.'' The school's football program was suspended for two years for flagrant and continued improper payments to athletes. The football coach, Bobby Collins, and the athletic director, Bob Hitch, quit. President L. Donald Shields also resigned, his health and spirit broken. The senior trustees resigned. The story leaked out in a series of revelations that included the approval by Bill Clements -now Governor of Texas - of continued payments to athletes when he headed the school's governing board.
THE CAMPUS OF Southern Methodist sits in prim, red-brick Georgian repose on 164 manicured acres in the heart of Dallas's most affluent neighborhood. Because of its tony isolation, the area is fondly known as ''The Bubble,'' and there has always been something a bit sheltered and insular about the school.
Most of the buildings bear the names of the Dallas businessmen who helped finance them. The school's 9,000 students, who have been better known for their Porsches and BMW's than their S.A.T. scores, have the seamless, designer-label look people associate with Dallas.
Comparisons to the city are more than superficial. S.M.U. is probably viewed nationally as just another football-crazy Texas school. In the academic world, it has been known as a school developing powerful resources and some first-rate faculty members, but lacking a coherent vision and remaining well outside the academic elite it hopes to join. In the Southwest, S.M.U. has precisely the image Dallas has nationally. It's viewed with a mixture of admiration, envy and distrust as a place that's rich, energetic, cocky and ambitious - sometimes too ambitious.
Until last year, its leadership came from a small cadre of the city's businessmen, who have dominated its finances and shaped its vision. And just as Dallas feels itself destined to dominate the southern half of the nation's midsection - as Chicago dominates in the north - S.M.U. during its boom years developed ambitions to be first in everything from academics to football.
''We are on a plateau just below the final step of achievement at S.M.U.,'' Bill Clements crowed to D, Dallas's city magazine, just before the football scandal broke. ''We are now talking in terms of S.M.U. in the future as being at the same level as a Duke or a Stanford.''
Soon after, S.M.U. was indeed the talk of higher education, but not in the way Clements had in mind.
ONE NIGHT LAST March, Kenneth Pye got a call at his home in Durham, N.C. Pye had often received calls from head hunters and found most of them of little interest. This time, however, the words from the other end of the line immediately piqued his curiosity.
''My name is Ray Hunt,'' the stranger said, in a soft, even voice. ''You don't know me, but I'm the chairman of the presidential search committee at Southern Methodist University. Let me give you a 30-second summary of the purpose of my call.
In some ways, Pye and S.M.U. seemed a perfect fit. He is a brilliant academic with a reputation as a tough, blunt, independent administrator. He comes from a university, Duke, with Methodist ties and a culture with some similarities to S.M.U.'s. Pye had also been one of the major architects of an athletic program at Duke that is considered one of the nation's best at blending big-time sports and successful academics.
The ultimate tragedy of the football scandals is that they masked some very real accomplishments over the past decade.
S.M.U.'s endowment grew from $52.5 million to $325 million, the 27th largest in the nation. Gifts to the university grew from $11 million in 1976-77 to $29.9 million in 1985-86. The number of endowed chairs rose from 29 in 1980 to 51. The Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of entering students, although still lower than those at schools like Emory and Tulane, with which S.M.U. competes for students and with which it would like to be compared, rose about 75 points during the same period to about 1,100.
During the boom years, S.M.U.'s leadership promoted the university with the enthusiasm of leasing agents peddling space in the newest office tower on the Dallas horizon. By contrast, Pye's rhetoric is judicious and his timetable much longer. ''It's going to take a long time for S.M.U. to get into a league that a lot of people think we can get into in a very short time,'' he said. ''But S.M.U. has a chance for greatness for the same reason Northwestern does. Northwestern is in Chicago. This is going to be one of the great cities in America. It deserves a great university.''
Officials say the bad Texas economy probably played a bigger role than the on-campus tumult, but total gifts dropped from a record $29.9 million in 1985-86 to $20.9 million in 1986-87. That's the lowest since 1982-83, and it highlights one of the problems the school faces. S.M.U. may not want to be viewed as an adjunct to the city's business community, but it knows it can't thrive without it.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/04/maga ... tball.htmlL. Donald Shields papers - A Guide to the CollectionIt was also in 1983, as the Design campaign came to an end, that a new university plan entitled "The Decade Ahead" was approved. As SMU had done in the early 1960s with the creation of a university master plan, "The Decade Ahead" established development goals for the university as it neared 1986, the 75th anniversary of its founding. The final report called for a student body population of eight thousand by the end of the decade, raising admissions standards, and the hiring of more faculty members; the report made recommendations for improvements in the individual schools within SMU as well.
November 1986 to March 1987 can fairly be described as the darkest period in SMU’s history. In that brief span of time SMU was hit with news of the continuing football abuses, the resignation of President Shields, the resignations of the university athletic director and head football coach, the implementation of the "death penalty," and a substantial reorganization of SMU’s governing structure. The NCAA ruled on February 25, 1987 that the SMU football program would be completely barred from competing in the 1987 season.
The SMU leadership shakeup continued as the Board of Governors—which functioned as a sort of executive committee of the Board of Trustees—was dissolved in March 1987. The Governors had fallen into disrepute due to the football scandal, and member Bill Clements (elected to a second term as Governor of Texas in 1986) acknowledged that he and others on the board had known of the illegal football payments. The Board of Trustees was also reorganized into a smaller body which would have more power than it had under the Board of Governors. This reorganization was also seen as restoring power to the president, as some believed that Shields had not been able to maintain sufficient control over university affairs.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the committee found, power over the Board of Trustees and even in the day-to-day operations of the university had begun accumulating within the Board of Governors. This aggrandizement of power by the Governors meant that the university president was in a sense subservient to that body, and could challenge the power of the Governors only at his own risk.
The report noted the dismissal (although billed at the time as a "voluntary resignation") of President Paul Hardin in 1974 following Hardin’s exposure of rule violations by the program to the NCAA and his attempt to reorganize the Board of Governors. In later years, Presidents Zumberge and Shields "were the administrators of the University during their respective terms, but Cox, Stewart, and Clements [chairmen of the Board of Governors] were the ‘leadership.’ And it was clear that the administrators reported to and were responsible to that leadership."
The report acknowledged a long history of athletic illegalities at SMU going back to the 1920s. Regarding the most recent football problems the committee concluded that President Shields had known about the payments as far back as 1980 after being named president. Following his own inquiries into the payment issue Shields went to two members of the Board of Governors and recommended that the football booster coordinating the payments be dismissed. The Governors opted not to take such action.
https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/smu/ ... 00114.html