The Persistence of the Old Regime

Wonderful analysis. Why can’t you blog more?

And I wonder what the most plausible mechanisms for continued social dominance would be. Path-dependence is likely a factor, but what prevents more movement up and down the ladder?

On the public vs private point, it’s important to observe that the top private schools haven’t grown in undergraduate student numbers since the 1950s, while most of the public schools grew strongly until the late 1970s.

Well, damn my wig.

@7 Entry to the list can happen with a new or greatly expanded funding source. For example, ANU was created by the national government as a research-only institution modelled on IAS at Princeton, and Kieran mentioned the massive expansion of UC following the master plan of 1960. Going more broadly, universities in China are bound to ascend the status hierarchy.

Relatedly, its possible for changes in funding models to shift the relative status of whole groups (Ivies vs state flagships in the US, unitechs vs 1970 vintage in Oz, maybe redbricks vs polytechnics in the UK).

Within any given system, these shifts are fairly modest, as indicated by the handful of examples you cite. More crucially, they have almost nothing to do with choices made at the university level. For example, ANU ranks above the nearby University of Canberra because of the historical circumstances of their creation, not because one was better run than the other.

@ harry b #9

A couple of years back I spent a term at Oxford (not at Brookes University, the other one). People in general was, of course, smart and well read. However, after some I noticed that most of the grad students hadn’t been undergrads at Oxford. It was mostly the same with PhD (or DPhil, as they call it – because they are, of course, special*) and professors. I suggested that perhaps the University of Oxford was a deskilling institution but didn’t get much support for this hypothesis from my peers.

* (My wife loves to say that I’m special, with a sarcastic smile – with this implying eating paste-special – in front of my mother. My mother, never noticing the subtext, always adds that ‘of course Olle’s special’ and pinches me on the cheek, or something like that, while my wife giggles silently behind her. I’m 36 years old, with a degree, a wife and a daughter…)

…20th century schools, most notably the whole California system, along with Georgia and Virginia Techs.

I find the non-California examples in Babcock:

Georgia Tech, listed in the Class IV column, as Georgia School of Technology, on p. 8 of Babcock’s document. Today, the full name is Georgia Institute of Technology.

Virginia Tech, listed in the Class IV column, as Virginia Polytechnic Institute, on p. 14 of Babcock’s document. (In 1911, the full name was Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. Today, the full name is Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.)

I do not expect perfection from a lunchtime pastime.

Thank you for showing us this evidence of the long-term persistence of institutional rankings.

@13: I think if you got a CS degree from basically any of those places, you’d be fine.

If I were a less generous person, I’d suggest that the USNWR people got hold of Babcock’s efforts and just tweaked the weights of their “system” until they reproduced his results.

I don’t know why anybody takes the US news rankings seriously if they know anything at all about academia, though I admit that that’s perhaps 5% of the US population.

Ogden—good catch. I’ve updated the figures.

The criticisms of the USNWR rankings are fairly well-known and seem at least partly valid to me. USNWR says this in its section on ‘methodology’:
The indicators we use to capture academic quality fall into a number of categories: assessment by administrators at peer institutions, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving [!], graduation rate performance and, for National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges only, high school counselor ratings of colleges.

The indicators include input measures that reflect a school’s student body, its faculty and its financial resources, along with outcome measures that signal how well the institution does its job of educating students.

That all sounds very nice, but the first item — “assessment by administrators at peer institutions” — gets a weight of roughly 23%, i.e., a significant amount. USNWR assumes administrators have informed, well-grounded views of the quality of peer institutions; but do they, or do they just repeat the conventional wisdom, thus perpetuating a sort of closed loop and helping ensure that reputations are “sticky” even when actual conditions/facts change? Moreover, this “assessment by administrators” is an inherently subjective criterion, unlike the objective metrics (retention rate etc) that are thrown into the mix. If I were a h.s. student applying to college, I don’t think I’d pay too much attention to the USNWR rankings except as an indication of the conventional wisdom.

There are very distinguished institutions included in all of the referenced “lists”. One trend that seems to have continued over the century is that the “rich get richer”. Colleges and universities, which attract well prepared and/or well financed students tend to be included, and institutions, who do the heavy-lifting of higher education tend not to make the “cut’.

It seems unfortunate that IHE, which enroll the less affluent and often less well -prepared and then transform them in acts of great “value-addedness” into persons of worth and renown receive less mention and praise than the well-established and well financed. Given the importance of HED in providing social mobility, would not it be useful to include among the criteria for USNWR, etc. the percentage of Pell Grant eligible students among an institution’s alumni?

Two points:

1: Where there ranked private schools that didn’t survive to the modern day? I would think schools that failed or fell off the rankings would also be interesting.

2: Every one of the ‘Class IV’ schools that now rank in the modern, public list is in the South. Major growth of the Southern economy, much? (The private school, Howard, is apparently in DC, which is pretty close.

Great analysis, hard to read graphs.

You have too many data points to use a graph like that vertical. Try it horizontal at least, so you can see more data points without needing to scroll. Graph would work well on paper on a large screen, but it it difficult to see completely on my 15″ macbook. I would have also aggregated the data a bit more, maybe by region? The graphs don’t give the full power of delivering your strong analysis. I think it is because I am looking at it only in small sections because of size issues.

There were a few other got points by others on shading and color use as well.