"This ranking among the top public universities in the nation reflects Virginia Tech's commitment to provide all students with access to a dynamic, diverse, and engaged Hokie experience," said Rachel Holloway, vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs. "We will continue to be guided by this commitment to serve and ensure students have the support and guidance needed to be successful in their academic and career pursuits."
For context, Virginia Tech was ranked #73 ten years ago. This is one of the biggest 10-year jumps of any university. We're now ranked higher than William and Mary.
Few reasons for this:
(1) Changes in the application process to make it easier to apply to VT (more applicants --> lower acceptance %)
(2) Changes in USNWR methodology that aligns with VT's academic strengths
(3) A flood of research / financial aid donations over the past decade
(4) Sands' leadership on the academic side of the university. Deserves a statue for what's he's done.
This is unreal. You want to talk about Beamer's legacy? This is a part of it. VT Football being the front porch of the university put a spotlight on the academic side and helped elevate its status.
Comments
Awesome. Thanks for posting this
Wow, we jumped PSU, Cuse, Miami, Pitt, NCState, FSU, tied with Wake and A&M, one behind UMd, two spots behind Purdue.
We're right behind the bulk of good Big Ten schools, Rutgers, OSU, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
So I guess Sands must be doing SOMETHING right.
VT has always been a "value for money" school, and now these kinds of surveys are reflecting that.
So from a public school front:
Top 20 schools are UCLA and Cal
Top 30 schools are Michigan, UNC, UC Davis, UCSD, UF, and UVA
Top 40 schools are Texas, GT, UC SB, Illinois, Wisconsin
Top 46 schools are Rutgers, washington, Purdue, anOSU, and UMd
So we are 19th best public school, 13th if you count University of California as 1
EDIT: typo
That's not a thing. One head office, but each university stands on its own.
I'm sorry my joke offended you.
Apologies, I had no idea it was a joke. I think people are legit confused how the UC system works.
I do have a diploma from one of these schools, and 3 of them are clients of mine. But, no offense taken.
This is huge news. For everything we complain about this is a true difference maker...and sets us up for legacy success.
While I was an easy take for VT back in 95, I have to wonder if I would be a borderline take today or possibly not even get accepted.
There is a zero percentage chance I would be accepted today.
It's a different game now. I get the impression that 30 years ago, it was basically 'do you have good scores and did you write a good (enough) essay.'
Now the questions are: Are you a well rounded person? Are you a fit for this school? How have you performed in all aspects of your life given the challenges you've faced? Are you a legacy student?
Legacy status is no longer a thing at VT.
That's wonderful!
This is a good approach, having an often talked about football team is free marketing and will make some people apply as cheering for a good team is likely to improve their college and alumni experience. I know I picked Tech over other smaller, but well regarded, engineering schools because I wanted to have that big game environment when getting away from classes for a bit.
#2 is the biggest factor here. They significantly changed the scoring methodology this year.
Social Mobility and outcomes for graduating students now represent nearly 50% of the score. Social Mobility includes first-generation graduation rates, first-generation graduation rate performance and proportion of college graduates earning more than a high school graduate.
Five factors were also eliminated that changed scoring pretty substantially. The five areas no longer evaluated are proportion of graduates who borrowed federal loans, high school class standing, alumni giving rate, terminal degree faculty and class size.
Another factor was that a long list of schools decided not to participate/cooperate in the rankings due to disagreement on the methodology. The biggest contention point there was that the report took Peer Evaluations into account for the scoring while not making it clear how these Peer Evaluations were being gathered.
It appears these changes were in Tech's favor.
Alumni giving rate, is this like the dollar amount per living alumni or percent living alumni that donated? Either way it seems like a way to buy a ranking.
Clearly, and no doubt purposefully so.
So rankings like this always tend to be worthless. I worked for a company that wanted to be on the Forbes best 100 companies to work for, and you have to apply for it and then pay money to them. They did do a bunch of interviews of employees or whatever but it just felt like it was all bought and paid for. Same think with JD Power associates. You have to pay them to use that designation, so you are basically just paying to say you are a good company.
I'm not sure these educational rankings work the same way. USNews and World Report rankings are pretty well-known.
The publicity from these rankings are clearly good for schools. VT has always been recognized for it's graduate schools in engineering and architecture. It's nice to see it recognized overall as well.
That is fair. However, the fact that a bunch of schools apparently pulled out means that the rankings should kind of have an asterisk stating "of the schools that participated" or something like that.
It's true, rankings are only as good as their criteria, and different rankings rate schools differently. But no, if some schools didn't do as well as they expected to and pulled out, THEY'RE the ones who get an asterisk.
Yale was fine with ratings for the past 30 years, when their law school was ranked #1. They probably prefer schools be ranked by endowment. I think they'll be OK even without US News rankings. You know, probably.
Shouldn't the goal of educational institutions be to educate people at a reasonable cost? If THAT's the criteria, I think Virginia Tech is going to do well.
I know I got my money's worth.
The Yale University Law Dean is a huge critic of these rankings and one of the schools that no longer is participating:
Article
Yale business school doesn't have grades. Doesn't need 'em.
Yale does what's best for themselves. Like Notre Dame, they don't have to follow other people's rules.
Yale is in a privileged position, and nobody needs ratings to know if they want to go to Yale.
But seriously. "Rankings are undermining the legal profession"? No, I don't think it's the rankings. Maybe it's more the pursuit of legal tender.
I put less than 0 faith in any of those Forbes valuations anymore. I remember when the Carolina Hurricanes were sold to their current owner back in 2017, Forbes said the franchise valuation was around $200m. When word leaked that the franchise was sold for that price, they immediately put out an article calling it 'fake news'. In reality, the only thing the initial leaks got wrong was to whom the franchise was sold for that price, not the dollar value of the sale.
Social mobility is a bit odd to have that much weight, but to the people it's important to its probably really important. For me it makes no difference my parents were both college professors, my father was dean of science and technology for a few years. My grandfather had a masters in ChemE, my other grandparents were high school teachers. Maybe thr thought is that if it's graduating kids that don't have the support and help that I did that they are doing well education?
I'm fine with all the stuff they dropped except classroom size, that's important for learning. I would hate to go to a school that every class was in Mcbride 100. Those were the worse classes I had.
I agree for many (most?) students, this is important. Some students do ok with large lecture classes, but many need more one to one or at least more small group interactive-type classes to do well.
I still remember Principles of Econ with Al Mandelstamm (if you took it 'on sequence, there was only one section he didn't teach); I had the live classin McBryde100 but there was another liveclass that was also both simulcast and also taped for other times. The mid term was3 essay questions- worth 60 points each. The class average wasa bout 45 points( I got 105 which equated to 95th percentile A)- the range went down to as low as 2 points! (It was graded by the TAs and was largely based on key words being in your answers).
The final was held in Burruss auditorium with all 1200-1500 students taking it; was 85 multiple choice questions. I'll neve forget being the first one to walk up to the stage to hand mine in (I take multiple choice tests EXTREMELY well no matter the subject) and seeing others look at me with odd look ( thinking I failed miserably or "holy cow they must really know the stuff") (got a solid A there too :) Fun times!)
My most vivid memory of McBryde 100 was my Marketing Final (Chris Neck was the professor) when right after the final was handed out, some dude streaked down the left side of McBryde, then ran all the way around the building, came back in an streaked back up the right side and back out again. After that happened, Neck got up on stage and said something to the effect of "I did not know that was going to happen, otherwise I would have told you to bring your magnifying glasses".
While not everyone needs it, if you were in a smaller class you would likely learn the material just the same as a larger class, the reverse isn't true for most people.
Also I am not sure what level principles of economics is but with 1000+ students it's sounds like a lower level class which those don't often go over more advanced concepts where students might need more one on one help.
I had a 90 person 4000 level capstone my senior year. There shouldn't be senior level classes that size. The professor had to teach it differently than he had done in the past. I had a 3000 math class that was taught by a beloved professor in the torgesgon auditorium (I dont know how many that held). Everyone thought I was so lucky to have him as a prof, and he was a complete ass the entire time. He was pissed that he got a class that big and took it out on us. This guy was one of the highest rated teachers on rate your professor and I wouldn't have recommended him to anyone.
Totally agree- yes the econ class was first year taken by everyone in freshman/sophomore year of college of business. Largest upper level class I had was about 50-60 but that was likely due to the building freeze that existed in the 1980s- they had classes everywhere they could find too- Lyric theater, rooms that used to be storage.
The visiting prof of that upper level class made a seating chart ala John Houseman's Professor Kingsfield in the movie the Paper Chase; and he called on students by name every day and when someone answered a question, he would turn to someone else and say "Mr. Smith , do you concur?". Great teacher who engaged everyone whether they wanted to be or not!
I remember Eng. Econ. Only class I actually asked the professor if I could skip the final. I had calculated I needed a negative score on the final to get a C. I could literally write my name on the exam and turn it in for a B. He said I had to take the final... It took me 26 minutes to do the 60 question final. I was by far the first person to turn it in for my class section. Solid A as well.
Sick brag bro.
I wish they had all been that easy. But I had also taken high school economics. Engineering Econ introduced very little new content.
That was 3rd quarter stats for me(looking up P values etc.); had a 90 going into final; I needed a 10 on final to get A, Same as you I asked if I could just not take it but he said no. Final was 25 questions-I finished in 8 minutes and headed to the hallway where the prof was sitting while the exam was going on. Turned it in and he said "Yu finished already/ I didn't make the ANSWER KEY out that fast" lol! I just know how to take tests- largely just going with gut instinct. I would go through on test paper and mark the answers - taking 15 seconds to think then if I didn't know, I'd skip it. When I finished that pass, I'd go back and start transferring my answers to the Opscan form; when I came to one I had skipped I spent no more than additional minute looking at it and then I'd just guess if the answer didn't come to me. and NEVER CHANGE an answer once made barring an obvious error (like hey 2+2 is NOT 735). Your brain will pick the right answer almost every time; second guessing far more often becomes changing your initially right answer to a wrong one than vice versa. I've "passed" tests on subjects I've never studiedtaken just by using common sense and trusting my gut instinct.
Never change an answer on multiple schoice tests, unless it makes a pattern on the scan tron form. Patterns are better than correct answers.
If we're ranking schools for undergrads, this is all that should really matter IMO. Maybe student satisfaction, and costs too. But I don't understand how the amount of research your school is doing impacts undergrads.
I know of one way it impacts undergrads. And it's not a positive. An anecdote: my thermodynamics "professor" was some eastern European guy who was here purely to do research. He didn't give a fuck about teaching but he was required to teach a class in order to do research. He was God awful at teaching and the entire class struggled. I learned very little from him. If not for friends in my study group who had different teachers, I might not have learned a damn thing about thermodynamics.
Yep - I asked my ECE professor a question after class, and she literally cut me off to say 'I finished my teaching duties for today - my primary job is research. If you have a question, I recommend you come to office hours.'
We're a school school now.
Been a while since our academic ranking was higher than our football ranking.
good news for those who DID come to play school, I suppose
Well, we have 37,000 students and like 700 total athletes so.... I hate that football sucks right now, but people who think the university has the wrong priorities might be the ones who are wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I recognize how football success has been a major factor in driving applications through the roof. However, 98-ish percent of the students are there to "play school".
to be clear, I am not upset about this
My degree is worth so much more than I paid for it.