Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums College Which colleges have good teaching?

Me too! I am now thoroughly confused having read this thread.

The article is dated 1990... nearly 30 years ago.
The article states that by changing date criteria, 2013-2014 ratings are available... that is still 5 years ago.
2019 rankings here. 2019 rankings by "teaching," top five[/color][/b], top ten:
[b][color:#003300]1. CalTech (USA)
2. Stanford (USA)
3. University of Cambridge (UK)
4. MIT (USA)
5. University of Oxford (UK)
6. Yale (USA)
7. U of Chicago (USA)
8. Harvard (USA)
9. Princeton (USA)
10.Peking University (China)

Clicking through the article's links to view the methodology shows the following: If there is a more recent webpage describing their methodology, I have not found it yet.

Why differences have you detected? I have no idea! They still sounded like the same things to me.

For those of us in other countries that believed that your "college" = our "university" (which I have always believed), this comment suggests that you have both colleges and universities and that leaves me wondering what IS college? An extra 4 years of boarding school after highschool but before university?

There was another post with a particular emphasis that also seemed to suggest college was not equal to university... but now that I am replying I can't see the thread to find it.

[/quote] The article is dated 1990... nearly 30 years ago.
The article states that by changing date criteria, 2013-2014 ratings are available... that is still 5 years ago.
2019 rankings [url=https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/st[/quote]

My apologie on the faux pas. I did not check the date.

But the composite of criteria is part of what we look for. And, as a CDN, who lived in the US for 30 years, my view is that Americans tend to say college when they mean a post secondary institution, whether it is a small liberal arts college or a large university. It appeared to me that it used to refer to a degree granting institution, but the lines have blurred and even community colleges are referred to as going to college. In Canada, they say university. College means community college. Here, there is no difference anymore.

I think the rankings are interesting in 2 things: input and output.

A third kind of input data used by USNWR concerns student selectivity. Some of these measures indicate how capable or prepared the students are when they enter a college or university: entering student scores on SAT or ACT tests and the percentage of students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Perhaps these measures are useful for a student choosing a college; high achievement students may want to keep company with other high achievement students. But such measures are a backwards approach to assessing the quality of learning at a college: Colleges are ranked higher insofar as they start with students who have already learned more.

Outcomes. The USNWR annual rankings do make use of one kind of outcome measure: graduation and graduation rates. They measure what percentage of an institution's first year students return for a second year, and what percentage of students graduate within six years. I believe these measures are the best aspect of the USNWR rankings. But, I also believe retention and graduation rates are a very primitive outcome measure: They beg the question of whether, and what, students have actually learned.

Also, NSSE, is from a student perspective

http://nsse.indiana.edu/html/annual_results.cfm

Quick caveat- this is my opinion only, based upon our experiences- if others have more knowledge, please share- we had specific goals in our DDs college search (we did not explore extremely large universities, for example).

The quick/simplistic answer, as far as I understand it, is that colleges don’t have graduate students or programs. So by definition, one of, if not the main goal, is the education of undergraduate students. Many, but not all, have as a secondary goal more of a broad view of education and therefore may have core classes or distribution requirements, theoretically ensuring that their graduates are more well-roundedly educated while still requiring a major area of concentration.

This can get really murky, however, in that many (?most) universities have colleges within them, some of which have separate admissions, some of which do not, some allow students to take classes enrolled in one college to take classes in all the colleges and to transfer if their major/plans change, some are more restrictive. Even within specific disciplines, we found there to be a lot of variability in this structure.

Because our DD still has several areas of interest and hasn’t decided on a definitive direction yet, we avoided those schools which required admission to very specific programs or schools, as they didn’t have the flexibility she wanted.

This webpage from CollegRank.Net may help explain the differences between college and university:
What Is The Difference Between College and University?

I'm aware of colleges becoming universities... with much press, fanfare, and celebratory events... usually after faculty reaching a RESEARCH milestone.

For undergrad work, conventional wisdom was: attend a college which is focused on developing and investing in its students, rather than a research university which is focused on developing and investing in itself. Depending upon what one is studying, I can see either approach/strategy as helpful.

Fresh new press release -
UCLA is No. 1 public college in 2020 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking
Rebecca Kendall
UCLA Newsroom
September 4, 2019


key area. . . . . . . . . . . UCLA ranking
(learning) environment(s) . . . 5
(student) engagement . . . . . 11
(educational) outcomes . . . . 16
student resources . . . . . . . . .?
overall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Another system for rating/ranking:
Carnegie Classification of Higher Education Institutions classifies universities into Tiers based on their research potential.

Links for information on Carnegie Classifications:

1) Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education
Center for Postsecondary Research
Indiana University
School Of Education

2) wikipedia - Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education