Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

This actually popped up in my feed on a Badger site.  I arranged it to be more useful:


NOTE:
To the extent that the B1G cares about academics anymore, these are not and never have been the academic rankings that they cared about.  What they DID care about was graduate/research academics and the money that flows from that.  

Honest question for @betarhoalphadelta and the rest of the Purdue contingent:  The ranking listed here for Purdue isn't bad frankly it isn't nearly as high as I expected.  Is this an issue where Purdue's engineering undergrad program is really good and the rest isn't or what am I missing?  

Honest question for @betarhoalphadelta and the rest of the Purdue contingent:  The ranking listed here for Purdue isn't bad frankly it isn't nearly as high as I expected.  Is this an issue where Purdue's engineering undergrad program is really good and the rest isn't or what am I missing? 

I think portions of this are flaws in the ranking model... 

42% of the ranking is related to the ability of incoming students to leave with a degree.

• 5% on first year retention rate, 16% on graduation rate, 5.5% on Pell graduation rate, for a total of 26.5%. 

This very seriously punishes schools who admit a lot of students and some of them flame out. This often unfairly penalizes large state schools unless they're hyper-competitive in admissions (like Michigan or UCLA). 

It rewards extremely selective colleges who only take the ones who can't fail and then... Don't fail. These can often be private schools, hence why Northwestern and USC do really well. 

So it's largely a measure of how selective the college is. 

Purdue has long been a somewhat egalitarian school that admits a little more widely and from there it's "sink or swim". 

• 10% is graduation rate performance, and another 5.5% is Pell graduation rate performance, which added to the former gets you to the 42% I mentioned.

This one is a little more nuanced... It appears to be related to graduation rates relative to incoming freshman quality. Essentially it seems to be a measure of how well-supported students are and how well the university handholds them to graduation. 

In this, I don't know how well I can compare Purdue to others. When I was there, I don't recall a tremendous amount of administrative support, but things might be different now. 

That said, Purdue hasn't raised their tuition since the 2012-2013 school year. It wouldn't shock me if one of the ways they keep it low is by not constantly inflating their support staff. Which could mean they're not handholding students as much, which might hurt both of the "graduation rate performance" metrics. 

Also, there is another metric, 5%, that's related to standardized test scores. That again would reward extremely selective colleges who only take the cream of the crop, vs larger public institutions who admit more widely. 

yup, I was even accepted at Iowa and UNL

For some it matters when looking for the first job. In my field, once you become licensed nobody cares.

yup, Cincy created a thread for this

I scanned a lot of resumes back in the day, hiring both PhDs and BS level folks.  The institution name was of minor interest, but I soon learned how folks with a 3.69 from a decent school often had learned very little.  

One of my top BS hires was from Northwestern …. state.