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Football is king, no doubt,  but academics has played a big role,  especially with the former "alliance" conferences of the PAC, BIg Ten and ACC.  Of course we saw how the alliance worked out. 

BUT for the most part the Big Ten still has a rule that a school needs to be an AAU member,  with a few exceptions like Notre Dame.

used to have a rule..

Nebraska and Notre Dame

not AAU, football schools, $$$

Interesting read.

Expansion and How Three Conferences Look to Compete With SEC and Big Ten (msn.com)

This is actually one of the things that bothers me about these rankings. One of the key numbers they use is graduation rate, but that has little IMHO to do with the quality of the school or education, and a LOT to do with the selectivity of the admissions process.

Schools like Purdue get knocked down the list because as a large state (and I'd argue co-flagship) school, part of what Purdue and Indiana exist to do is to take as many students from the state that qualify academically as they can. Often that might include taking students who aren't going to graduate. But just as often it means giving an opportunity to a student who is going to work their effing ass off and be a success but couldn't sniff getting into an Ivy.

The Ivies admit the kids who are so high up the academic ladder, and so driven by academics, that they'd rather die than fail at school. Does that mean the school itself is any better? Not in my opinion--it means that their students were the top of the top before they even walked through the door.

We see it often in football. There are some programs with helmet status that will get the 5* and 4* kids lining up in droves to come there, and then they predictably win a lot of games because they had better athletes to begin with. But are those the best coaches in the game? Not IMHO. Some of the best coaches in the game are guys like Dantonio who can develop lesser athletes into reaching their full potential, and who can scheme the team together to make sure the best pieces are put in the best positions for team success.

I hate to see that these rankings penalize educational institutions for offering educational opportunities to those who need them most, instead of trying to lock those students out because it might hurt their graduation rate.

Yeah Texas gets dinged in those types of rankings for the exact same reason.  I don't worry too much about it, people who get hung up on those rankings aren't actually interested in quality of education, anyway.

I'm not sure without looking it up, but I think Washington is VERY strong in research spending, like top-10 or maybe even top-5 strong.

The rest of this I agree with.

Yes, if you look at the rankings I posted you will find Washington above every Big Ten school.

This is actually one of the things that bothers me about these rankings. One of the key numbers they use is graduation rate, but that has little IMHO to do with the quality of the school or education, and a LOT to do with the selectivity of the admissions process.

Schools like Purdue get knocked down the list because as a large state (and I'd argue co-flagship) school, part of what Purdue and Indiana exist to do is to take as many students from the state that qualify academically as they can. Often that might include taking students who aren't going to graduate. But just as often it means giving an opportunity to a student who is going to work their effing ass off and be a success but couldn't sniff getting into an Ivy.

The Ivies admit the kids who are so high up the academic ladder, and so driven by academics, that they'd rather die than fail at school. Does that mean the school itself is any better? Not in my opinion--it means that their students were the top of the top before they even walked through the door.

This is a longtime pet peeve of mine with academic rankings not just for Universities but for High Schools as well.

Basing rankings on graduation rate inherently creates a motivation for administrators to "dumb it down" and hand out diplomas like candy. That, of course, devalues diplomas as employers learn that some "High School Graduates" are functionally illiterate or can't add and subtract.

Schools like Purdue get knocked down the list because as a large state (and I'd argue co-flagship) school, part of what Purdue and Indiana exist to do is to take as many students from the state that qualify academically as they can. Often that might include taking students who aren't going to graduate. But just as often it means giving an opportunity to a student who is going to work their effing ass off and be a success but couldn't sniff getting into an Ivy.

The baby boom was from 1946-1964. After that a combination of social, cultural, and technological factors led to the "baby bust" of the mid-1970's.

I was born in 1975 with a total of 3,144,198 US births that year. That was, IIRC the lowest number since the 1930's.

In Ohio, as in other states the Baby boom led to a surge in college applications 18 years after birth so 1964-1982 but then as the kids of the low-birth 1970's reached college age, applications plummeted.

In Ohio the State Legislature dictated during the baby boom period that the state schools (including tOSU) take anybody with an Ohio HS diploma. Ohio State had basically no admission standards and their flunk-out rate was sky high.

Ohio State during this period built an unfortunate negative academic reputation that, to be fair, was not altogether undeserved.

After that the Ohio State administration spent literally decades working to change the reality and they are still working on the reputation/perception.

Ohio State today is a very good school. They aren't #1 in the B1G, but they are very much respectable and I think most everyone who follows this knows that. If you go to a recruiter with your tOSU degree, they know that it is a quality institution but the old reputation still exists out there with people who don't follow this closely.

What Ohio did to fill the gap (pickup the students who now cannot get into Ohio State) is two things:

• They expanded lower ranking four-year universities within the state, and
• They added a lot of seats in Community Colleges throughout the state.

There still are those students who:

But just as often it means giving an opportunity to a student who is going to work their effing ass off and be a success but couldn't sniff getting into an Ivy.

Ohio now basically says to these kids "ok, go to Community College for two years and prove it, if you do we'll let you into Ohio State." 

In this way Ohio State has been able to tighten up admissions standards while the State of Ohio still offers a lifeline to those students without the grades/scores to get into Ohio State.

Ohio also has a "transfer module" where the core stuff (basically first two years) transfer en-masse between Ohio's colleges and universities. Thus, if you go to Cuyahoga Community College (Cleveland area) or Columbus State (duh) or any other Ohio college or University you can take out the entire module then transfer that module as one piece to any other Ohio College or University.

I figure the point of a college degree is to get a decent job (or husband).  I doubt anyone hiring looks at two resumes and refers to these rankings.  Sure, maybe an NW resume gets noticed a bit more than Iowa, OK fine, but if the hiring manager puts much emphasis on that he's a nut.

I used to roughly think of it as "elite", "near elite", "very good", and "maybe so so".  Some of the best folks I hired came form maybe so so.  A guy from some elite school mayb think the world owes him as a result.