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What is going horribly wrong at PSU - free fall in academic rankings

If I had it to do all over again - I went to F&M for academics - I would have gone to Miami to sow my wild oats with the coed population. I wouldn't have studied nearly as much, but the smile on my face would have been ear to ear.

UC Davis for enology.
 
Totally: an internationally publicized pedophilia scandal that dominated news for months couldn’t hurt image or recruiting or reputation at all. Definitely Barron’s fault!
Wait i thought the general consensus of the BoT was this was a football failing and had nothing to do with the University at large. they told us applications were up, donations were great, and the way handled the crisis wasn't hurting our reputation at all. ooops! As a person who has lived out of state since 1984 that was obviously poppycock at least of Pa.
 
My nephew wants to go to Penn State and I have told him he should definitely consider other schools. He can’t afford it, would absolutely need to take out huge student loans, and I am not sure he would ever get them paid back before he would hit the age of 50. He and his mom are not doing a good job on his college selection process and they don’t want to seem to listen to common sense.
 
So you think it’s all behind us now? That lost fundraising and any hits to recruiting have no lasting affect? That all of our competitors were sitting still?
Then you are right!!!
I thought the BOT says year after year that fund raising is actually UP, not down....
 
If I had it to do all over again - I went to F&M for academics - I would have gone to Miami to sow my wild oats with the coed population. I wouldn't have studied nearly as much, but the smile on my face would have been ear to ear.
I recall hitting Duvall Street in Key West on spring break in the late 90s. I was blown away by all the Miami girls. Kids today are better traveled and "wiser" to the world than I was at that age. I think they've seen more and consider more in choosing a college.
 
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Could you please define “irony?” I don’t think I’v ever seen that word properly used (on this board)
My point is that the "scandal", as it relates to PSU, was created and nurtured by Old Main. It never had to be that way.
 
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So you think it’s all behind us now? That lost fundraising and any hits to recruiting have no lasting affect? That all of our competitors were sitting still?
Then you are right!!!
Explains the similar drops by Michigan and Ohio State. Oh wait ...
 
I concur. When I went to PSU as an out of state student the difference between in state and out of state was only $5k, now it is about double. I would not send either one of my kids to PSU unless they were able to get significant scholarship assistance.

Unless you kids can get into the Honors College or are black or Hispanics, the odds of scholarship $$$ is pretty much zero.

I looked when my kid wanted to go there about 10 years ago, zippo. He went to in state UCONN instead, I couldn't stomach the $50k/yr total costs for being out of state. He became a RA and between that and what we kicked in he may have had $12k of debt when he graduated.
 
US News rankings are totally worthless, just ignore it. Everybody in higher ed knows they're worthless.

If Penn State wants to increase their US news rankings, ironically, the best way to do that is to raise tuition and give big raises to their administrators. That raises the per-student spending which raises the US news score.

If you have to believe in rankings, look up ARWU -- Academic Rankings of World reseach Universities. It is based on journal citations -- whose professors get cited the most by other researchers around the world.

It's also an imperfect measure -- just because your faculty publishes a lot of papers doesn't mean they even bother teaching undergrads.

But as a rough measure of the horsepower of a research university and how influential its faculty is, ARWU is pretty good.

US News is a mishmash of a bunch of statistics but it basically boils down to how much money they spend. The more you spend, the higher your ranking. So US News has very much aggravated the problem of skyrocketing college tuition. If you google it you can probably find Malcolm Gladwell's takedown of the whole US News ranking racket. It's a savage article and spot on.






Back in 2013 Penn State was ranked 37 in the US News and World Report rankings. Now they are 62 and behind Pitt and Ohio State. I realize this is just one ranking, but it is also the most widely accepted ranking. PSU admins need to focus on stopping this free fall.
 
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US News rankings are totally worthless, just ignore it. Everybody in higher ed knows they're worthless.

If Penn State wants to increase their US news rankings, ironically, the best way to do that is to raise tuition and give big raises to their administrators. That raises the per-student spending which raises the US news score.

If you have to believe in rankings, look up ARWU -- Academic Rankings of World reseach Universities. It is based on journal citations -- whose professors get cited the most by other researchers around the world.

It's also an imperfect measure -- just because your faculty publishes a lot of papers doesn't mean they even bother teaching undergrads.

But as a rough measure of the horsepower of a research university and how influential its faculty is, ARWU is pretty good.

US News is a mishmash of a bunch of statistics but it basically boils down to how much money they spend. The more you spend, the higher your ranking. So US News has very much aggravated the problem of skyrocketing college tuition. If you google it you can probably find Malcolm Gladwell's takedown of the whole US News ranking racket. It's a savage article and spot on.
So why has our rating declined so much? I’d be shocked to hear that it’s due to a decrease in spending
 
Spanier knew how to keep us steady or moving up in these rankings. I hate to admit it but Erickson did too, I think we reached our high point of #37 under Erickson right in the middle of all the negativity.

The moment they tried to replace Erickson with the crook from SUNY, and then couldn't find anyone other than Barron, the freefall started. I doubt this is as far as it will drop unless the board figures out that we need to have a very good president. The credentials have to be outstanding and they have to understand how a big state school works. Barron understands the second part but he is the B-team.
 
Sure. No question. But wouldn't that be a delayed reaction? The scandal hit in 2011/12. PSU was 27th in 2013. Now we are 62nd. So from 2013-20 which is 2-8 years post-scandal, and it's the scandal.
Saved me the post.. thanx. I'd wager there's more going on than the scandal of '11.
 
Spanier knew how to keep us steady or moving up in these rankings. I hate to admit it but Erickson did too, I think we reached our high point of #37 under Erickson right in the middle of all the negativity.

The moment they tried to replace Erickson with the crook from SUNY, and then couldn't find anyone other than Barron, the freefall started. I doubt this is as far as it will drop unless the board figures out that we need to have a very good president. The credentials have to be outstanding and they have to understand how a big state school works. Barron understands the second part but he is the B-team.
The fact that Spanier was on One Term Tommy's enemies list is enough to make me a fan.
 
Unless a student gets big scholarship $$$ (or has rich parents), it’s generally best to go to an in-state Public.

It definitely does not make sense to rack up huge student loans and then whine about an inability to pay them, regardless of the sympathy you might garner from the media and some politicians.
 
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I don't care what the rankings say, if you live in PA and want to go to college in PA, there are really 4 choices: Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, Penn St. Those schools have national and international recognition and your degree will always have value and good perception. There may be exceptions for schools like Lehigh and Bucknell if you really want a specific major and plan to stay in that field forever. But try looking for a job in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, etc with Haverford, Bryn Mawr, etc on your resume. The average person in those cities will have no idea what those schools are and equate them as just some average regional school. And they certainly won't value IUP, Shippensberg, etc.

A large reason students at those schools like Haverford, Bryn Mawr do well in their careers is they come from wealthy, well-connected families to begin with. It's not worth the expense for a lower class, middle class, or even some upper class students attend those schools. In 10, 20, 30, years people will always recognize Penn, PSU, Pitt, CMU.
 
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They have a number of decently rated schools. I have no idea what kids may aspire to these days.
Yep. Many kids overlook SUNY but it is one of the best values out there. I know in my kids classes their friends shirked SUNY schools only to come back to places like UB, Binghamton, Geneseo, New Paltz. They realized a) tuition was affordable and b) you get a pretty good education. Buffalo and Binghamton have very good engineering programs and New Paltz is coming up with their new eng. curriculum with lot of money being pumped in.
 
If I had it to do all over again - I went to F&M for academics - I would have gone to Miami to sow my wild oats with the coed population. I wouldn't have studied nearly as much, but the smile on my face would have been ear to ear.
Sort of an overrated campus imo (and a bitch to get to or from), Gainesville or Tally would have been better.
 
Comment on the crazy New York state university system. Long ago, (1966) I applied to Alfred University. I was interested in Ceramic Engineering. Alfred's school of engineering was a state school, the rest of the university was private. There was a two tution system in place with the Engineering School having a lower tuition. The school of engineering offered Ceramic Engineering and a few other majors, but not Metallurgy. Metallurgy was my main interest. My concern with Alfred was if I transferred out of Engineering I would be facing a tuition hike. Anyway I went to PSU.
 
We have no football and no academics. I’m starting to wonder why Penn State exists.

o_O
 
Yep. Many kids overlook SUNY but it is one of the best values out there. I know in my kids classes their friends shirked SUNY schools only to come back to places like UB, Binghamton, Geneseo, New Paltz. They realized a) tuition was affordable and b) you get a pretty good education. Buffalo and Binghamton have very good engineering programs and New Paltz is coming up with their new eng. curriculum with lot of money being pumped in.
And Stony Brook has very good health programs and medical school.
 
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Unsurprisingly, Penn State is once again among the greatest universities in the country, according to Niche.com.

This past week, the rankings and reviews site published its yearly assessment of the United State’s universities and colleges. Overall, it gave Penn State an A+ ranking and named it the No. 82 overall college in the country. Niche also called Penn State the No. 18 public university and “big college” in the United States.

Additionally, Niche named Penn State the sixth-best student life college in the country. Only USC, UCLA, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Vanderbilt were favored over the Nittany Lions. Penn State also had a leg up on its rivals, beating out Michigan (7th), Ohio State (12th), and, of course, Pitt (53rd).

Penn State received three other top ten national rankings. The university was rated the seventh-best college for Information Technology, eighth-best for Greek life, and 10th-best for partying
 
So why has our rating declined so much? I’d be shocked to hear that it’s due to a decrease in spending
Because, since 2013, the rankings have started to put more and more weight on factors related to cost of attendance and financial aid. Penn State has very high tuition compared to public schools, and very low financial aid awards compared to private schools. Cost of attendance and financial aid both hurts Penn State in the rankings formula, and makes Penn State less competitive in attracting high school applicants with high GPAs and SAT scores.
 
Comment on the crazy New York state university system. Long ago, (1966) I applied to Alfred University. I was interested in Ceramic Engineering. Alfred's school of engineering was a state school, the rest of the university was private. There was a two tution system in place with the Engineering School having a lower tuition. The school of engineering offered Ceramic Engineering and a few other majors, but not Metallurgy. Metallurgy was my main interest. My concern with Alfred was if I transferred out of Engineering I would be facing a tuition hike. Anyway I went to PSU.
Similar situation hold true for SUNY ESF (env. science and forestry) at SU and some of land-grant majors at Cornell. Students in those programs are taking courses along side other Cornell and SU students and are paying a fifth of the tuition.
 
I don't care what the rankings say, if you live in PA and want to go to college in PA, there are really 4 choices: Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, Penn St. Those schools have national and international recognition and your degree will always have value and good perception. There may be exceptions for schools like Lehigh and Bucknell if you really want a specific major and plan to stay in that field forever. But try looking for a job in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, etc with Haverford, Bryn Mawr, etc on your resume. The average person in those cities will have no idea what those schools are and equate them as just some average regional school. And they certainly won't value IUP, Shippensberg, etc.

A large reason students at those schools like Haverford, Bryn Mawr do well in their careers is they come from wealthy, well-connected families to begin with. It's not worth the expense for a lower class, middle class, or even some upper class students attend those schools. In 10, 20, 30, years people will always recognize Penn, PSU, Pitt, CMU.
I think you’re forgetting about many of the good Pa schools who do get recognition. The average Californian may not know about Drexel, Swarthmore, or even Temple more recently but don’t excuse their ignorance. Lafayette, F & M, Dickinson, Muhlenberg, Villanova, Gettysburg, Etc. are very well known and respected by the people who matter. People in the West don’t have the luxury of attending great small liberal arts colleges. They are stuck in big diploma mills like ASU or UC Santa Barbara and are increasingly dominated by Asian and Hispanic students representative of the demographics in those states. They have no tradition of small high quality colleges which in many cases were founded before they became States.
 
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Unless you kids can get into the Honors College or are black or Hispanics, the odds of scholarship $$$ is pretty much zero.

I looked when my kid wanted to go there about 10 years ago, zippo. He went to in state UCONN instead, I couldn't stomach the $50k/yr total costs for being out of state. He became a RA and between that and what we kicked in he may have had $12k of debt when he graduated.

I would agree. We are at a point where if my kids can stay in state they should be able to graduate with no debt or very little. With living in Maryland, we have UMD which is a very good school. I can't imagine paying $45K (tuition + room&board) at PSU when UMD is $23K (tuition + room&board).
 
Unless you kids can get into the Honors College or are black or Hispanics, the odds of scholarship $$$ is pretty much zero.

I looked when my kid wanted to go there about 10 years ago, zippo. He went to in state UCONN instead, I couldn't stomach the $50k/yr total costs for being out of state. He became a RA and between that and what we kicked in he may have had $12k of debt when he graduated.
I know from personal experience that in 1990s, there were a number of partial scholarships available that had nothing to do with Honors program or ethnicity. These are usually specific to certain colleges or majors, and sometime you cannot apply for them until after your freshman year. I ended up with a half tuition scholarship, based on academics only (I'm a white male who didn't have financial need).

Perhaps someone either recently out of school (or with kids currently in school) can comment on whether this is still the case, but usually these scholarships are endowed so I'd be surprised if they have gone away.

This is not to say that PSU is affordable for out of state students (it isn't) but I wanted to refute the idea that there is no scholarship $$ available.
 
I know from personal experience that in 1990s, there were a number of partial scholarships available that had nothing to do with Honors program or ethnicity. These are usually specific to certain colleges or majors, and sometime you cannot apply for them until after your freshman year. I ended up with a half tuition scholarship, based on academics only (I'm a white male who didn't have financial need).

Perhaps someone either recently out of school (or with kids currently in school) can comment on whether this is still the case, but usually these scholarships are endowed so I'd be surprised if they have gone away.

This is not to say that PSU is affordable for out of state students (it isn't) but I wanted to refute the idea that there is no scholarship $$ available.
Based on everything I've seen, your experience in the 90's would be a rarity today. Keep in mind, too, that tuition in 2020 is significantly higher - probably more than double - what it was in the 1990's. Even if the scholarships are endowed, if the endowment disburses $5,000 a year, that money doesn't go nearly as far as it did 25 years ago.
 
Based on everything I've seen, your experience in the 90's would be a rarity today. Keep in mind, too, that tuition in 2020 is significantly higher - probably more than double - what it was in the 1990's. Even if the scholarships are endowed, if the endowment disburses $5,000 a year, that money doesn't go nearly as far as it did 25 years ago.
Appreciated, but I was refuting the statement that there are no academic scholarships available outside of the Honors Program. Perhaps you could say there are no *full* academic scholarships available, but even Honors scholarships are only $5K per year, no?
 
I tend to read these to be "which schools know how to job the metrics the best" sorts of things, as well as many have stated, what some of these lists deem as "key" and how that relates to the academic acumen of the schools can vary widely. Yes cost is key, and any school in the state of Pennsylvania is going to struggle with that, and also how PSU and the other State Related schools have the whole issue of "not a private school, but also not really a public school in the true sense" that is unique to Pennsylvania and I am sure throws the algorithms off a bit for how these ratings are created.
 
Similar situation hold true for SUNY ESF (env. science and forestry) at SU and some of land-grant majors at Cornell. Students in those programs are taking courses along side other Cornell and SU students and are paying a fifth of the tuition.

Don't know about Syracuse, but at the Cornell state contract colleges the tuition is $39k for a NY state resident v. $59k for a non-resident. That's a little more than 20%
 
Similar situation hold true for SUNY ESF (env. science and forestry) at SU and some of land-grant majors at Cornell. Students in those programs are taking courses along side other Cornell and SU students and are paying a fifth of the tuition.
I worked at SU (in a department closely aligned with ESF) for awhile so I know a bit about this. Cornell is a little different because those students are actually Cornell students (they just pay less) meaning their diploma says "Cornell". While ESF is actually very good, it does not have the name recognition (nationally at least) of Syracuse or Cornell.

Additionally, It is not at all unusual for closely affiliated universities to allow students to take a limited number of courses at the affiliated schools. For example, NCSU/UNC/Duke allow students to take classes at each institution regardless of their home institution. While at UNC, I took classes at both NCSU and Duke. Interesting, more Duke students take classes at UNC than the reverse (or that used to be the case...I can't find the current numbers).
 
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