(06-12-2013 06:06 PM)OldApp79 Wrote:  

(06-10-2013 04:31 PM)jrj84105 Wrote:  .....
Since this is conference realignment board, and we're looking through that prism, the question that I think is interesting, is whether or not there is room for an academic branded conference among the Go5. AAU membership has been a great branding hallmark for the B1G even though AAU membership has some weird historical biases and can be, for marginal schools, as arbitrary as many of the other ranking systems. If you were going to pick an academic criteria for Go5 academic all star member schools, Carnegie designation would be an OK criteria, while top 150 USNWR ranking would be silly.

I agree that there is much talk of academic prowess in conference realignment, but I have never given it much credibility. If one is concocting theories on conference realignments based on academic prowess, then how does that theory take into account Ivy League schools? Looking at those same USNWR rankings, the 8 Ivy League schools are ranked 1, 2, 3, 4, T8, T10, T15 & T15 and of course all are rated RU/VH by Carnegie. If academic rankings carry weight by conference decision makers, then either the Ivy League schools would be targets for acquisition by Po5 conferences or any Po5 school would jump at the opportunity to be in the Ivy League. Neither is plausible.

In truth, the acquisition portion of conference realignment is weighted equally by athletic prowess and name recognition for TV ratings as this drives TV money which is used to fund the non-revenue sports. This enables the AD to report a balanced department budget to the university president. Only then and to a lesser extent, university presidents looking at conferences will look for academic rankings that are merely similar, not higher or lower.

You have a point but really the Ivy League schools are not a good example for two big reasons.

1. The Ivy League schools have been very clear for a long time that they neither want to leave or want to add schools. They don't care how much money you are getting either.

2. As a group the schools decided to not do things as many other schools do. This means that these schools could do more they purposely choose not to. This goes hand in hand with them refusing to participate in the football playoffs as well.

Would say the Big Ten offer Princeton or Harvard if they said they were going whole hog on athletics and were willing to leave the IVY? I would say yes they would be interested. If you need an example of how they would do just look at schools like Northwestern or Stanford. They can compete if they want to.

(06-12-2013 09:21 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  

(06-11-2013 10:12 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(06-11-2013 05:59 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  

(06-10-2013 04:47 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(06-10-2013 04:31 PM)jrj84105 Wrote:  Number of doctoral degrees awarded
Federal grant money received
Non-federal grant money received
Endowment
Number of professors in national societies
Undergrad admission rate
Undergrad entrance scores
Graduate placement rate
prestige
etc, etc, etc,

There are many different metrics for measuring academic strength and these are combined in a multitude of different scoring and grading systems. All the systems have strengths and limitations and each is geared to a specific audience. USNWR is a good reference for education consumers starting to look at college options. It is not a very good reference for department chairs looking to compare their academic productivity relative to peer institutions.

Since this is conference realignment board, and we're looking through that prism, the question that I think is interesting, is whether or not there is room for an academic branded conference among the Go5. AAU membership has been a great branding hallmark for the B1G even though AAU membership has some weird historical biases and can be, for marginal schools, as arbitrary as many of the other ranking systems. If you were going to pick an academic criteria for Go5 academic all star member schools, Carnegie designation would be an OK criteria, while top 150 USNWR ranking would be silly.

Agreed. When college presidents talk about academic prestige in realignment, USNWR is not what they consider. They might consider ARWU.

ARWU has Hawai'i substantially above Notre Dame, Syracuse, WF, Tulane, and Boston College. It also has PSU as being substantially better than all of those schools plus Rice and UVA. Although I know a couple of people who would go to Hawai'i over ND, I don't know anyone who would do it for academic reasons (assuming they were undecided).

Schools like to be in conferences with other schools that are filled with smart students. Paying $0.0000002 less for pencils (the benefit of being in a conference with a bunch of research institutions) is good, but convincing UVA's undergraduate population/the prospective students at UVA that you are a good school is priceless.

For all their criticisms, USNWR are pretty good at picking which schools have good students. Sure they might not be 100% accurate, but they are usually ball park. And sure they might make their own luck (i.e. schools are good because they say that they're good, so good students apply there), but they're still fairly accurate. Unless you think that the U of Hawai'i has academic that blow ND's out of the water, ARWU rankings are not. Also, Carnegie doesn't rank schools. They classify schools. There is a HUGE difference.

USNWR has Alabama and Auburn ahead of Colorado if you believe that. CU is #97 in USNWR but #33 in ARWU. Alabama isn't even ranked in ARWU. USNWR also heavily favors private schools with things like % of students contributing. And schools cheat a lot on it. Emory & Clemson to name a couple of fairly recent examples. USNWR main advantage is that its easy to find and has a lot of data handy. But its not a good measure.

FWIW, I've gone to one public school (technically state-related) and one private school, and the public school cheated on rankings WAY more than the private school. I realize that my personal experience is just that and doesn't conclusively prove anything, but I don't think that you're right. I don't think that private schools cheat more than public schools. Why would they? Also, why would alumni donations favor private schools? I'm pretty sure that the school spirit at Alabama, UK, UL, UF, UT, ATM, Michigan, Ohio State, and so on is very high.

That's not what I said. I said the measures USNWR uses favor private schools. That's a common complaint among public schools. Cheating in reporting to USNWR has been caught on a number of occassions. I have no opinion whether its more common among public or private schools. I mentioned 1 of each.

Penn and Yale could easily make a switch to P5 now if they wanted. Both gross about $37 million. Every other IVY league school is in the $20 mil range or less. That's not to say that those other schools couldn't raise $100 mil by throwing one fundraising party, but it just shows how much they put into their athletics now even though they don't have to. To give a comparison, $37 mil is the same ballpark as Cincinnati, Temple, San Diego State, UCF, ODU, and Hawaii. With a TV contract...

If the IVY ever opened up and wanted to get to 12 teams to form an athletic conference that actually wanted to be in the public eye, then you would have Duke, Northwestern, Vandy, Georgetown, and Wake Forest lining up. Whatever revenues losses were sustained by exiting their existing conference would be more than made up by association to the IVY schools.

(06-13-2013 10:42 AM)bigblueblindness Wrote:  Penn and Yale could easily make a switch to P5 now if they wanted. Both gross about $37 million. Every other IVY league school is in the $20 mil range or less. That's not to say that those other schools couldn't raise $100 mil by throwing one fundraising party, but it just shows how much they put into their athletics now even though they don't have to. To give a comparison, $37 mil is the same ballpark as Cincinnati, Temple, San Diego State, UCF, ODU, and Hawaii. With a TV contract...

If the IVY ever opened up and wanted to get to 12 teams to form an athletic conference that actually wanted to be in the public eye, then you would have Duke, Northwestern, Vandy, Georgetown, and Wake Forest lining up. Whatever revenues losses were sustained by exiting their existing conference would be more than made up by association to the IVY schools.

This isn't directly in answer to your post, so it may seem like I'm putting words in your mouth, but I do think that it's relevant.

IVY schools have no desire to add, nor will they ever. It isn't about money and it isn't about athletic prowess. It's about history and culture. Nobody else has their history (especially against each other) and nobody else has their culture, Duke, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Rice, MIT, and Northwestern included. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's not necessarily a good thing. It just is what it is and nothing else.

(06-12-2013 08:05 AM)jrj84105 Wrote:  

(06-11-2013 08:37 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  Athletic departments are just marketing departments, and my money is on a university president wanting to market his/her university to the best available students, but if you can put together a coherent argument to the contrary, then I'll listen.

Do you really think that undergrad recruitment is anywhere near the top five in a university president's priority list? Teaching undergrads is akin to babysitting at most major institutions. The entire organizations are focused on recruiting, retaining, and fostering the productivity of a cadre of leaders in academic fields. Even within an academic department, many of the junior faculty basically serve as buffers to free the all star researches from the daily demands of teaching and collaborating on lesser projects. A University president is pimping his organization to highly productive researchers and to donors/investors who can provide the infrastructure to recruit those top researches. Undergraduate recruitment is an afterthought and typically comes as a trickle down effect from the primary goal of research productivity. The only university presidents who primarily concern themselves with undergrad recruitment are the ones at crappy for-profit schools that have commercials during daytime TV.

The question is not whether it's high on the priority list. It's either, should it be high on the priority list, or, does this fact mean anything for how good the university is overall? And if it does, how much? There are lots of people that switch majors during undergrad study (and many of the smart ones), many times because of a particular professor or class.

(06-12-2013 09:27 PM)jrj84105 Wrote:  

(06-12-2013 09:17 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  

(06-12-2013 08:05 AM)jrj84105 Wrote:  

(06-11-2013 08:37 PM)nzmorange Wrote:  Athletic departments are just marketing departments, and my money is on a university president wanting to market his/her university to the best available students, but if you can put together a coherent argument to the contrary, then I'll listen.

Do you really think that undergrad recruitment is anywhere near the top five in a university president's priority list? Teaching undergrads is akin to babysitting at most major institutions. The entire organizations are focused on recruiting, retaining, and fostering the productivity of a cadre of leaders in academic fields. Even within an academic department, many of the junior faculty basically serve as buffers to free the all star researches from the daily demands of teaching and collaborating on lesser projects. A University president is pimping his organization to highly productive researchers and to donors/investors who can provide the infrastructure to recruit those top researches. Undergraduate recruitment is an afterthought and typically comes as a trickle down effect from the primary goal of research productivity. The only university presidents who primarily concern themselves with undergrad recruitment are the ones at crappy for-profit schools that have commercials during daytime TV.

Yeah, I do. Undergraduates generally characterize the school's reputation, undergraduates generate most of the school's revenue, undergraduates generally makeup most of the school, and undergraduates are the easiest and best supply of future quality grad students.

Research on the other hand is almost entirely unaffected by conference alignment. The main role of CIC's and other similar institutions is to pool buying to leverage better prices. Syracuse for instance is a "high" research university, as opposed to Tulane, which is "very high." Syracuse does about $100 million of research a year, whereas Tulane does about $160 million of research a year. How much cheaper do you think pencils are for Tulane? $0.00002? Tulane actually produces excellent students, but pretend that they don't. If you were the president of (insert your favorite school here), would you rather have pencils that are $0.00002 cheaper, or would you rather have a chance to market you school to some of the nation's best and brightest undergraduate students for 4-5 years?

FWIW, when I was doing research at PSU, we were working with WVU of all places. That's how much the CIC/conference affiliation mattered to us.

Also, FWIW, I think that the real benefit of CIC is group classes. The B1G is experimenting with those, and I think that they're the way of the future. As of right now, they're all language classes, but I think there is plenty of room to grow. A situation where GT students could virtually take journalism classes at Syracuse and, in return, Syracuse students could virtually take engineering classes at GT would be very, very cool. IMO, that's the future of the academic side of conference realignment, and it has almost nothing to directly do with research.

I never said there was any benefit to a university's research programs conferred by conference affiliation. I was at a CIC institution as well- just down the street from the HQ actually, and it had no impact on my research life. Where you got the idea that I think CIC or any conference affiliation aids research, I don't know.

There was an exercise in picking a cohort of Go5 academic standouts. I've made the argument that I would give preference to research institutions over undergrad education. You're absolutely wrong about the relative value of undergraduate education relative to research productivity as far as overall prestige. There's no contest there.

There's prestige (perception), and then there's reality. In football, the P5 schools have prestige, including such stalwarts as Duke, Indiana, Kansas, etc. Boise State and BYU have reality.

Cincinnati is holding it's own very well as a national research facility with very high activity. Cincinnati improved 17 points in the last rankings. We had the largest improvement of any school in our class. With this a priority at the university, I see the ranking improving even more over the next five years.