@TheOriginalCane
Please repost your detailed explanation as to why these rankings are not academically based.
Somewhere on this board, I did a lengthy snooze-inducing analysis. I will give the Cliffiest of Cliffs Notes here.
Well more than HALF of the US News score that makes up our "academic" ranking is based on NON-academic factors, or at least factors that are only slightly academic in nature.
So there are factors such as student-teacher ratio (mild "academic" connection) and student loan balance ratios (not really "academic" and certainly more pronounced for private schools vs. state schools) that can cause our "ranking" to fluctuate each year, even if nothing substantive has changed on the academic front.
There are other factors such as "selectivity index" (percentage of applicants accepted) that might SEEM to indicate "academic" excellence, but are really just popularity factors. As we have discussed before, ALABAMA has been moving up in this regard DUE TO THE SUCCESS OF THE FOOTBALL TEAM, but not because they added some really great academic programs.
Finally, there is a decent chunk of the score that is "academic", but for which there is very little transparency or explanation of how that component is computed. In a PURE sense, one would think that academic "excellence" is a factor that should not be subject to huge year-over-year fluctuations, and yet...we have the US News rankings moving around like it was the AP football poll.
[And none of this addresses the CHEATING and juking of the system that some schools like Columbia have employed, but that's a discussion for another day.]
For three decades (from the early 1980s to the late 2000s), the University of Miami enjoyed a slow-and-steady climb from a ranking in the 90s (we were #88 when I enrolled as a freshman in 1986) to a ranking in the 30s. Since that time, we have been back-sliding, and it has continued to get worse under Frenk.
Here is what we are going to need to do (no joke here, these are things that will help):
1. Better football team - which leads to more applicants, which leads to more rejections, which leads to higher selectivity index
2. Cutting overall class size again - Tad Foote turbo-charged our first run up the rankings by cutting the undergrad enrollment in the early 1980s, and we have been growing the enrollment for the past 15 years or so as we built more classroom and dorm and parking capacity on campus. Now it's time to go back in the other direction, cutting enrollment again.
3. Need more fund-raising for scholarships - Miami ain't cheap, and student loan programs are not raising the max student loan amount as fast as colleges have been raising their tuition rates. Simply stated, we have to raise more money to endow more scholarships, and make Miami a place that is affordable for top students who do not come from wealthy families.
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