By wpengine September 5, 2003
For the third straight year, U.S. News & World Report ranked Cornell as the 14th-best university in the country, despite an improvement in some of the key figures reported by the administration. Harvard and Princeton topped the list, while the other Ivies were also in similar positions as last year. Yale placed third, the University of Pennsylvania was fifth, Dartmouth was ninth, Columbia 11th and Brown 17th. In 1999, Cornell ranked sixth. Since then, different weighting of the ranking criteria has dropped the University out of the top ten. The rankings continue to strongly influence where high school students choose to apply despite many in higher education who have criticized college guides that use them. “The rankings do matter, because they are self-reinforcing,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, director of Cornell’s Higher Education Research Institute and also the former vice president for academic programs, planning and budgeting. “A school that moves up in the rankings, other factors held constant, receives more applications, has more students accept its offers of admission and is able to bring students in with somewhat less generous financial aid packages,” Ehrenberg said. While Cornell’s numbers for the magazine’s key categories, such as faculty salaries, spending per student, student test scores and student-faculty ratio, have improved, they have gone up at a slower rate compared to some of its peer institutions. “We’re not getting better [in the U.S. News categories] at the rate our competitors are,” Ehrenberg said. This year, instead of simply dividing total students by the total number of faculty, Cornell computed a 9:1 student-faculty ratio by including only undergraduates and faculty who teach undergraduates. According to Linda Grace-Kobas, interim vice president for communications and media relations, this change conforms to how peer institutions compute their respective student-faculty ratios. Last year’s ratio, under the old computation, was 13:1. “It’s interesting to see how the numbers play out,” Grace-Kobas said, noting that the U.S. News methodology has become more consistent in recent years. Factors like faculty composition can dramatically affect the U.S. News numbers, Ehrenberg noted. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, trails Cornell slightly in its academic reputation score but is the number-one university in the faculty resources category, compared to Cornell’s 22nd spot. At least part of this might be explained by Penn’s higher average salary, which is the most important factor in computing faculty resources. Since Pennsylvania has 278 business faculty and 51 law faculty, compared to Cornell’s respective 50 and 32, the large difference may be partially explained simply by having a greater proportion of professors in higher-paying fields. The real problem with the rankings, Ehrenberg said, “is the notion that you can add up all the characteristics and come up with a single number.” Cornell students, for the most part, recalled paying little attention to college rankings when applying to universities. “It mattered to my family,” said Jennifer Robinson ’06, “but I applied to schools whose academic reputation I was familiar with, but not because of rankings.” Theresa Hsu ’07 said general rankings “didn’t matter at all” when she chose to study engineering at Cornell. “There’s a lot more that matters to me,” Hsu said.Archived article by Dan Galindo
By wpengine September 5, 2003
In planning out their future courses, few students can deny the allure of working in a class-free Friday with a little scheduling finesse. But according to an article published in the Wall Street Journal last week, Cornell students could soon be spending their Thursday nights hitting the books rather than the bars. Around the country, colleges are trimming down on three-day weekends by bulking up their Friday schedules, a day which has often seen classes go sparsely attended or not held at all. For now, however, Cornell students who like their Fridays light and easy can breathe a sigh of relief — the University has no plans for a Friday-scheduling frenzy. “We don’t find an increasing scheduling of courses on Friday, not at Cornell,” said Dotsevi Sogah, chair of the Educational Policy Committee, which examines student scheduling. “Whether we will change and follow everyone else we don’t know yet.” University officials acknowledge that there is a dip in attendance rates toward the end of the week but indicate that it is too mild to prompt any corrective action. “It turns out there is a slight drop-off on Friday afternoons, but it’s not that great,” said one faculty member. The relative lack of action stems in part from the fact that Cornell has always utilized Fridays to some extent, although historically they are not as heavily scheduled as earlier days of the week. “In terms of the largest number of classes scheduled, they peak on Wednesday,” Sogah said. “On Thursday and Friday we see less.” A busy Friday is not the case at all universities, however, and many are taking steps to reverse a gradual extension of weekend free time. Syracuse University has made Friday classes the focal point of a new scheduling initiative, with plans aimed at halting a trend toward excessive Thursday-night partying and disturbances. According to the Syracuse website, “many students view Thursday night as part of their weekend socializing time, just like Friday and Saturday nights,” resulting in an increase in calls to the public safety department and creating an “adverse effect on social conditions.” While the effect of a three-day weekend on social conditions is probably a matter still up for contentious debate, it appears that more schools are falling into the Syracuse camp. Wesleyan, Miami and Clark Universities are all in the process of adding classes to their Friday schedules. That’s not to say that Cornell has not been looking into these issues. The Educational Policy Committee conducted a survey last year examining student sleep patterns, attentiveness and attitudes toward class hours. It found, unsurprisingly, that students felt most alert between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., before sinking into a lull of mid-afternoon sleepiness. Classes are arranged with this drop-off in mind, and the midday period is the most heavily scheduled on most college campuses, a phenomenon known as “bunching.” The hours from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., when attention spans are at their shortest, are considered protected time to be used for dinner or clubs but not for academic activities. The survey also found a high rate of end-of-the-week absenteeism before school breaks, when the temptation of a five-, six- or even seven-day “weekend” becomes too great for all but the most devoted of students. Before last year’s fall break, for instance, only 35 percent of undergraduates showed up to their last lectures on Wednesday, and over 20 percent had disappeared at the close of classes that Monday. David Cronheim ’07 may be a freshman, but he’s wasted no time in picking up the college lifestyle. Although academic obligations thwarted his attempt at securing a three-day weekend, he was able to keep his Friday lectures to a minimum. “It’s not high school. Having a free day on Friday gives you a little extra break so you can have a good time on the weekend,” Cronheim said. “It means you can go out and party on Thursday night.” Despite the hopes of many students, long weekends at Cornell are still the rare exception rather than the rule. “It’s pretty tough to do that,” said Sean Dranagan ’06 regarding the elusive Friday off. “A lot of classes are scheduled Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so it’s kind of difficult to avoid those.” Besides, said Dranagan, “I think Friday is a perfectly good day of the week. Why shouldn’t you have classes on Friday?” Archived article by Jeff Sickelco