[John Isbell]

Hi Shaun,

Is OSU in Columbus? I grew up in Cleveland Heights, long ago now. We left in 73.
It's the NFL players I see who introduce their alma mater as The Ohio State University. I guess it's an in joke!

Cheers,
John

[E. Shaun Russell]

(I figure all these posts on higher ed deserve their own thread, so I split it off from Good News.)

Originally Posted by John Isbell

Hi Shaun,

Is OSU in Columbus? I grew up in Cleveland Heights, long ago now. We left in 73.
It's the NFL players I see who introduce their alma mater as The Ohio State University. I guess it's an in joke!

Cheers,
John

Yes -- right smack dab in the middle of Columbus. It's a growing city, and on paper it's a big city, with the metro area well past a million...but I've always thought it feels like a much smaller city (not in a good way). Despite my comment in the original thread about the "The" being eye-roll worthy by most people, I probably overstate things. Sports fans tend to love the "The." It's the rest of the academic and non-sporting world that think it's ridiculous.

As for rankings, I honestly think they're absolutely bonkers. US News and World Reports is the most trusted source in America for college rankings, but their methodology is absolutely ridiculous. In the past, they essentially sent out surveys to administrative faculty (e.g. director of undergraduate studies etc.) that asked them about where they would rate other schools. Response rates were sometimes abysmal, and the whole situation was shockingly unscientific. The self-reporting that occurs is unquestioned, which is obviously problematic in its own right. The Chronicle had this good opinion piece on the situation a couple of months ago (behind a paywall, alas, but worth reading regardless).

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Ooh, rankings! And the debate around them goes right back (in my horribly Eurocentric world-view) to Humbolt and that question about whether the purpose of universities/HE should be for teaching or research, or a holistic mixture.

We have a whole host of rankings in the UK, too - they used to be mainly driven by well-known media. Until recently, methodology wasn’t usually published, and there are exclusions (I teach in collegeHE, and our institution is frequently rendered invisible in 'rankings' because the cloud of external ‘rankings’ only look at institutions with university status, which is a shame, because in the National Student Survey metrics we do well).

The world is changing, though, as ranking Higher Education becomes part of the wider policy landscape and data is becoming publicly available (which at least means that the kind of spurious survey methods you mention are ceasing, if not dwindling entirely)

On the other hand, here in the UK, policy is never far away from the metrics used to capture where certain institutions might rank. Not just for research (in the UK we have the Research Excellence Framework, or REF, which grades each institution in terms of impact for research outputs) but also the Teaching Excellence Framework, or TEF, which uses a basket of metrics (including a national student survey and a ‘graduate outcomes’ survey administered to every undergraduate 18 months after graduation) alongside a contextual statement supplied by the institution to grade every provider of HE in England Bronze, Silver or Gold. To be used in marketing narratives.

So, the old-boy network begins to dissolve (yippee), but data driven metrics and the complex algorithm form a replacement, which in some ways is far more interesting, but in other ways risks privileging the abstractions of data over the messy everyday imo (and working in a tiny college, the use of big data methods to assure quality can be challenging).

Sarah-Jane
(Yes, I know too much about this)

[E. Shaun Russell]

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

Despite my comment in the original thread about the "The" being eye-roll worthy by most people, I probably overstate things. Sports fans tend to love the "The." It's the rest of the academic and non-sporting world that think it's ridiculous.

Looks like I spoke too soon.

[David Callin]

Good to see my alma mater, the University of South Wales - then Glamorgan Polytechnic (Accountancy Foundation Course, passed with Distinction, 1976-77) - is hanging on to its place in the top 1200.

I rarely go back. (Not once, yet. But I keep promising myself.)

[James Brancheau]

Never mind, of course.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Good to see my alma mater, the University of South Wales - then Glamorgan Polytechnic (Accountancy Foundation Course, passed with Distinction, 1976-77) - is hanging on to its place in the top 1200.

I rarely go back. (Not once, yet. But I keep promising myself.)

You're safe if you were from the Glamorgan branch. Before the University of South Wales, there was the University of Wales, which was eventually disbanded following a series of scandals around overseas students/visas.

They don't have a league table for HE scandals, though. I wish WonkHE (the go-to place for UK HE news) did one.

Sarah-Jane

[John Riley]

Here in N.C., our former governor said it was an injustice for taxpayers to pay for someone's degree in philosophy. It wasn't seen as controversial. I read that Alaska was considering doing away with the English, Philosophy, and History departments in all state schools. I don't know if they followed through. I remember when digitization started there was so much talk about creativity and the "freedom" (hate that word) it would provide. Instead, it has led us to an existence shaped and controlled by fascist algorithms.

When Galileo went to college and announced he wanted to study math his father, who was a well-known musician, was upset that he was going to waste himself on useless studies. There was little need for math beyond the adding and subtraction used in commerce at the time. Now when someone wants to go to college and learn about the world that existed before they were born, or dive into literature and art and learn how to think logically, parents scream that the kid is wasting their money. I bet I was asked, while in school getting my land-grant triple major in English/History/Religious Studies at least a thousand times, "What are you going to do with that?" They usually had a look on their face like they were tasting something bitter.

We don't educate in America--we job train.

[W T Clark]

What John (Riley) is saying seems eminently more important than some made-up system for judging half-corporate, self-satisfied, semi-corrupt centres of higher education. (This comment now makes me a hypocrite.)

[Allen Tice]

Just because the past is a different country where they usually do things differently is no reason not to visit there for understanding. I like your triple major. We’re not yet in a lifeboat world here where everything has to be sacrificed for immediate survival. Understanding: understanding what and with luck why. Ah.