US News 2024 Rankings (Wake #47)

[Deacsfan27]

I failed intro to psychology my freshman year because I just never went to class.

Took it during summer school and made literally a 100. Sometimes you just need a wake up call.

 

[myDeaconmyhand]

I wonder if we were in the same class. I had literally the exact same experience. I think it was 8AM (or no later than 9AM).

Was at this point in college where I was basically staying up all night every night , so I was checked out or absent from any class I had before noon. Wasted a lot of tuition money and some great learning opportunities back then.

 

[Deacfan2009]

I failed intro to psychology my freshman year because I just never went to class.

Took it during summer school and made literally a 100. Sometimes you just need a wake up call.

I failed my first Calculus class at Wake because the professor jumped straight into multivariable stuff in the first week under the assumption that everyone had already taken it in HS and had a decent understanding of the basics. It was an intro level class. I went to a few office hours but was completely out of my depth and then it was too late to drop.

Retook it as a summer school class with a good but very difficult professor and got an A. The smaller class size in summer school definitely helped w/my confidence too (even if you do a "discussion" based class with 30-50 people, some people are going to have a harder time meaningfully contributing with a group of peers that large).

 

[06deacon]

Regardless of class size I think the expectations of wake professors and general rigor of the classwork, while unquantifiable except in the grade deflation, really make you up your game and grow as a learner as well.

I had small classes at a summer school session at a state U for philosophy and Brit lit and my A-plus level work there probably would have earned me considerably less than an A at wake.

 

[PhDeac]

I failed intro to psychology my freshman year because I just never went to class.

Took it during summer school and made literally a 100. Sometimes you just need a wake up call.

On the bright side, you lowered the class size and made the class better for everyone else.

 

[Deacsfan27]

Was at this point in college where I was basically staying up all night every night , so I was checked out or absent from any class I had before noon. Wasted a lot of tuition money and some great learning opportunities back then.

On the flip side - you learned a lot about yourself and developed socially. I would say the majority of what I learned from college (since I am obviously not getting much mileage out of philosophy degree while running an insurance department), is how to manage time, how I learn, etc.

 

[DeaconCav06]

I was a philosophy major and I don't think, aside from the Intro to Philosophy, that there was ever more than 10 people in any of my classes. It was awesome and probably allowed me to graduate because I could go talk to the professor about any questions that I had and they would know my style of learning/what I was struggling with to assist. You CAN get that in larger classes, but I highly doubt it would have been as tailored to my specific needs as Wake was.

To me, that certainly qualifies as a "better" learning experience. I'm sure that some folks may learn better in larger settings, but when it comes to getting one on one time with the professor, there's no way it can possibly compete with smaller class sizes.

I had a class on Aristotle with 4 students on Wednesdays from 5-8 We just sat at a conference room table.

 

[Deacsfan27]

I had a class on Aristotle with 4 students on Wednesdays from 5-8 We just sat at a conference room table.

Yup that was my entire senior year.

 

[morrison2951]

Regardless of class size I think the expectations of wake professors and general rigor of the classwork, while unquantifiable except in the grade deflation, really make you up your game and grow as a learner as well.

I had small classes at a summer school session at a state U for philosophy and Brit lit and my A-plus level work there probably would have earned me considerably less than an A at wake.

Psych Prof Dr. "Flunking Falkenberg" had something like a 5 or 7 pt grading scale- grade deflation to the max.

 

[Frosty]

No point to make, but my favorite classes at Wake were the discussion classes with 10-15 students all sitting around a long table. I probably had a half dozen of those classes. Had probably the same number of large lecture courses and skipped the majority of those classes and did all my learning in the reading and study sessions.

For sure. Spanish was one of my majors and once you got to the upper level courses they basically involved 10-15 students discussing Spanish language literature in Spanish. If the class size went to 30 or 40 this setup wouldn't be possible, at least not in a way where you'd derive the same benefits for language acquisition.

 

[Frosty]

On the flip side, my smallest econ classes could have had 50 students in them and I'm not sure it would have made a ton of difference

 

[Frosty]

Although once you got to stuff like econometric modeling and doing independent research the smaller class sizes were nice so what do I know

 

[PhDeac]

Although once you got to stuff like econometric modeling and doing independent research the smaller class sizes were nice so what do I know

Just checked at my university. Intro to Econometrics and Econometrics I are capped at 40 and Econometrics II is capped at 16.

All the Spanish III, grammar, and lit classes are capped at 19. Most Spanish I and II sections are capped at 19 as well. Most of them aren't full. Colonial Spanish Literature has four students and is taught by a full Professor who had a Fulbright and has published 3 sole-authored books.

 

[BirdinBama]

When I was at Wake, all the pre-med students had to take and do well in Dr. Allen's Intermediate Biology class to get into Bowman Gray. He had a 5-point grading scale. I never saw students work as hard as those did.

 

[TheReff]

Class size is a help to some kids but not all kids will care about that. My daughter goes to a large state school and her upper level classes in her major are all small classes. Having small classes for liberal arts core classes like history and philosophy is nice but it isn't going to have a huge affect on anyone's college experience. Wake seems to think their education is somehow better than other schools based on things like class size but the world is moving toward actual data. There is nothing wrong with sticking to your beliefs if you are wake but USNWR has tons of weight with high school families. Pretending it doesn't is silly. I don't live in the south anymore and the one thing I would say about a Wake degree is that it doesn't have the clout in other states that it may have in NC/SC. And this isn't going to help. I also see the value of larger Alumni bases over small class sizes for my kids. I like Wake as much as the next alumni but no way I would want my kid to go to Wake over a solid state school even if tuition was the same. And I certainly wouldn't pay double or triple for a Wake education.

Maybe Wake can cut down on the tuition by increasing the class size by also cutting the number of professors. Charging $85,000+ for a year seems nuts to me. What is the after-grad value for the grad in the job market?

 

[PaddyWF]

I’m far enough along in my career that my undergraduate degree and Wake’s ranking are irrelevant for me, as far as rankings go. I think it’s a mistake for Wake administrators (Wente) to take the approach that it’s no big deal. For something as big and expensive as college purchases, where there is always imperfect information and 18 year olds are really guessing about what’s best for them, falling this far is bad for WF’s future. The fact is rankings matter and this is far and away the most prominent ranking list for colleges. We can’t credibly tout it when it’s good and say it’s no big deal when it’s bad. It seems like we’re finally being squeezed for being a tweener… not really a national university but not really a liberal arts college either.

This is the closest to my reaction. The endowment numbers bare that out as well, tweener. We have punched above our weight for quite awhile, but where do you go from here?

As costs continue to rise, it will separate the rich schools with elite name from the sorta-rich schools with decent brand.

There just aren't many schools comparable to Wake that have very good (not elite) academics, and P5 sports. If we had lost the ACC, we would be in huge trouble. Cal/Stanford/SMU joining the conference was incredibly important.

 

[Rafi]

Yeah that doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to anyone but Ph

After doing a little reading, I learned that US News dropped class size (and 5 other variables) because they were self-reported by schools, and many large schools had stopped reporting this metric (because it was hurting their ranking). US News tried to compensate for this by increasing the weight of the student:faculty ratio, but they only increased that a little, and has been pointed out, that doesn't measure the same thing as class size.

So, US News didn't drop this metric because they found it unimportant, they dropped it because they couldn't get large schools to report it. Their diplomatic phrasing, "Five variables were droppeed: class size (8%), the proportion of a school's faculty with terminal degrees (3%), alumni giving rate (3%), the proportion of graduates borrowing (2%) and high school class standing (2%). Although each of these statistics adhered to industry standard definitions from the Common Data Set and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), they were not collected or computed by the U.S. Department of Education and therefore not as universally reported by schools."

 

[thatguy2016]

After doing a little reading, I learned that US News dropped class size (and 5 other variables) because they were self-reported by schools, and many large schools had stopped reporting this metric (because it was hurting their ranking). US News tried to compensate for this by increasing the weight of the student:faculty ratio, but they only increased that a little, and has been pointed out, that doesn't measure the same thing as class size.

So, US News didn't drop this metric because they found it unimportant, they dropped it because they couldn't get large schools to report it. Their diplomatic phrasing, "Five variables were droppeed: class size (8%), the proportion of a school's faculty with terminal degrees (3%), alumni giving rate (3%), the proportion of graduates borrowing (2%) and high school class standing (2%). Although each of these statistics adhered to industry standard definitions from the Common Data Set and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), they were not collected or computed by the U.S. Department of Education and therefore not as universally reported by schools."

Yes. Class size is specifically one of the metrics Columbia lied about, as discovered and revealed by their own professor.

 

[Rafi]

Yes. Class size is specifically one of the metrics Columbia lied about, as discovered and revealed by their own professor.

Yep. Columbia can lie about their data and still be ranked #12. UNC can have fake classes for 30 years and still be ranked #22...

 

[thatguy2016]

Yep. Columbia can lie about their data and still be ranked #12. UNC can have fake classes for 30 years and still be ranked #22...

maybe it isn't a coincidence that UNC wears Columbia blue