Ranking season comes again

Once again, it's ranking season. US News & World Report rankings will come out shortly and I feel compelled to once again point out that success isn't only found at a top ranked school. This year's methodology hasn't come out, but I imagine that, once again, US News did not take student satisfaction, student services, study abroad options, graduate school admission, or job placement as criteria. Aside from the average SAT scores, no student information seems to be included in their calculation.

That being said, I guess I have to write about UVa's ranking...tomorrow. I can't believe I had to do this, but the rankings are "embargoed" and aren't supposed to be released, though someone at another school sent them to me before the numbers sent to UVa directly made it to my inbox.

With UVa's hiring of some very prominent researchers, we might see our ranking shift in the coming years because the methodology used by US News puts a high value on faculty resources.

Update:

UVa has crept up one spot on the national list to #23 (tied with Georgetown and ahead of Michigan, which shared the #24 spot last year with UVa). The public school list hasn't changed since last year with Berkeley at the top the list and UVa coming in 2nd.

Are UVa students conservative or liberal?

Every once in a while, someone mentions that they were told that UVa is full of conservatives. This originally surprised me, seeing that most colleges and universities in the United States are liberal places, as are the cities that surround them. Charlottesville is no exception, with it's eclectic mix of musicians, artists, writers, politicos, lawyers, and academics (the list could be longer).

Some statistics from our Office of Institutional Research just came my way and they point to UVa being a bit more left than some people believe it to be. 28% of UVa students designate themselves as conservatives, 35% are liberals, and 37% say they're "middle of the road".

Do those numbers surprise anyone?

Darden's Luckiest Student

The suspense is killing me!

The folks at Darden, our graduate school of business, used an anonymous gift as an opportunity to teach students about risk taking. A random process selected one Darden first year to participate in a "Deal or No Deal" exercise of sorts. The student would be presented with two suitcases: one with $17,500 in it (tuition) and one with nothing in it. The student could select a suitcase or opt to get a pay off of sorts from "a banker", but the amount of that pay off would be unknown.

You can watch the early rounds of the selection process on the Darden website. I couldn't tune in for the live webcast this morning, so I don't know what happened in the end! I've checked the one Darden blog I know (even the one written in Japanese), but there's no mention of the result yet.

Update: The local paper has the result. He went for the suitcases and he picked the empty one.