Dear Friends:
You may be aware that we announced some leadership changes in Georgia Tech Athletics this week. These were difficult but necessary decisions.
I remain grateful to our departing athletic director and head football coach for their dedication to Georgia Tech and our student-athletes. Ultimately, though, our performance had fallen short of what our students and loyal fans expect and deserve, and it became clear that we needed a different approach.
Georgia Tech is a competitive community. We are proud to be one of the nation’s best public universities, and we aspire to compete with the top universities in the country in everything we do. Athletics is no exception. We want to be among the best, and that’s why we had to make these changes. While we complete the search for new leadership, I encourage you to double down on your support for our program, to show up to our games, and to keep cheering our amazing student-athletes.
Speaking of competitiveness, I thought I would share some thoughts about college rankings in light of the recent release of U.S. News & World Report’s much-discussed annual undergraduate rankings. Like them or hate them, the reality is that rankings will continue to proliferate because students find them useful when trying to decide among hundreds of choices, and media companies find them invaluable for attracting readers and revenue. The key is to understand the criteria used by each specific ranking so that we can each reach our own informed conclusions.
In the latest U.S. News rankings, for example, we were listed as No. 4 in engineering (tied with Caltech). What ranks us lower than MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley and higher than Michigan and Carnegie Mellon is not how successful or happy our students are after they graduate — or whatever else you believe we should strive for — but our reputation among deans and senior faculty across hundreds of universities. If you trust that deans have a good eye for quality and value in other schools, then this ranking is for you. If you would prefer hard data about outcomes, you will need to look elsewhere.
The same reputation metric ranks us No. 1 in aerospace (tied with MIT) and industrial engineering; No. 2 in biomedical, chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering; No. 3 in environmental engineering; No. 5 in computer science; and No. 19 in business. Interestingly, while U.S. News thinks we are one of the best choices in the country in areas where more than three-fourths of our students major — engineering, computing, and business — our overall national ranking is only 44 (we were 38 last year). How can that be?
U.S. News uses a different methodology when ranking universities as a whole than it does when ranking specific majors. For example, the overall ranking values how much a university spends per student (the more, the better, in their view) and how small classes are. Not surprisingly, the top positions are reserved to private institutions with large endowments and small student bodies. The top public universities, Berkeley and UCLA, are ranked only No. 20, even though each of them offers a world-class education to about as many students as the top five put together, all of which are private.
In our case, thanks to fiscal prudence, generous state investments, and enrollment growth, Georgia Tech has been able to streamline costs per student, lowering tuition and fees while delivering some of the best student outcomes in the nation. We see this as a success even if it costs us a few positions on a specific ranking.
Overall, we are pleased to see Georgia Tech listed among the best public universities in the country by a multitude of rankings: Forbes (No. 12), Niche (No. 3), Money (No. 6), Payscale.com (No. 8), and The Wall Street Journal (No. 15, the same as U.S. News). The more a ranking focuses on value for students, the higher Georgia Tech tends to show. Low cost, high value, high graduation rates, great jobs for graduates — that’s where we excel. In fact, according to the University System of Georgia’s new tool, Georgia Degrees Pay, Georgia Tech leads all public universities in the state in terms of six-year graduation rates and salaries. (We are also slightly pricier than the rest — though well below our national peer institutions.)
Whatever rankings say about us, we always note whether they indicate areas where we need to improve. For example, Georgia Tech doesn’t score well on U.S. News & World Report’s measures of social mobility. While our Pell Grant students (students qualifying for federal need-based financial aid) graduate at very high rates (No. 8 among public universities according to The Chronicle of Higher Education), we do not serve as many Pell students as we should. The fact that we are now the No. 3 most selective public doctoral university is making it harder for us to attract low-income students who haven’t had access to the same opportunities in high school as others. Yet, UCLA and Berkeley — the only two public doctoral universities that are even more selective than we are — manage to attract more Pell students than we do.
One of the goals of our strategic plan is to expand access to careers in science and technology, and the number of Pell students we serve is a good metric of progress. Increasing the number of low-income students we serve will require more targeted recruitment efforts and, most importantly, more philanthropic resources for need-based student financial aid — the top priority of Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech.
We are always seeking ways to innovate and improve, to transform ourselves and become a better Institute in everything that we do. I am grateful to you for your support as we continue our good work.
In Progress and Service, |
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