America's Best Colleges
ranking by the US News & World Report is out - with Harvard and
Princeton sharing the top spot in overall rankings for the best national
universities. Other leading institutions include Yale University in third
spot and MIT in fourth.
The ranking covers a
list of over 100 national universities.
The usnews.com website
has explained the extensive methodology used in compiling the ranking. The
list also features the institutions that excel in different disciplines,
so students and parents can choose the right college, instead of just
focusing on the overall scores.
'The indicators we use
to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: assessment by
administrators at peer institutions, retention of students, faculty
resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and
(for national universities-doctoral and liberal arts colleges-bachelor's)
'graduation rate performance', the difference between the proportion of
students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do.'
'The indicators include
input measures that reflect a school's student body, its faculty, and its
financial resources, and outcome measures that signal how well the
institution does its job of educating students,' it said.
The US News and World
Report, however, cautions that parents or students should not simply focus
on the top-ranked schools, as many factors other than those measured at
the ranking will figure in a decision. These include the feel of campus
life, the school's location, its cost, and the availability of financial
aid.
To arrive at a school's
rank, 'we first calculated the weighted sum of its scores. The final
scoreswere rescaled: The top school was assigned a value of 100, and the
other schools' weighted scores were calculated as a proportion of that top
score. Final scores for each ranked school were rounded to the nearest
whole number and ranked in descending order.The full list and other
categories are available at www.usnews.com
- Singapore
Business Times 26 Aug 2003
When 22-year-old Kun Hsu of Toronto
graduates from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania next
spring, he's confident his Ivy-League-branded education will open some big
doors.
"We're pretty much a trade school
for Wall Street," he chuckles. Encouraged by his Canadian parents to
apply to U.S. institutions after high school -- his two American cousins
attended Princeton -- his education has been peppered with special guest
lecturers like Jack Welch, Madeleine Albright and Warren Buffett, and his
finance program includes a Nobel Laureate as a professor. The price tag?
$50,000 a year for tuition, room and board.
Mr. Hsu's American choice is an
increasingly popular one, even though a year at a Canadian university is
just a fraction of the cost at about $10,000.
Last year 25,279 Canadians drifted
southward for post-secondary education -- an increase of 7.4% over the
year before. And for U.S. institutions that are stepping up their Canadian
recruitment efforts, the hope is that this number will continue to
increase.
Drawn to Canada in part by Ontario's
"double cohort," -- in 2003, 290,000 Grade 12 and 13 students
will graduate at the same time -- hundreds of U.S. schools are now
offering incentives to Canadian students across the country.
While a Canada Student Loan is
available to help out with some designated schools, and U.S. academic or
athletic scholarships can sometimes be available, many America-bound
Canadians must foot the often-massive bill themselves.
Penny Bissett, an education consultant
who has spent the last nine years helping American institutions with their
Canadian recruiting efforts, says she's watched Canadian students grow
increasingly interested.
"The U.S. is becoming much more
appealing to students," she says. Adventure, specialized programs and
U.S. family connections are all common reasons. "The financial side
has been the big obstacle, but that's slowly changing," she explains.
"Those universities that are actively recruiting are making every
effort to make a much better deal for kids in Canada."
For the most part, these aren't the
super-prestigious schools like Hsu's, but the hundreds of other private
institutions that dot the country charging anywhere from US$10,000 to
US$16,000 in tuition.
As only a selective few can ever get
into the top schools anyway, this is good news, Ms. Bissett says.
"There's interest in the Ivy
League schools no doubt," explains Jennifer Humphries, director of
membership and educational services at Ottawa's Canadian Bureau for
International Education, "but there's also interest in the state
universities. Sometimes that's because of a particular program, sometimes
that's because of sport scholarships which are much bigger than here and
then there's the specialty institutes that are religious based."
Melik Khoury, director of admissions at
the University of Maine at Fort Kent, is eager to grow the Canadian
population at his small 1,000-student state school. So much so that
they'll allow Canadians to skip the entrance test, the SATs, that
Americans write.
"As long as you are in the top
half of your class and you have a grade point average above a C, you can
potentially be accepted," he says. As well, it offers Canadians a
special tuition rate of US$5,000 -- instead of about US$8,000 -- and
freshmen scholarships of up to US$2,500. Total? About US$10,000 for a
year.
Over at Southern New Hampshire
University, an incentives program was launched in late spring allowing
Canadian dollars to be accepted at par for tuition payments -- a savings
of about US$6,000 a year. The reason for the deal, explains Steve Harvey,
director of International Admissions, is that so far they haven't had tons
of luck wooing Canadians to their Manchester campus.
"Price has been the major
drawback," he says. While he has spotted plenty of interest from
Canadian students at the recruitment fairs he's attended across the
country in the last four years, the price has always been too steep. His
hope: at a cost of just US$10,000 a year -- instead of US$16,000 a year as
in the past -- will make a difference.
For universities, however, that don't
offer much in the way of cost incentives or scholarships for Canadians --
like University of Notre Dame in Indiana -- Michael Gantt, assistant
director of admissions, says their US$35,000 annual price will continue to
be prohibitive to many. While he will continue to attend recruitment fairs
in Canada, it will have to be the students who can "make it happen
financially" that will be accepted.
At the moment, of the school's 25
Canadian undergrads, almost all of them are on an athletic grant.
Kyle Doerksen, a 19-year-old
neuroscience undergrad at Stanford University in California, says that
he's fortunate his dream-school offered him a large scholarship that's
completely based on need.
"At Stanford it's not need-blind
for international students," -- where students are accepted on merit
and then the finances are figured out later -- "but they kind of work
that into the mix when they're considering whether or not they're going to
let you in."
(Harvard, for example, has a need-blind
program.) With this financial support Mr. Doerksen only has to pay a small
portion of the US$35,000 fee for tuition, room and board every year. He
also works in a campus lab.
But money aside, actually getting into
an American school, is a much different - and arguably more complicated -
process than applying to a school in Canada.
Aside from usually having to write SATs
(which costs about $100 a pop) and getting recommendation letters from
guidance counsellors and teachers, Mohammed Badi, a 26-year-old
Torontonian also at Stanford, says there are also tricky entrance essays.
"My question for Stanford was,
'tell us about you favourite conversation,' " he remembers. And once
accepted, a higher cost of living -- depending on what part of the country
you're in -- can also be a downside.
This said, Mr. Hsu, Mr. Doerksen and
Mr. Badi are all thoroughly enjoying their American education.
But all of them also have a major goal
in common: to someday bring their new skills back to Canada. "I would
like to end up in Canada," says Mr. Badi, "because it's
home".
- Saturday
Post 27 July 2002
