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Um, no. At least not as far as its stature relative to WUSTL is concerned.
In that "Top American Research Universities" report you linked (thank you for doing that; it's fascinating, especially the academic paper that opens it, "The Unrecognized Complexity of Higher Education"), the University of Minnesota and Washington University in St. Louis are in the exact same cohort, placing in the top 25 nationally on six of the nine metrics the Center for Measuring University Progress uses to asses how well universities are performing. Minnesota ranks in the top 50 on one more of the metrics than WUSTL does, and it has a little more than $100 million more in sponsored research than Wash U does, but Wash U has more Federally sponsored research and a bigger endowment. More Wash U faculty (57) are members of the National Academies than Minnesota faculty (43), but twice as many Minnesota faculty won national awards in 2018, the year on which this ranking is based (25 vs. 12).
And in the area where reputation probably counts most when it comes to attracting students, at the undergraduate level, Wash U attracts brighter students by far, if the 2017 median SAT scores for the undergraduate admits can be said to be a proxy (Washington University in St. Louis: 1460, 19th nationally; University of Minnesota: 1325, 102d nationally. For purposes of comparison and maybe a clue into what goes into those assessments of "public Ivies": the University of Virginia, which usually makes those public-Ivy lists, is in cohort 9 on this ranking (top 25 in only one of the nine metrics), but its median undergraduate SAT score of 1405 is 54th nationally, well above Minnesota. BTW, in this cohort you will find three schools in the top 25 for median SAT scores: Brown University (11th), Carnegie Mellon University and Northeastern University (both also tied with WUSTL for 19th). Brown is an actual Ivy League school whose reputation probably outranks every other school in its cohort save maybe UVa).
(Edited to add further: To round out the nine metrics, Minnesota is stronger than WUSTL at the advanced graduate education level: it awarded about 2.5x as many doctoral degrees and had about 400 more postdocs in 2018, and its alumni are just a smidgen more generous than WUSTL's in annual giving. Both schools were in the top 25 nationally on that last metric while only Minnesota was on the advanced-training ones.)
But worth noting in terms of my reputation comment above: Also in this cohort are Northwestern University, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The two other public universities in this cohort do make just about every "public Ivy" list I've ever seen. By that score, Minnesota should too — but it doesn't.
Some other interesting things I see in that ranking:
UCLA outranks Berkeley. It's in the second cohort (top 25 nationally on 8 of the 9 metrics), along with Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Penn and Yale. (Penn is private. Pennsylvania's flagship public university, Penn State-University Park, is in cohort 7, with a top-25 national ranking on three of the nine metrics).
One of the reputational heavyweights, Princeton, ranks well below its reputational peers Harvard, Stanford, and MIT; it's in cohort 4 with relative reputational underdog University of Southern California. OTOH, Columbia, which enjoys a reputation comparable to that of Penn, joins Harvard, Stanford and MIT in cohort 1 (top 25 on all nine).
And, of course, I see no connection whatever between academic and athletic performance. While there are a few athletic powerhouses on the list of 48 universities (half public, half private) that land in the top 25 on at least one of the nine metrics — Penn State, for instance, or UCLA, or Texas, or Duke and UNC in basketball —and schools in the Big Ten Conference are very well represented (Iowa and Nebraska are the only two of the Big Ten's 14 schools not to make this list; Minnesota is a Big Ten school), most of the schools on it are not, and one of them, Northeastern in Boston (top 25 in one metric), I was surprised to find on it.
Still, based on this ranking, the University of Minnesota is not superior to Washington University but rather its equal. Both schools, however, are indeed head and shoulders above Case Western Reserve, which doesn't make the list of 48 schools at all. It's in the second group — the 30 universities that rank between 26 and 50 nationally on at least one of the nine metrics. (No school in this group scores in the second 25 on all nine; the two best, Michigan State and Arizona, score in the second 25 on seven of nine. CWRU ranks in the second 25 on two of the nine.)
I'm not going to delve into the Univ. of Minnesota, but I suspect, as with Ohio State, it is a university within a university for undergraduates. Ohio State offers very generous merit awards and other benefits for superb undergraduate students. Comparing overall undergraduate academic scores may be deceptive. Merit programs at great state universities represent one of the best bargains in American higher education, especially for STEM students.
Given state subsidies, endowments aren't as meaningful for public schools; alumni contributions more frequently are plowed back immediately into infrastructure.
I didn't argue that athletic excellence had anything to do with academics (e.g., the University of Chicago which left the Big Ten to emphasize academics), although athletic prowess certainly increases alumni contributions to non-academic programs. My point was that top-notch university athletics heightens the athletic entertainment profile of any community.
My defense of the Univ. of Minnesota resulted from its unjust belittlement in this thread. Given the much greater scale of the Univ. of Minnesota, certainly reflected in its economic impact, any community planner would prefer its presence over Washington University.
Research rankings somewhat distort Case Western's excellence. It is intertwined with the Cleveland Clinic and its Lerner Research Institute even though Case Western University and its University Hospitals system (second-ranked in Ohio after the Cleveland Clinic) are distinct. Both schools share a new Health Education Campus. I don't believe that Lerner's large research budget is included in Case Western's reported research funding.
My defense of the Univ. of Minnesota resulted from its unjust belittlement in this thread. Given the much greater scale of the Univ. of Minnesota, certainly reflected in its economic impact, any community planner would prefer its presence over Washington University.
I'll go rummaging through the info on the link between Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic/Lerner later (and I haven't yet read down to the section of the report that deals specifically with universities that have large medical or engineering research programs, which it has separate sets of rankings for).
But you do make a strong case that Minnesota is something of a Rodney Dangerfield among top American research universities.
I'd say that the same can be said of St. Louis as a city/metro in this discussion, however. And while Minnesota's size means that it would have a greater impact on a community than a Washington U in St. Louis would, I don't think that any community planner would turn down having a school of WUSTL's size and caliber as a community anchor. I can tell you from having been there that what is probably the liveliest outlying shopping/dining/entertainment district in St. Louis, the Delmar Loop district in next-door University City (guess what university the city's named for), gets a lot of its energy from Wash U just a few blocks to its south. (My mother lived in a beautiful turn-of-the-20th-century gated community of substantial brick homes that straddled the St. Louis-University City border in between the Delmar Loop and the Wash U campus when she was stationed at the St. Louis VA Medical Center.) Most of the west-central part of St. Louis and U-City, including the Washington University campus itself, developed either during the runup to or around the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition (the "St. Louis World's Fair") and the concurrent Olympic Games, which left Forest Park as their legacy to the city.
I assume there's a district similar to the Delmar Loop near the Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. What can you tell me about it?
(Minneapolis is on my need-to-visit list, partly because one of my favorite Harvard 1980 classmates is a native Minneapolitan who returned to pursue a successful medical career after graduation; she and I also share a first name.)
My favorite parts of these cities are the un-sophisticated parts.
I’m the same, I much prefer the older, gritty, less shiny areas of cities, to the overly gentrified or newly built parts, they just seem more authentic.
Location: Live:Downtown Phoenix, AZ/Work:Greater Los Angeles, CA
27,606 posts, read 14,587,616 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by btownboss4
So I would say it’s a combinations of
1) Big Buisnesses
2) Endowed amenities (museums, Ballets etc.
3) Concentrated wealthy neighborhoods
4) Elite Universities
5) “statement” architecture this is things like Grand Central, Botanical Gardens, Philly City Hall of the Boston Public Library Public to Semi-Public buildings meant to give a sense of Grandure to a place
Inner suburbs are acceptable but they must directly border the city limits.
Best to worst, MSP, Mistake By The Lake, Cincinnati, STL
Location: Live:Downtown Phoenix, AZ/Work:Greater Los Angeles, CA
27,606 posts, read 14,587,616 times
Reputation: 9169
Quote:
Originally Posted by STLgasm
Is this a joke?
Name a city in the STL area that matches up to Indian Hill then?
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