Methodology: The Best Undergraduate Teaching

Faculty and administrators at these schools commit to teaching undergrads in a high-quality manner.

By U.S. News Staff

September 12, 2011 RSS Feed Print

For the third consecutive year, in the spring of 2011, U.S. News asked top academics as part of the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey to name the schools that they think have faculty with an unusually strong "commitment to undergraduate teaching."

These rankings are the schools whose faculty and administrators are committed to teaching undergraduate students in a high-quality manner. College presidents, provosts, and admissions deans were asked to nominate up to 10 colleges in their U.S. News Best Colleges ranking category with a "commitment to undergraduate teaching."

This item on the peer survey has enabled college officials to pick schools within their U.S. News Best Colleges ranking category that have a strength in undergraduate teaching that they believe the public should be aware of. The best undergraduate teaching rankings also focuses attention on one very important part of undergraduate academic experience that is not always directly measured in a college's regular peer assessment survey results and in its overall U.S. News Best Colleges ranking.

The "commitment to undergraduate teaching" rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the peer assessment survey. These lists, organized by U.S. News ranking categories, contain all the colleges that received the most nominations by top college officials in the spring 2011 survey for having an unusually strong "commitment to undergraduate teaching." They are ranked in descending order based on the number of nominations they received.

Tags:: methodology,; colleges,; rankings

Reader Comments Read all comments (3)

Add Your Thoughts Comment Name State Email

Please enter the two words below into the text field underneath the image.

Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.

Miami Oh should be #1! Outstanding professors strictly focused on teaching and developing undergraduates.

RedhawkCaw of FL 12:45AM May 24, 2012

This is extremely flawed methodology and, equally important, it is being used in a flawed way by many schools' "admissions marketing" departments.
First, to survey administrators OPINIONS about "commitment to teaching" tells you nothing about ACTUAL commitment to teaching, either by institutions or by individual instructors. Second, "commitment" is nice, but actual effectiveness is what students should really be interested in. This is, of course, notoriously hard to measure. However, even some measure of how much time faculty put into teaching would be better than the nonsense you report. I can assure you that at least one of the schools highly ranked using this methodology talks a good game but actually only rewards faculty for research productivity.
The other problem, not yours but presumably important to your readers, is how the marketers use this information. They regularly ignore the Carnegie category, which, among other things, means there are lots of "#1"s. It also invites absurd comparisons. Would anyone really want to say that a high ranking on this measure at a Research 1 university means "better undergraduate teaching" than at even a middling-rated liberal arts college? But that is the buzz that the marketers try to create, and it just ain't so!

Ivy Prof and LAC parent of CT 9:35AM September 21, 2011

Oh please -- Yale, U of Chicago, and Clemson on a list of schools that supposedly put undergraduate teaching first? Everyone knows that Ivy League schools and many of their clones are famous because of their research and huge graduate programs, with the possible exception of Dartmouth and Brown. They are known for having professors that are largely inaccessible to undergrads and view them as a nuisance. And Clemson is no different than its land-grant peers throughout the country, where research, huge lecture classes, TAs are the norm, not undergraduate focus. William & Mary has a much better average class size and student-teacher ratio than most of the schools on the list, and it is public to boot, so you are getting those smaller class sizes and accessible professors for a fraction of the cost of many of them. Another school that should be high up on the list is Wake Forest. Anyone who knows these schools will laugh if they see you ranked Clemson ahead of Wake on caring about teaching. Clearly the factors being considered for you ranking methodology are quite flawed, because the reality that current students are experiencing is quite different than what your rankings would have prospective students believe.

College Mom of VA 8:49AM September 13, 2011

Related Articles

Methodology: The Best Undergraduate Teaching

Faculty and administrators at these schools commit to teaching undergrads in a high-quality manner.

Reader Comments Read all comments (3)

College Search

Knowledge Centers

Parent Question-of-the-Day

What will be your primary resource to help pay for college?

Find Online Programs

Editor's Picks