Digging the web:
NY Times article back in 1997:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/19/us/a-study-alters-criteria-in-rating-universities-and-stony-brook-soars.html?src=pmA Study Alters Criteria in Rating Universities, and Stony Brook Soars"Ratings are an American obsession. The best-dressed women. The most respected professions. The best movie sound track. The best graduate school programs. All have a lot to do with popularity, even in academe.
The granddaddy of university rankings is the National Research Council's 740-page tome, which uses hard data like how many academic papers are published or how many Ph.D.'s are produced. But, like the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in awarding Oscars, the research council asks thousands of college professors to vote on which programs are best. The results affect Federal largesse in research grants, applications for enrollment and faculty recruiting.
Now a new study, published in late January, says reputations can be misleading. Using data like research dollars and numbers of publications, the authors have produced a new pecking order that places the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the same league as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison."
"The study, ''The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era'' (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Hugh Davis Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and Nancy Diamond, a graduate student in public policy at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, argue that ratings based on reputation reflect yesterday's reality and understate the quality of some universities while overstating others.
The study ranks Stony Brook as the third-best public research university in the nation, behind only the University of California campuses at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara and ahead of both Michigan and Wisconsin. The study also ranks the State University of New York at Albany as 20th and the State University of New York at Buffalo as 31st.
Similarly, University of California campuses besides Berkeley and Santa Barbara did very well; the top 17 included U.C.L.A., San Diego, Riverside, Santa Cruz and Irvine.
''The strength of the new public institutions leaps out at you,'' said Professor Graham, who notes that some of these universities did not even exist at the end of World War II. Stony Brook, for example, was plunked down on Long Island's potato fields only 40 years ago, and Albany turned from a teachers college to a research university in 1963.
Among private universities, the rankings put Brandeis University, founded in 1948, tied for ninth place with Johns Hopkins. Stanford led the list, with Princeton second, followed by the University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale, all tied for third.
The study used conventional criteria like publications and research money but avoided criteria based on reputations. It also departed from tradition by giving smaller colleges a handicap; the scoring was averages per professor, not totals, which give bigger campuses an advantage.
The study used five criteria, all divided by the total number of faculty members: Federal grants for research and development, the number of journal articles published by its faculty members, the number of articles published in a smaller number of prestigious journals in science and technology and in the social and behavioral sciences, and awards in the arts and humanities.
The study counted fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The data covered 25 years, from 1965 to 1990.
Some ratings experts applauded the elimination of reputation as a criteria."
"'Reputations are very, very slow to change,'' said David S. Webster, an associate professor at Oklahoma State who specializes in university rankings. ''Even a guy like me, who likes to think he keeps up with college quality, sometimes finds he has not.''
Cornelius Pings, president of the Association of American Universities, a consortium of leading research universities, agrees. Mr. Pings said one reputational study declared that the California Institute of Technology had one of the nation's top 25 psychology departments. But Cal Tech did not have a psychology department.
Mr. Pings said the association, which has been criticized for being slow to take in up-and-coming institutions, would review the study ''to see if we can learn anything.''
The new data offer a welcome payoff to states like New York and California that have poured billions of dollars into their public universities only to have them thought of as solid and worthy, but not spectacular or great.
''In some ways, Stony Brook has been a well-kept secret,'' said Shirley Strum Kenny, president of the university. She plans to distribute the study to trustees and legislators.
Karen Hitchcock, president of the State University of New York at Albany, said: ''By taking the size factor out of the analysis, it demonstrates our quality very starkly. This study shows what investment can do, and shows the potential of further investment.''
What led Professor Graham and Ms. Diamond to rethink the rankings was the conviction that their own small, relatively young institution, the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, where Professor Graham taught in the mid-1980's and where Ms. Diamond was studying for a doctorate, was not getting the recognition it deserved.
Once reputations did not matter and size was adjusted for, ''lo and behold, U.M.B.C. looked very good,'' Ms. Diamond said.
Still, it is not Berkeley or Harvard. Brendan A. Maher, a Harvard professor who was co-chairman of the National Research Council's 1995 ratings, contended that reputational information is not simply a ''weird artifact,'' and challenged the adjustment for size.
''I would challenge immediately the whole business of correcting for size,'' Professor Maher said. ''The question is which you'd rather go to, a small hospital like Southern Massachusetts or a large one like Massachusetts General.''