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We were having a discussion regarding Big East academics on ScoutFriars so figured I'd dump some research I did over there onto here. In case anyone was curious about the BE schools academically. Since the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are pretty much universally used, I did a little research on each BE school to see where they rank. Although not totally apples to apples because many schools are categorized differently, it still gives you a good indication how the BE schools fare academically (which are all quite good). Listed below, in alphabetical order, are the most up-to-date U.S. News & World Report college rankings for each BE school:

Butler University: #2 in Regional Universities Midwest
Overall Score: 98/100
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70% Acceptance Rate

Creighton University: #1 in Regional Universities Midwest
Overall Score: 100/100
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70% Acceptance Rate

DePaul University: #124 in National Universities
Overall Score: 43/100
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72% Acceptance Rate

Georgetown University: #20 in National Universities
Overall Score: 78/100
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17% Acceptance Rate

Marquette University: #86 in National Universities
Overall Score: 51/100
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74% Acceptance Rate

Providence College: #1 in Regional Universities North
Overall Score: 100/100
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57% Acceptance Rate

St. John's University: #164 in National Universities
Overall Score: 35/100
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65% Acceptance Rate

Seton Hall University: #118 in National Universities
Overall Score: 44/100
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76% Acceptance Rate

Villanova University: #50 in National Universities
Overall Score: 62/100
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48% Acceptance Rate

Xavier University: #4 in Regional Universities Midwest
Overall Score: 88/100
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72% Acceptance Rate

One note: the scores don't really mean anything when comparing between different rankings. The top school in the category gets 100 and everyone else is a fraction of that. So, Villanova scored 62% of Princeton.

I'm surprised to see St John's ranked below Seton Hall. Having Chris Christie as an alum of the SHU Law School alone should drop them down in the rankings.

Fenway, do you know why a school is ranked as a Regional vs a National? Always been curious about that.

jfan wrote:Fenway, do you know why a school is ranked as a Regional vs a National? Always been curious about that.

First of all, let's acknowledge that the US News rankings are not a serious effort to tell us what colleges do. They are a vehicle to sell magazines and thereby make money.

To your question, the Carnegie Foundation for Higher Education in 1970 established a framework for classifying colleges and universities by category. Their goal was primarily so that the government could have some objective standard to decide where to invest research dollars.

"National Universities" is simply US News' euphemism for Carnefie's "research universities" (doctoral level schools). Originally Carnegie broke the research universities into 2 categories, based on the level of dollars spent on research

The US News' euphemism of "regional universities" refers to Carnegie's master's level colleges and the "national liberal arts colleges" to highly competitive Bachelor's level colleges with less competitive schools relegated to their "regional liberal arts" category.

St. John's for undergrad is a joke. That's what waters these rankings down. The business, law, psychology, and pharmacology programs are well respected and hard to get into for graduate school. It's almost like 2 different schools within the same school. For grad school they have standards but for undergrad they just want to be diverse. Many of the undergrad students are the first to attend college in their families. We have a financial incentive to do this (see Pell Grants). I disagree with it, because I'm a merit not quota kinda guy, and it kills our rankings. So please keep that in mind when seeing our embarrassing academic rankings. Grad school is very solid. Undergrad they take everyone.

Thanks for the reply. Hey rankings are rankings. Creighton has a billboard in Omaha touting the US News ranking. Most people are like me and don't have a clue what it actually means. It looks good on a billboard!

Does that mean the PhD I got from Creighton is actually a Master's?

Creighton has been #1 for the last 14 years, I hope one day we make the jump like Nova did to the national ranking.

sciencejay wrote:Does that mean the PhD I got from Creighton is actually a Master's?

Haha, it's funny that Creighton is in the "master''s catergory when they offer so many Doctoral degrees (MD, DDS, Pharm D, DPT, DOT, Law, PhD etc..).