re: Which school in the SEC would you send your children?

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How can experience at one university and not the other drive anything but feelings, which I argue are irrelevant. Why do we have rankings? Is it just to make some universities arbitrarily look good and others bad?

Of course we can cherry pick colleges/departments from any university and say it is better here than there. I am talking across the board. Look at things like faculty salaries, grant money, publications, and graduate placement. These things, along with reputation (occasionally) are usually interacted in some way to come up with the rankings. The Carengie rankings are quite broad and only categorically distinguishable. Arkansas has not been VH for very long by the way. We have to look beyond that. I admit as a general rule, few doctoral programs outside of VH are worth attending. There are, as you point out, exceptions to this.

Check these out (I left off the typical US News rankings because they are known to be quite subjective):

MUP

A&M Endowment

ARWU

NSF

AAU - Also a broad category, but much narrower than VH

There are others, but I think we can see that rankings are not just some group of elites coming up with arbitrary lists. Things can be measured and ordered. Are they all meaningless with respect to quality of education? If the question had been where we could send kids for degree X, then maybe we could pick more subjectively. As long as we are talking in general terms then we have to go with the evidence we have. Feelings, hearsay, and knowing people are simply not good enough to produce an informed answer.

I continue to maintain that all schools in the SEC can produced fine graduates, as can all schools in the Sun Belt. When we get down to brass tacks though, something separates some schools from others. I cannot see how one could argue that universities that produce more scholarly output to their respective fields, have more financial support, better job placement, and more difficult admission standards are not superior places to be educated.

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Again, I am going off of personal experience. I weigh personal experiences far beyond some ranking system.

But while we are on the topic, yes, I think many of the ranking systems that exists are largely arbitrary and mainly exist to create some sort of competition between schools and to garner attention to whatever ranking system is being observed. What really makes one school "better" than another? The faculty? What if one school has world-renowned professors and they all suck terribly at teaching, while your local community college has teachers with few accolades, but excel at relating to the student and teaching them the material? Which school is "better"? What if one school has small classes, but the professor spends little time after class helping students, while a classroom of 70 have a professor that commits every night and weekend to tutoring and answering questions? Which school is "better"? How about average income after graduation? Several of you Aggies have opently admitted that your networks play a large part in why Aggie grads make good money. But what does that have to do with your school, and more importantly, the education you received? Just because you were able to secure a job more easily than someone from, says, Mississippi State, does that mean that you "learned" more while at school? If anything, it seems like it would inhibit some people's desire to learn since they feel they can get a job either way.

I'm sorry, but the process of learning has way too many wrinkles to it to be simply categorized and ranked. Whatever environment and faculty challenge and inspire their students to learn and apply what they have learned entails being a top-tier university. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I really don't understand what you are trying to prove here. Obviously most rankings are going to have A&M in front of Arkansas and most other SEC schools as well. They also are MASSIVE so they are going to have a lot more research spending, endowment, etc. You can keep hanging your hat on that but it really doesn't make much of a difference to me.

I am not trying to argue that. I simply said the education you get at Arkansas is extremely similar in terms of quality as it is at Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, etc. Since research kept being brought up, I also mentioned that I never had a problem with my experience with research at Arkansas, despite being lower "ranked" than A&M.