Keywords

U.S. News rankings, college rankings, benchmarking, predictive model, classification discriminant analysis, engineering college rankings

Abstract

Improving national ranking is an increasingly important issue for university administrators. While research has been conducted on performance measures in higher education, research designs have lacked a predictive quality. Studies on the U.S. News college rankings have provided insight into the methodology; however, none of them have provided a model to predict what change in variable values would likely cause an institution to improve its standing in the rankings. The purpose of this study was to develop a predictive model for benchmarking academic programs (pBAP) for engineering colleges. The 2005 U.S. News ranking data for graduate engineering programs were used to create a four-tier predictive model (pBAP). The pBAP model correctly classified 81.9% of the cases in their respective tier. To test the predictive accuracy of the pBAP model, the 2005 U.S .News data were entered into the pBAP variate developed using the 2004 U.S. News data. The model predicted that 88.9% of the institutions would remain in the same ranking tier in the 2005 U.S. News rankings (compared with 87.7% in the actual data), and 11.1% of the institutions would demonstrate tier movement (compared with an actual 12.3% movement in the actual data). The likelihood of improving an institution's standing in the rankings was greater when increasing the values of 3 of the 11 variables in the U.S. News model: peer assessment score, recruiter assessment score, and research expenditures.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2005

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Tubbs, LeVester

Degree

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

College

College of Education

Department

Educational Research, Technology, and Leadership

Degree Program

Educational Leadership

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0000431

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0000431

Language

English

Release Date

5-1-2008

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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