02-20-2013, 07:41 AM
http://news.yahoo.com/stanford-universit...nance.html
Back when I was applying to school what dinged Stanford in the USNWR rating was alumni satisfaction. Everybody here knows how proposterous that is. They used alumni giving rate as a proxy for satisfaction, which is ridiculous in Stanford's case because the school doesn't have the same multi-generational giving and matriculation as the Ivy League. Using giving also unfairly dings public institutions. Futhermore there's a thought out there that the Stanford graduate schools discriminate against Stanford undergraduates in the effort to make us get academic diversity. If the Ivy League is keeping more of their own within their graduate ranks, then they would keep more of the giving. I also wonder if some of us figure that the Stanford billionaires will pick up the slack so don't give at all. Or that the school has so much money that there are more deserving charities out there. Anyways it's hard to say that the alums are less satisfied when they give $1 billion, or when the football team goes to BCS bowl games 3 years in a row.
Back when I was applying to school what dinged Stanford in the USNWR rating was alumni satisfaction. Everybody here knows how proposterous that is. They used alumni giving rate as a proxy for satisfaction, which is ridiculous in Stanford's case because the school doesn't have the same multi-generational giving and matriculation as the Ivy League. Using giving also unfairly dings public institutions. Futhermore there's a thought out there that the Stanford graduate schools discriminate against Stanford undergraduates in the effort to make us get academic diversity. If the Ivy League is keeping more of their own within their graduate ranks, then they would keep more of the giving. I also wonder if some of us figure that the Stanford billionaires will pick up the slack so don't give at all. Or that the school has so much money that there are more deserving charities out there. Anyways it's hard to say that the alums are less satisfied when they give $1 billion, or when the football team goes to BCS bowl games 3 years in a row.