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No Love for FAU on U.S. News and World Reports Listing of Top Schools

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The listings of U.S. News and World Reports' Top Schools is out, and FAU is no where to be found: Failed to make the top National, or Regional listings.

Nearly everyone else is though.

Key factors included towards ranking were Fees, Enrollment, Acceptance, Retention, Class Size, and ACT/SAT scores.

Of note for Florida…

National Universities Listing:

47. Miami
49. Florida
91. Florida State
T170. Central Florida
T170. South Florida


Southern Regional Universities list:

T1. Rollins
5.  Stetson
11. Embry-Riddle
22. University of Tampa
44. Palm Beach Atlantic
51. North Florida
55. St. Leo
T62. Jacksonville
T62. St. Thomas
79. Florida Gulf Coast
80. USF ST. Pete

Southern Regional Colleges

5. Florida Southern
8. Flagler
36. Southeastern
41. Bethune Cookman
57. Keiser
74. Indian River

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I wonder why, but this is simply pathetic. My life will not be dictated because of the school I graduated from, but I am currently enrolled in the MBA at FAU and I personally thought the program was more well regarded.
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I don't see FIU.

Indian River? Wow!!!! That is where my AA is from.  From a small JC to regional recognition.

FAU - THE REAL SLEEPING GIANT
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Nothing to be bent out of shape over… FAU typically ranks in the 200's this list stops at 200 if I saw it correctly.  Clearly there is a different criteria for regional and national so we wouldn't and shouldn't be ranked in the regional group….and we are an University not a college so you can't group us with the Bethune Cookman College's and Keiser College's of the world Forbes has UCF at 170 for research Universities and FAU at 201


University of Central Florida - Forbes

Florida Atlantic University - Forbes
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FAUs 4 year graduation rate is 15%. Not good.
At a rank of 170, USFs 4 year rate is 43%.  University of Illinois-Champaign up here has a rate of 69%.

Improving this would help FAUs national ranking.

FAU - THE REAL SLEEPING GIANT
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Why this happens is complicated.

The most prominent reason is that we have too many part-time students. People won't graduate in four years taking two classes a semester and working 30 hour weeks. Some people have to do that (especially non-traditionals with families) and some people prefer to do that (usually younger people who are worried about graduating with debt)

Just stating a fact, not saying it's good or bad.

That's a hard problem to get around. More scholarships are probably the answer there. If you can replace the income potential of the non-traditionals they could do school full time and still make their budget. However, the "downside" there is you attract more 40 year olds to campus than 18 year olds, which can then push the school back towards a commuter school (because these students typically don't live on campus or engage in any student life activities).

on the other hand if you give the young kids scholarships, they may graduate on time or they may lack the maturity and fail a ton of classes because who cares, they're not paying for it? You can really tell the people who are paying out of pocket from the people on full rides in terms of the effort; some people realize that they don't want to pay $500+ to take a class again and work harder to pass the first time.



Beyond that:

We need more general classroom space.

once we have more space, we need more professors to teach in that space.

And we need to offer classes every semester instead of once a year, especially the required ones. There are sometimes artificial bottlenecks on classes that keep people around longer than they should (or drive them away). For instance, the UP ran an article about their required 4000 level Multimedia Journalism class offered once a year and only held like 35 people, despite the professor saying he'd be happy to have much more. I'm not sure HOW often this happens per se but as you guys probably know, the higher you go in your major, the less often certain classes are offered. For my major (neuroscience) there'd be classes like Fundamentals of Neurobiology and that was only offered in the Spring because in the Fall that professor taught something else.

Or the classes and professors themselves get reputations, so you'd be dwindling down and need to take say 4 classes to graduate… but of the four available that semester, 2 were "really hard" with "that one guy that's an @$$hole. Wait til Spring for this other class, it's better." It seems petty but people like to protect their GPAs as much as they like to avoid debts.
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100% agreed owl2doc, sounds about the same as when I went FAU in the late '70's.

If we want to become a more "traditional" school we have to do things in a more "traditional" way, not by trying to be a night school for adults or retirees. We will get there someday but when you consider that over 50% of our 30K enrollment are part-timers…
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