By Ryan Leon, Oct. 15, 2024
Cal Poly Pomona has been ranked the No. 2 top public school in the West by U.S. News for the third straight year.
With a fall enrollment of 25,255 undergraduate students and 1,941 graduate students for the 2024-2025 academic year, according to the 2024 fall term enrollment summary, CPP has been a top destination for incoming freshmen and transfer students.
While a university’s enrollment numbers are important, U.S. News ranked colleges based on 17 factors, including borrower debt, peer assessment, faculty salaries and student-faculty ratio, to name a few.
“Each publication is different,” said Brandon Tuck, interim presidential associate for community partnerships and expanding access. “They all have different rubrics they use for rankings. U.S. News, for instance, can look at graduation rates and employment statistics. Some of them can look at the salaries of recent grads… it just depends on the publication.”
Tuck explained the Strategic Communications Department at CPP keeps an eye on rankings and presents CPP statistics to several publications. Tuck also mentioned as CPP continues to improve, other universities are improving as well, so the increasing competition among universities tips the scale on where students end up.
U.S. News released a methodology report to further explain how they rank colleges. Indicator weights — percentages assigned to each ranking factor — based on national universities are displayed in comparison with all other ranking categories. The methodology report provides thorough definitions of ranking criteria.
For example, student-faculty ratio is defined as “the ratio of full-time-equivalent students to full-time-equivalent faculty members during fall 2023, aligned with 2023-2024 CDS instructions for reporting faculty. A lower student-faculty ratio (fewer students per each faculty member) scores better than a higher ratio in the ranking.”
According to the U.S. News report, only around a quarter of all CPP classes have less than 20 students, while only 15% of classes have more than 50 students.
Despite being ranked No. 2 public university in the West, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs S. Terri Gomez believes CPP can still improve.
“I think there are areas where we can do better, and one of those areas is more intentionality with career engagement,” said Gomez. “Some colleges do that really well in terms of internships and engagement with students the minute they walk in the door so that they know there are other options in terms of careers and also graduate school, so I think we can do a better job of that.”
On top of enhancing career engagement to improve in rankings, Gomez brought up a new program CPP has started working on called Future Career Paths. The idea behind this new initiative is that it won’t matter whether a student comes in majoring in business or anything in the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences.
It assists them with finding and being ready for a potential career they can stick to, rather than bouncing from job to job. This includes preparing students with essential skills like critical thinking, communication ability, group work, problem solving and others.
CPP’s consistent No. 2 ranking among the public schools in the West raises questions as to why the university isn’t No. 1, the position held by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
According to Tuck, it’s because senior students in different majors who have experience working with underclassmen are graduating. They assist younger students with lab work and different internships. Once they’ve accomplished what they set out to do at CPP and begin their careers, that loss of experience factors into the rankings. As a result, an awkward trajectory of students can be seen, and that factors into the rankings as well.
Gomez believes CPP’s No. 2 public schools rank in the West also has something to do with the campus population, but in a different way.
“We have a tremendous impact in terms of the success of our students,” Gomez said. “When you look at where we start off when you’re a predominately first-gen, diverse campus, Hispanic-serving institution, minority-serving institution, we know that those rankings have an extra value because of who we serve and how hard they have to work to get to that point.”
Students do in fact play vital roles when it comes to ranking criteria, according to U.S. News’ reports. Campus diversity and first-generation graduation rates are two more ranking factors U.S. News employed in their report.
Since CPP’s students are a big factor when it comes to its No. 2 public university in the West ranking, their thoughts on the subject are significant.
“It makes me feel proud,” said aerospace engineering student Angel Reyna. “The rankings don’t necessarily matter because it depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want hands on? Do you want to do more research? Me personally, I want hands-on work. I want to build satellites, so to me personally, rankings don’t matter.”
Feature image courtesy of Darren Loo