at 193 worldwide, we're probably the highest without graduate students.

Heh, yeah. That's consistent.

How many years removed are you from graduation? That's what I thought. You have no clue what's going on.

Donate or shut up.

Here is a better measure of success for an undergraduate teaching institution:

http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=2074

The point, in case you missed it (and you clearly did), I believe is that Obama has been in office for less than 6 months and you are saying the economy is all his now. Bush was in office for a bit over 8 months when 9/11 occurred. Shouldn't that be all his too?

Alternatively, you could take the more honest position that responsibility cannot be allocated solely to one individual or party, but you won't.

FYI, I have no interest in discussing this with Cali. If AA chooses to weigh in again, I'll respond to him in turn.

I follow much more closely than you would care to imagine, listen carefully to the public pronouncements from administration, speak to my several professor frineds and investigate the status of the several schools which interest me.

Ever since Bateman and Samuelson, BYU has suffered academically.

Wow, that's an impressive survey.

BYU has many excellent students. However, get back to me when Harvard's Economic Chair got her degree at BYU, the Economics Chair at London School of Economics is from BYU and the acting partners at the Wall Street institutions hail from BYU.

Our institution doesn't emphasize publishing enough, doesn't emphasize research enough and doesn't promote itself it enough. There should be a drive to move the school up in the rankings or move out. We need devoted Phd programs in all major disciplines and become a full spectrum university to take advantage of the general hard working students found in the midst.

Obama has been in office for less than 6 months and you are saying the economy is all his now. Bush was in office for a bit over 8 months when 9/11 occurred. Shouldn't that be all his too? :)

Now Tex, I'm generally on your side of these debates. I'd say I'm generally on your side in THIS debate. But it won't do to say that 9/11 was a problem Bush inherited from Clinton at the same time as arguing that Obama now bears all of the blame for the economy.

I don't put all of the blame on Bush for 9/11, and I don't think Obama should shoulder all of the blame for the lousy economy. In fact, my biggest criticism of Obama is that he thinks he can he can cure it. He'll spend trillions of dollars trying to right a ship that will right itself in due time if he'd just leave it alone. Watching him exert so much blunt force on so intricate a thing as the national economy is like watching an elephant try a flamenco dance. And he's bet trillions of dollars that it will work.

We're still pumping out students to the best law schools, right? Georgetown #14, NYU at #5?

Psst. Hello? Kim Clark, HBS Dean? The best economists teach at Business Schools cuz they pay more. Clark is an economist. Bateman himself was at the upper echelons of M&M Mars before BYU pulled him for the business school. Also an economist, MIT bred.

We send someone to the top program, MIT or Chicago every year, which should be our primary aim as a teaching school.

Archaea's next predictable response..."Talk to me when BYU becomes Ivy League."

Tired of losing?

Sorry to let you down. Chicago at #6. They offered me off of their wait list last month.

But yeah, BYU does very well at shipping their students off to other prestigious universities. We're a good feeder school. I think the regret is that we are not ourselves a prestigious university. We're shipping out great talent to other places instead of bringing in great talent from other places.

That's probably not necessary.

Necessary? Clearly not. But he is. ;)

Chose Chicago for its ideological balance, yeah?

My home teacher is a recent Chicago law grad and a patent lawye. He did computer science as an undergrad at the Y.

The best part of Chicago law is that they mix economic analysis with EVERY COURSE. That is where the law and economics field was founded.

Ideology wasn't really much of a deciding factor, to be honest. Chicago reportedly leans right and NYU left, but both schools insisted that they go to what lengths they can to ensure a balanced perspective, and I have no reason not to believe that they're telling the truth.

I did like the fact that Chicago has a smaller class size; 200 students per class, compared to NYU's 450. Mostly, I liked the feel of the school. I walked around the campus of the university and thought to myself, "So THIS is what a real university looks like." Ivy covered walls, vaunted halls and gothic architecture-- it just feels like you're going to a world-class institution. The guys at NYU would point out that NYU is as good as any school out there, and so I might as well go live in New York City. They're probably right. But while NYU is as good as anybody else, Chicago is like nobody else.

Plus, Notre Dame is less than an hour away by train. I've got a buddy who says he'll get me a ticket.

You don't get it. BYU has some great students but we don't have many great programs.

So BYU doesn't have a name in much of anything and with its student body and potential for endowment it should. We need more Ira Fultons before that will happen.

Bateman did more to stifle true economic freedom than anybody since Ernie Wilkinson with his famous student spy network.

Samuelson hasn't done anything to foster it either.

BYU is failing in becoming a great university which is its rightful place in society. And it's due to the parochial and provincial attitude of its administrators.

You may be pleased as BYU lauds itself, but I am not. What's wrong with alumnae wanting BYU to be perceived on par with the Ivy League. It's not likely to happen in my lifetime or in yours, but what's wrong with that as a goal? I get the idea Samuelson's goal is to make it on par with UVSC.

If you don't need to know BYU has great students, don't ask me for them.

true economic freedom? wtf?

You liberal arts softies need to look at the data. Our rankings have been on an upward climb since Bateman took over. It's dropped in the last couple of years, but rankings are a noisy time series.

Becoming ivy league is a waste of resources. That's not what we're designed to do. You can use a spoon to dig a tunnel from England to France if you want. We will always be known as a brand name feeder to the best grad programs.

There hasn't been censorship, except in the religion department, or maybe in some humanities department college raters don't care about. But it's irrelevant anyway; there are so many obstacles to uncovering truth in the humanities, academic freedom isn't' gonna make a difference.

You the take the lid off censorship in order to get better professors, and you'll lose your identity like every other religious university in this country has.

It's risen but it's fallen recently. Nice spin, Mr. Mullah.

If we're not a top ten in all departments we choose to field, what are we doing having such a department?

Let me explain noisy time series to you. This is a noisy time series:

1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,9,9,10,11,12,13,1 4,15.

Do you get it now? Moves up and down but the long-term trend is up?

Sorry, Mullahs have to be Republican.

I understand "noise" Mr. Arrogant asshole, but I don't think it's noise, I think it's a reversal trend due to poor policies being felt by having GAs, not administrators as heads of the university.

Chino is an idiot. Debating him is a fool's errand. Chino, what do you do at John's Hopkins? Clean toilets? Are you some kind of a Ginea Pig?

He is not an idiot but mullah who reconciled according to his own preconceptions. In fact, it is quite difficult and intellectually challenging to support the party line no matter what.

You "think." I've got plenty of evidence this is not so.

1. Bateman is an administrator, he's been a Fortune 500 administrator all his life.
2. He raised a ton of money, which is what most University presidents are hired to do these days. . And that's huge component of college ratings. Dang lucky we have an economist at the helm.
3. He got people to graduate earlier, kicking up our artificially low deflated retention rate, another huge component of rankings.
4. Our ratings went up during Bateman's tenure, because, well, they went up, duh.

Being an administrator of business is not the same as being an administration in eduction, in fact they are quite different. Plus, it was the Mullah attitude he employed against faculty that bothered me mostly.

We could ask many questions to this but we don't know the factors. Did they go up because of matters initiated by the previous administration?

Notice how the unemployment data points are red. That is because they are Bush's fault.

The really fun part of this exercise is supporters of Obama will sluff off any failure as Bush's fault. When Bush did that for Clinton, it was considered ludicrous, but now that Obama is in power, Bush is the Boogeyman.

Obama is a teflon man as the media is giving him a free pass.

The free pass thing is ludicrous. For the most part, any benefit he gets is based on the fact that we realize we couldn't expect instant results to the tough situation he inherited. Yes, he did inherit, whether you want to attribute that to Bush or Bush and Clinton and on back. That's just the way it goes. All new presidents have to balance being responsible for their own adminstaration with the fact that they are still affected by the choices of the past. Our patience recedes with time, of course, because the effect of the past becomes less in that balance.

Oh, and that chart--what it doesn't say (indeed, what it cannot say) is what the effect would have been without any measures Obama has taken. The projections were wrong? Big deal. Maybe things are better than they would have been. Maybe not. We don't know, which is why that chart is so meaningless.

Nonsense. Blaming Bush is politically silly at this point. People are slowing staring to realize this, and it's reflected in the polls. What, has a mannequin been in the Oval Office for the last 9 months? Did a robot sign that massive "stimulus" bill?

That chart is meaningful precisely because it demonstrates how woefully this administration underestimated the recession, and how Candyland their solution has been. Presidents don't get the benefit of some mythical well-we-don't-really-know standard. We can only judge them based on what they say, and what they do. By that measure, Obama's policies have been a failure: they failed to produce anything close to what was promised.

The fact that the administration has resorted to pointing to a mythical "jobs saved" figure, which has since proven to be a pretty questionable number, demonstrates this all the more.

YOu do realize (ha, as if!), of course, that you just pretty much repeated what I said in a mean-spirited way, and from a right-wing biased way. I said, that politicians inherit, and the more time goes on, the less thy can point blame on the inheritance, which it why your precious polls would indicate a growing realization of that fact.

If Bush were in a similar situation, he wouldn't be treated so kindly. Bush never received the favorbable treatment Obama receives. The press would do the country a favor by taking the gloves off and begin pummeling him like they did Bush.

Virtually every economist agrees that the stimulus package helped accelerate the recovery much quicker than it otherwise would have, and slowed job loss significantly. In fact, the portion of the stimulus that economists largely agreed to have been pointless was the tax cut, which the Dems opposed and Republicans demanded. Ironic. Particularly now that Republicans are screaming that the stimulus wasn't efficient enough.

You are like a fan going into the lockerroom at halftime and telling the players what a crappy plan they have, what a terrible leader they have, and how they can't win the game no matter what they do, and it won't inspire anyone.

It certainly doesn't win the game.

Virtually every economist alive is a Democrat, so bias is showing. BTW, I love this form of logical fallacy but keep it up, dude.

There is no recovery. I love how people in the media are proclaiming a recovery that people on the streets are not experincing. Yes you may show so fancied up data showing this and that, but the man on the street hasn't experienced a rehire or an increased wage.

There is no recovery. Mark my words, come April when we're faced with soaring interest rates because nobody will buy our T bills. The pain and agony has just begun. The spending spree will just cause us to tailspin further down.

Logical fallacy? And "virtually every economist alive is a Democrat?" This is so silly I don't even know where to begin. Have you ever heard of the Chicago school?

Except that you prefaced your comments with "the free pass thing is ludicrous." While we agree that a president's early legacy is a mix of his own policies with those of his predecessor's, I suspect that you are willing to give Obama a great deal more rope than he deserves. As are the media, of course.

An appeal to the mythical majority.

I would be thrilled to see the economy recover in full. I benefit in every way possible by a thriving economy. Unfortunately I think Obama has demonstrated how economically ham-handed he is, and he's only making things worse, particularly in the long run.

I wonder if the angry Lefties would consider this "lying":

Via Drudge.