It’s interesting to see where we really shine. The law school worked really hard to improve its ranking, and they succeeded, number 37. President Randall has challenged a number of schools to achieve top 10 status, among public universities, in the next 10 years. Law is one of the on a he challenged. We’ll see how they do.
That’s my own interest, but there are plenty of other surprising and impressive achievements here. Physical therapy ranks number 13. I knew we were good, but I didn’t know we were that good.
My interest is in the Engineering school. I think they have been about the same level since I was there 20+ years ago. I looked at the top 10 schools and chose 3 to apply for graduate school. With a lot of innovation, I would think many would be higher (esp. Biomedical and Materials + Computer/EE). Utah should be the premier STEM school not only in Utah, but in the intermountain region.
Also surprised how low the medical school is.
I think there’s a lot of opportunity to move up with smart investments and Taylor is the right one to do it.
Wish I could remember who the Dean of the Business school was when I was there (early to mid '90s, the forever plan). As an undergrad I took as many entrepreneurial classes as I could. I wonder if those helped build today’s ranking? I hope so.
Side note: This was when JIT and Continuous Process Improvement was the big thing in manufacturing thanks to the Japanese companies being so innovative at the time.
Because of what was rapidly becoming the globalization of production and trade, and based on the costs associated with carrying inventory, JIT was an easy sell to Wall Street. The truth is, even in the face of the current disruptions, JIT will play a key role in the promotion and spread of overall wealth to the world long term.
Funny the Japanese get all the credit for TQI/TQM, AKA Gemba Kaizen, but it was actually an import from the Marshall Plan. During the reconstruction of Japan post WWII, America sent W. Edwards Deming to Japan to teach their industrial leadership a new way of managing and improving their production. Deming’s work revolutionized their companies and moved them from “making junk” in the 1950’s to the gold standard by the 1980’s. The Japanese took Deming’s ideas and literally rebranded it as their own. The rebranded process is what we all got to hear about. During their 1989 “bubble economy” crash, their companies abandoned a vast portion of TQI/TQM due to the time lines needed for those portions of operating the process. I’ve always wondered had they simply just rode out the recession if they would’ve seen a faster recovery than the almost 20 years it took them to recover.
At one point the Japanese had an award in Deming’s name, they considered him kind of a national hero. At a previous job they gave us all CQI books, Deming’s books, etc. Good stuff.
I always found amusement in the fact Deming was from… Wyoming.
I had forgotten that it was Deming who introduced these concepts to the Japanese. I do remember it came from the US and helped revamp Japanese industry after WWII. They had nothing to lose by doing all of the CPI, TQM, JIT and whatnot. It served them well. You question about the Japanese riding that recession is a good one. With all of the integration (information) we have today, perhaps it’s time for them to revisit the ideas of TQM and CPI. I geek out on the concepts of CPI, TQM, JIT, etc. In practice it takes a lot of diligence and caring from the workforce, so it comes and goes in effectiveness.
My inner geek jumps at history and historical parallels. History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
And Joseph Juran from whom I got training in the early 1990s. Isikawa make it more statistical, and why the Japanese are noted. They made it a science. Love them all.
The law school is rising in the U.S. News rankings and is now 37th. That means more firms from outside Utah will recruit there. In the PAC-12, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, USC, and ASU are ahead of Utah in that order. Utah is about 10 points ahead of some of its biggest competitors for students – Washington, Arizona, and Colorado. Oregon is in last place as it is in the 60s. Overall, the PAC 12 is quite strong. ASU is 30th and I’m told Utah’s new goal is to pass ASU. The quality of applicants to Utah has grown steadily since joining the PAC-12, and that helps rankings too.
Admission to the law school is becoming more and more competitive. The average LSAT is 163 and average GPA is 3.89. Meaning that most people who graduated over 10 years ago could not get in now.
99.8 % of graduates in 2021 (most recent data available) have full-time employment in law-related positions.
These are significant upward trends. Taylor Randall has asked the school to become a top 10 public law school in 10 years.
I sat in a law school board meeting today that President Randall joined for 30 minutes. The guy is beyond impressive. In his remarks he mentioned that one of the U’s goals is to lift the communities it touches. When asked to elaborate, he shared the U’s plans to build a $700 million hospital in the West Valley. He described it as an example of how the U. can “work with a community in a way that helps them realize their hopes and dreams.” All the University’s colleges have been invited to propose a way they can participate. One obvious opportunity for the law school is to extend their legal clinics to the local residents in the hospital’s neighborhood. Law students (with licensed attorney supervision) will help people get access to care, deal with insurance issues, and also deal with external wellness factors like abusive landlords refusing to deal with mold, and so on.
Having a hospital in the area also creates jobs–not to mention making a fully operational emergency department available.
It all left me feeling really proud of the U. and wanting to help.
That’s a really good move by Pres. Randall. Needing to navigate insurance, 2 different state, and 2 different medical bureaucracies over the last month I could have used some assistance like what Pres Randall suggested. Just the myriad of things that I didn’t know we needed was frustrating, especially when I wasn’t able to find information online, or was so buried as to be nearly useless.
Reach out… help bridge the East-West divide in the valley, help a lot of young people “feel” the U’s presence and provide career path examples in their neighborhood, etc.
Another thing he’s doing is challenging the research community to reach the $1B mark in research funding annually, where we’re currently around $580M.
Taylor Randall is the opposite of a care-taker president.