<p>This is a technical question, not a value judgment. </p>
<p>What accounts for Wellesley's significant drop in the latest ranking? Is it because Wellesley lost points in a particular metric? Is it because USNWR re-jiggered the weights used in the ranking? Is this a general trend against women's colleges? Someone with more data or history may have the answers.</p>
<p>(Smith and Barnard also dropped by quite a bit. Bryn Mawr, however, moved up a little. Vassar fell, though it is not a girls' school any more.)</p>
<p>I guess I don’t think of a drop from "tied-for-4th to “tied-for-6th” as very significant–but I can’t speak to the question of what caused the drop. Wellesley remains the top all-women’s college in the country and one of the top LACs–I don’t think there is anything to worry about!</p>
<p>Looking at the data available for free online, I would bet that Wellesley’s “high” acceptance rate compared to the top 5 LACs hurts our ranking. We all know that the “high” acceptance rate is not really very indicative of Wellesley’s selectivity, but I’m sure it hurts us compared to the top 5 colleges. Our freshmen retention rate is also lower than the rest of the top 5, although it’s hard to believe that 95% versus 97% or 98% really says a whole lot about a school’s quality. Same thing with the graduation rate. But a ranking that said that these 10 or 20 schools are basically all as good as each other would not sell very well, you know? So you have to rank the schools somehow. That’s my theory, anyway.</p>
<p>A big reason for the drop is Wellesley’s alumnae giving participation rate. </p>
<p>This is how it’s calculated according to U.S. News:
“Alumni giving rate (5 percent of ranking): This reflects the average percentage of living alumni with bachelor’s degrees who gave to their school during 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, which is an indirect measure of student satisfaction.” </p>
<p>Overall, Wellesley’s participation rate has declined 15% since 2004 (there was a slight uptick last year). Their rate is in the mid-40s. Most of the top liberal arts schools have rates well above 50%. Middlebury had a major participation campaign a couple years ago and their rate increased to about 60%. That was the year Middlebury tied with Wellesley for the first time. </p>
<p>The participation rate, in the eyes of U.S. News, is a way to evaluate how much alums like the school and want to give back. Overall, women’s colleges have lower giving rates than co-ed schools. This can partly be explained by the fact that at co-ed schools students tend to marry one another. So if you think about it, in those cases, a school will get two donations instead of one. Plus if an individual met their spouse at college, the person is likely to be loyal to the school and have had a good experience.</p>
<p>Alumni (or alumnae in Wellesley’s case) giving is an interesting factor to consider. In terms of U.S. News rankings, it’s more important to give to the school every year than to give large gifts every once in a while. Participation>amount.</p>
<p>You bring up a good point about alumnae giving, and I agree with you that intermarriage in coed schools may only be a partial explanation. I have heard from an Ivy fund-raiser that it is more difficult to raise money from their female than male alums, so assuming this anecdotal observation is valid, there must be other reasons why female alums don’t give as much, even in a coed setting. I doubt if it is all income or wealth disparity, either; I am sure 60% of Wellesley’s alums can afford $100 a year from their spending budgets. Any ideas?</p>
<p>There is another indirect measure of alumnae loyalty, and that is: how many daughters of Wellesley alums apply to Wellesley, and enroll if accepted? I don’t know if such statistic is available, but we may get a hint of it from the legacy percentage at Wellesley. Any idea what it is, and how it compares with Wellesley’s peers’?</p>
<p>Alum giving rate is only weakly correlated with endowment growth. Aside from the issue of investment returns, it is further the case that most of the growth comes from few large donors. The few dollars that make up the high giving rate actually barely breaks even (an exaggeration, but not by a lot). So the bottom line is: how is Wellesley’s endowment doing? From that angle, Wellesley does very well. Wellesley and Smith are in the same league as Amherst and Swarthmore, where I think they belong, rather than with Middlebury, Bowdoin and Carleton, where the latest USNWR placed them. In the long run, endowment size is probably the best single determinant of a college’s competitive standing; it gives the college the oxygen it needs to attract top talent and build leading edge programs. It is a pity USNWR does not give more and direct weight to endowment.</p>
<p>I do not get the USNWR; where does Wellesley come out when ranked by peer assessment?</p>
<p>“Wellesley does very well. Wellesley and Smith are in the same league as Amherst and Swarthmore, where I think they belong, rather than with Middlebury, Bowdoin and Carleton, where the latest USNWR placed them. In the long run, endowment size is probably the best.”</p>
<p>Don’t you think this is splitting hairs among 7 of the finest LACs in the country? I, too, cannot view 4 to 6 as a “significant drop” or frankly, even a drop at all.</p>