2014 US News & World Report Combined Rankings

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Someone did this a few years back, so I figured I'd go ahead and go through and combine the US News & World Report for the top 50 Universities and LAC's by their ranking score:</p>

<p>1 - Williams College
1 - Princeton University
3 - Harvard University
4 - Yale University
5 - Amherst College
6 - Columbia University
7 - Swarthmore College
7 - Stanford University
7 - University of Chicago
10 - Duke University
10 - Bowdoin College
10 - Middlebury College
10 - Pomona College
10 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
10 - University of Pennsylvania
16 - Carleton College
17 - California Institute of Technology
17 - Wellesley College
17 - Dartmouth College
20 - John Hopkins University
20 - Claremont McKenna College
20 - Davidson College
20 - Northwestern University
20 - Haverford College
25 - United States Naval Academy
26 - Brown University
26 - Washington University in St. Louis
26 - Vassar College
29 - Hamilton College
29 - Washing and Lee
29 - Cornell University
32 - Harvey Mudd College
32 - Vanderbilt University
32 - Grinnell College
32 - Wesleyan University
32 - United States Military Academy
37 - Colgate University
37 - Rice University
37 - University of Notre Dame
37 - Smith College
41 - Bates College
41 - Colby College
43 - Macalester College
43 - College of the Holy Cross
43 - Oberlin College
43 - Scripps College
43 - United States Air Force Academy
43 - University of Richmond
49 - Georgetown University
49 - University of California Berkeley
49 - Emory University
49 - Bryn Mawr College</p>

<p>I know this isn't one hundred percent accurate, I'm just using US N&W Report in an attempt to scale things, as the methodology for LAC's and Top Universities is the same. If you see any mistakes I made, please comment and let me know. (Also there are 52 schools listed instead of 50 because of ties.)</p>

2

<p>You can probably improve it by normalizing it with the number of schools in both categories. One way to do it is to do ranking based on percentile. Being 5th out of 10 is very different from being 5th out of 50.</p>

3

<p>What methodology did you use to compile this list? Some of the rankings seem counterintuitive.</p>

<p>For example…seems odd to see Emory so far behind ND.</p>

4

<p>Sam I will definitely look into that to improve this list, I’ll probably comment my new results later this week.</p>

<p>Bigdaddy88 -
I agree that it is weird. Essentially what I did was go to the ranking score on USN.</p>

<p>For example, for Notre Dame the score was 83, but Emory at number 20, was lower at 79. As you can see, there are no other top universities in between Notre Dame and Emory except for Georgetown (also a 79.) Liberal Arts Colleges completely filled this very large gap with scores from 80-82.</p>

5

<p>Very nice to see the list like this. However, I still think one needs to compare apples to apples. LAC’s are so different from large, research universities.</p>

6

<p>Doesn’t US News give a 100 to the top school in each category? So the top LAC might have only half the quality of the best uni, but both would get a 100?</p>

<p>I think you are comparing apples and oranges.</p>

7

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<p>LACs can also be very different from each other (e.g. USNA vs. Oberlin), as can small research universities (e.g. Caltech vs. Dartmouth). Even similarly ranked larger research universities may have significant academic differences in terms of strength of various departments and the like.</p>

8

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<p>More like comparing oranges and … grapefruits. </p>

<p>The methodology and the criteria are the same, ranging from selectivity to resources, spending per capita, or class sizes. All such criteria are comparable. </p>

<p>As far as quality of education --which is NOT really what USNews measures-- the differences are all in the eye of the beholder. Some might actually think that quality might be directly proportional to the absence of the untrained and unqualified academic slaves lovingly called TAs or GSIs. </p>

<p>To each his own!</p>

9

<p>I do not think comparing LACs to Research Universities is like comparing apples and oranges, or oranges and grapefruit for that matter. A fruit is a fruit after all. There are several differences between LACs and research universities that make any comparison between them very difficult. For one, LACs present their students with limited academic offerings, both in terms of breadth and depth. In the fall of 2013, Amherst offered 10 Mathematics courses, compared to 50+ Mathematics courses offered at schools like Cal, Cornell, Michigan and MIT. Many students prefer having the option of choosing from a large number of courses, or perhaps even of taking advanced (graduate level) courses in their field, even if it means (oh the horror) having to endure the trials of having a 4th year PhD student teach them elementary Calculus or Intro to the French Alphabet. At schools like Cal, Cornell, Michigan and MIT, undergrads also have the option of delving deeply in Business and Engineering studies, which may not appeal to all, but certainly does to some. For those students, most LACs simply won’t do. </p>

<p>To many, LACs and research universities stand worlds apart.</p>

10

<p>Alexandre, that is one way to look at it, but there are plenty of other viewpoints.</p>

<p>The horror is not of having to endure the trials of having a 4th year PhD student teach them elementary Calculus or Intro to the French Alphabet, but to have an untrained fresh of the boat (make that 747 now) foreign student engaging in a teaching activity for which he has neither training nor aptitude. And add no desire to the list. The horror can also be to have a 4th Year PhD who decides to gives the curriculum a total different twist than advertised, depart drastically from the lectures given by the tenured superstar, and grade accordingly to his or her deep set of biases or gender issues. Hearsay? Perhaps, but I think that I can be a pretty good judge of the instruction received by my sister at one of the very top schools discussed here. While she loved most of her TAs, she will gladly admit that some presented the biases I suggested above. Simply stated, it happens and it should not. When choosing a class, one can look up the teacher and identify the match. For TAs, that might not be possible if no other sections are open. </p>

<p>Secondly, the breadth and depth of a school is vastly overrated. Both systems attempt to graduate their students in four years. LACs pretty much have to offer a full curriculum and fully expect the students to graduate in those four years. Large schools, on the other hand, adopt a more leisurely plan and do NOT offer the classes every year, let alone every year. Getting in a specific class or attending the class of one of those academic superstars might simply be a matter of luck. This said, I accept your point on its theoretical value. I dispute it on the practical side. Again, I can use my own experience at both types of schools, as well as my sister’s. </p>

<p>In the end, both systems have positives and negatives, and the differences are mostly personal in nature. After all, some do love the possibility of seating in a huge hall and passively follow a lecture and later working in a section group. The same people might hate the forced participation in most Socratic type of instructions. Or hate the close and consistent interaction with the professors who might have written the book on the subject. </p>

<p>No system is perfect! And, not all LACs are the same. One would not compare Harvey Mudd to Amherst, but would compare to its closest peer, which is none other than Caltech. No suprise that Amherst is not a rival of MIT or Caltech, but targets perhaps Yale or Brown. In the same vein, one would not compare CMC to many other LACs.</p>

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<p>Fwiw, the comparative exercise was not based on the criteria you presented. It compared the results of USNews’ identical criteria. For example, one CAN compare selectivity among both type of schools.</p>

11

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<p>Looking at schedules indicates that smaller schools are more likely to have core courses for one’s major offered at less frequent intervals. At such a school, one may have to take the course in the semester offered, with the instructor who happens to be teaching it, rather than waiting for another semester, because the next chance to take the course may be two years from now.</p>

<p>Larger schools may have courses offered at less frequent intervals, but they are more likely to be more esoteric electives rather than core courses for one’s major, which are more likely to be offered every semester, or at least once every year, rather than once every two years.</p>

12

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<p>That’s exactly how they do it: Princeton gets a score of 100 for being the top “national university” and Williams gets a score of 100 for being the top “national liberal arts college,” but that doesn’t mean Williams would be judged to be as good as Princeton if they were both in the same category, and it certainly doesn’t mean Williams is better than the #2 national university, Harvard.</p>

<p>If you compare Harvard and Williams category by category in all the categories that count toward the US News ranking, Harvard bests Williams in most of them, often quite handily:</p>

<p>Peer Assessment score (15% of total tanking): HARVARD 4.9, Williams 4.7
GC survey score (7.5%): HARVARD 4.9, Williams 4.6
Acceptance rate (1.25%): HARVARD 6.1%, Williams 17.0%
% of freshmen in top 10% of HS class (3.125%): HARVARD 95%, Williams 92%
Middle 50% SAT CR+M (8.25%): HARVARD 1410-1590, Williams 1330-1560
% of faculty who are full-time (1%): HARVARD 93.8%, Williams 93.1%
Student-faculty ratio (1%): Harvard 7:1, Williams 7:1
Class size 1-19 students (6%): HARVARD 81.2%, Williams 75.7%
Class size 50+ students (2%): Harvard 7%, WILLIAMS 3%
Graduation rate (18%): HARVARD 97%, Williams 96%
Freshman retention rate (4.5%): HARVARD 98%, Williams 97%
Alumni giving (5%): Harvard 36%, WILLIAMS 58%
Graduation rate performance (7.5%): HARVARD +2, Williams 0</p>

<p>So that’s Harvard leading in categories accounting for about 72% of the overall ranking, Williams leading in categories accounting for 7%, and a push in one category worth 1%.</p>

<p>Some categories are not transparent in US News. These include faculty compensation (7% of total ranking), percent of faculty with terminal degree in their field (3%), and financial resources which is basically a measure of how much the school spends per student (10%), for which US News provides no data. But we have other sources of data for part of this. According to the American Association of University Professors, the average full professor at Harvard makes $203,000 per year; at Williams, $137,200. The gap is narrower at more junior (associate professor, assistant professor) levels, and to some extent total faculty compensation and faculty compensation per student depend on the mix of full, associate, and assistant professors at any given school, but there’s little doubt that Harvard wins that category as well. That means Harvard leads Williams in categories representing 79% of the total US News ranking, while Williams leads Harvard with respect to 7% of the total ranking, 1% equal, and the remaining 13% undetermined from publicly accessible data.</p>

<p>Bottom line, there’s no way Williams would rank ahead of Harvard in a combined US News ranking. To be sure, Williams is a great school, and it’s clearly the top LAC by US News metrics. But by those same metrics, it’s not nearly at Harvard’s level. It might rank among the top 10 or 15 in a combined US News ranking; I’ll leave it to others to make those computations. But you can’t just line up LACs with national universities by their raw US News scores, because those scores are relative to very different leaders in very different categories.</p>

<p>Final caveat: this is not intended as an endorsement of the US News rankings. It might well be the case that Williams provides a superior undergraduate experience to Harvard for many people. But if so, that’s the result of factors that are just not captured in the US News rankings.</p>

13

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<p>That could be a rankings reward for wealthy schools that spend a lot, even if such spending is not all that efficient in terms of improvement in educational quality (however that is measured) per dollar spent.</p>

14

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<p>Absolutely right. This is a point I’ve been making on CC for some time. It rewards the producers with the highest cost per unit of production. In the education context, that inherently favors smaller schools because their fixed costs are spread over a small student base. Bigger schools which can achieve economies of scale by more efficient use of classroom and lab facilities, more users of libraries per dollar spent on acquisitions and staffing, and bargaining leverage to negotiate better health insurance rates are punished for those economies. Schools that find ways to reduce costs by being more energy-efficient are punished. Schools that jack up spending (and ultimately tuition) on luxury services to students are rewarded. It’s just an absolutely asinine measure of educational quality.</p>

15

<p>I have to agree with a lot of the above posts. It’s realistically inaccurate to compare LAC’s and Universities this way, but I think this gives some publicity for the LAC’s which sometimes go unnoticed because they aren’t compared to the brand names of the Ivies.</p>