People can put their faith in USNWR to pick the ‘best’ schools if they want to, but I certainly don’t. USNWR is just taking numbers and plugging them into a formula they’ve created. Who cares?
I was recently reading another ranking by USNWR - cruise ships. Does it really mean NCL is better than Carnival or MSC is so inferior you’ll have a terrible time? No. It is just ranking factors, a few opinions, some official reports (like ontime rankings, criminal reports, accidents). If you read the details it might tell YOU that YOU’d like NCL better for the cost or the meals or the excursions, but not which is best, or which is No 3 or No 6. The rankings are just a game.
Colorado College was tired of the game. It is never going to overtake Harvard or Stanford (or even #1 LAC) as #1 but it is still judged against the same factors that were designed to make Harvard and Stanford the top.
This inevitably kicks up a lot of dust around subject matter and what belongs or doesn’t belong in the liberal arts and science “pantheon” or “canon” or whatever you want to call it. Wesleyan and Colgate, despite the fact that they call themselves by the name, “University”, don’t teach a lot of business and accounting. According to its common data set, URichmond awards upwards of 37% of its degrees in business and accounting and another 9% in “Homeland Security, law enforement, firefighting”. Judge for yourself whether that is a typical LAC.
I don’t know why Colgate decided to call itself a university. It has a graduate-level education program with just a handful of students. Wesleyan has a few more (maybe 10% of their students are master’s students, although I’m not going to go verify that now).
I laughed out loud when I read this, because that is exactly what Colorado College does, or at least did, according to a NY Times article about six years ago.
There were hundreds of colleges analyzed in that report, but Colorado College stood out to the point that I still remember it years later. First, it accepted a very large percentage of students from the top 1%. I believe a quarter of their class was from the top 1%. In contrast, only about 5% of their class was from the bottom 40%, roughly the cutoff for Pell eligibility.
The thing that was jarring about Colorado College were the poor financial outcomes for its students, particularly surprising given the high incomes coming in. The median income at age 34 for its graduates was $44k, lower than at colleges like Tulsa, or University of the South. It was income mobility, but in the wrong direction.
I know more than a handful of kids who went to CC over the year. All pretty wealthy (at least would have been full pay at any college). Maybe some hockey players weren’t wealthy.
A few years ago CC started offering tuition to instate students at the same rate as a state school (so about $12k) to attract more instate students because it was really just too expensive for an average family.
I don’t know if that program has worked to attract more instate students, and more from a middle class family.
Maybe it’s because they come from wealthy families and don’t need a high income? Decades ago my friends with trust funds all went into social work and teaching. I was jealous they could have a job with purpose and still live comfortable.
According to Colgate archivist Howard Williams in his History of Colgate University 1819–1969 , “the story of Colgate’s early years is often confusing because of the variety of names used in referring to it.” Colgate University - Wikipedia
When my daughter went to the admitted student visit, it was a nice city, nice campus - but she too picked up on the fact that every student they encountered seemed to be a business. Eventually we went past a quaint little building that housed the language (or may be foreign languages) department. At least to a touring student, it almost seemed like an afterthought.
Maybe there is a limit for the number of grad programs a school can have (and grad students, judged by % of total students on campus…) and still be called a LAC…?
I could forgive the U of Richmond for awarding a lot of pre-professional BS/BA degrees, because the students choose their majors. But do they also have a bunch of grad programs and grad students? I know that Google is my friend – just trying to frame the question and help to define LAC expectations/limitations.
Wesleyan offers a PhD in in biology, chemistry, ethnomusicology, mathematics, molecular biology and biochemistry, and physics. I’m curious about why teaching accounting is what really makes a university a university.
I think insofar as the Carnegie Foundation classifications are concerned, URichmond is a LAC and, yes, it is based pretty much on the proportion of grad to undergrad students. The rap against it being one in spirit has to do with perceptions about what is or isn’t a liberal art or science subject:
