Pomona College continues to get national recognition as they finished #7 in Forbes 2016 ranking. However, Forbes had Pomona having 12% acceptance rate? I though PMC was around 9%??
Surprised who is missing? Duke and Cornell. Kinda sorta loses a little credibility, don’t you think? And, lo, just a few years ago, the US Military Academy was number 1. The avowedly PC colleges (Yale, Brown, Swarthmore, Wesleyan) have advanced in the ratings. Forbes had to throw a bone Southward to someone, and chose . . . . “Davidson”? Berkeley not on the list? “Davidson,” really? Seriously? If you are Pomona, you actually prefer not to draw attention to this list. Harvard, Princeton, etc. will always make any lists like these, so they are stuck. If you stick Bowdoin on a list like this, why not roll the dice and select its indistinguishable cousins Middelbury and Colby?
So yeh, as you know, Pomona reports 9 point something admission rate, under 10% and last year, it was also less tan 12% C’mon Forbes, report accurate data, please!
Forbes is still figuring out their ranking methodology it seems. Too many rank changes year after year. Too inconsistent to be a useful guide.
I’d stick to US News - even if they have some methodology errors (2 examples: Reed’s ranking is too low simply because Reed wont send them data and in fact does not want to be ranked, Barnard’s ranking is too low because they give it no credit for shared access to Columbia’s resources).
Also honestly, I have no clue how much the difference is between the top tier colleges. For a liberal arts student Pomona is comparable to a Princeton. But for an engineering student as I was in the late 80s, some of these ranks are beyond meaningless. Except for Cornell, Penn and Columbia - which are decent all the ivy engineering programs are substandard compared to the offerings at an MIT/Caltech/Berkeley.
We put too much weightage on overall rankings for whatever reason - maybe a subject/field based ranking will actually mean something beyond just prestige?
I’d switch to Barron’s, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, Peterson’s, Colleges That Change Lives, and the Princeton Review. They do a great job of describing colleges without ranking them.
US news 2017 rankings came out today. Good news is Pomona is stll in the top 10 national liberal arts rankings for many years now , bad news is they moved from 4th to 7th place. I try not to put too much stock in the rankings though.
Yep…we won’t be at the very top on US News rankings until we’re acknowledged equivalently to Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore by the peer institution survey. This year, we did poorly on counselor rankings as well (#15 out of all LACs). While Forbes ranking has questionable aspects to it as well (namely RateMyProfessors), I find the east coast bias of the survey respondents more aggravating.