<p>Not pretty or nice.</p>
<p>If student demonstrations were enough to trigger a permanent decline in college quality, why are Columbia and Berkeley (which had major demonstrations in the 1960s) now in the Shanghai top 10? It’s also a big stretch to equate this Spring’s “student hissy fits” at Brandeis and other schools with French demonstrations in 1968. </p>
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<p>If Haverford’s brand is a laughingstock, why does it have a 23% admit rate along with average SAT scores as high as (or higher than) some of the universities Rich Karlgaard would “buy”? Its endowment per student is higher than MIT’s and more than double Columbia’s (<a href=“http://www.ordoludus.com/quality.php?sort=ES&dir=down#data”>http://www.ordoludus.com/quality.php?sort=ES&dir=down#data</a>). Nearly half of Haverford students receive need-based aid, averaging ~$38K per student. So their average four-year investment would be less than $100,000. According to Payscale data, Haverford’s average mid-career salaries rank 17th among all colleges (higher than many schools he’d “buy” such as Berkeley, Columbia, UCLA, Chicago, Texas, and Michigan).</p>
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<p>No doubt what he would consider “ideological nonsense” also exists in the liberal arts programs at those schools. Do we believe that in 20 years, all college students will be majoring in engineering and “practical sciences”?</p>
<p>Entirely useless, wish I could scrub my brain from reading that drivel. </p>
<p>He mentioned Rutgers (not that I have any wish to defend it), and that is also a larger university with a good engineering department, school of pharmacy and medical school, so why wouldn’t it also be protected?</p>
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<p>Someone didn’t do their homework…</p>
<p>What a dumb article.</p>
<p>And then there is a paragraph at the end:</p>
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<p>@EllieMom
Haha! I didn’t catch that, and it’s pretty hillarious!</p>
<p>The entire article suffers from the point that it isn’t about investment returns, but an ideological analysis of institutions and an ultimate conclusion that STEM/Research universities>everything else.</p>
<p>However, from an investment standpoint, the point is to look at rising stock, and most importantly, not to use the QS ratings, since those rankings are less quantitative and rigorous than that of USNWR (I can’t believe I just defended USNWR). </p>
<p>In fact, USNWR even has like a rising-stars college ranking section, and many of them would be good buys, i.e schools that are growing in renown (Such as how UChicago, WUSTL and CalTech have recently shot up). </p>
<p>Here would be my “buys”:</p>
<ol>
<li>University of Southern California</li>
<li>Northeastern</li>
<li>Drexel</li>
<li>George Mason</li>
<li>NJIT</li>
<li>Maryland-BC</li>
<li>UC Irvine</li>
<li>Case Western Reserve University</li>
<li>UIUC</li>
<li>NYU</li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, he missed the fact that Princeton has no professional schools or medical school (although it does have the Wilson school for graduate programs in public administration…maybe that should count these days).</p>
<p>But his underlying point, clumsily articulated, is that a university is asking someone to make an “investment” when he attends that school. You invest four years of your time, and you invest six figures of your savings (your parents), or possibly the governments money in the form of loans, which you must pay back.</p>
<p>It really falls into the broad question of “is college worth it?”, and for whom, and in what form. I do think that there are more than a few private schools that are priced equal to Harvard et al, which aren’t even close. Some of them have been acknowledging that by offering merit discounts, and in some cases, lowering tuitions.</p>
<p>I believe that some of the traditional northeastern private schools have suffered mightily over the past 10 years as families become more and more willing to send their kids to southern public universities at lower prices than to pay full pay Ivy rates for something that isn’t Yale. </p>
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<p>Their yield rate is 40%, which measures how many people who get in actually decide to go.
That number is skewed by the fact that they admit 40% of the class in ED.
Without the ED students, the yield is around 28%.</p>
<p>Speaking of ROI, I’m sending Karlgaard a bill for $40 because that’s three minutes of my life I can never get back. </p>
<p>Buys would have to be good and upcoming publics. Truman State, University of Alabama, Evergreen State, UMBC, NJIT</p>
<p>SOG, your time is worth more than that.</p>
<p>IF you had read the article, you would have likely noticed the following flaws:</p>
<p>The guy is a shill for for-profit universities–many of which are advertisers on forbes.com or otherwise connected to Forbes (the writer is the publisher, i.e., the “money guy”).</p>
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<p>Then he throws out bombastic statements with no facts behind them, as others have noted:</p>
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<p>Honestly, if “liberal-arts education” were called anything else–anything without the horrible word LIBERAL in it–the right-wing media would not be freaking out so much. (You know, free market and everything…)</p>
<p>There ARE some good points in the editorial–I agree with his assessment that land-grant universities and community colleges have great value–but a lot of it is red meat for a particular readership base.</p>
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<p>Apparently Columbia was considered the universal top college in America prior to their protests, which would make that quite the drop.</p>
<p>Forbes ranked so many liberal arts colleges in their top 20 this year (Swarthmore, Pomona, Amherst, Williams etc), yet goes on to say that the liberal arts education is not worthwhile. Hypocrisy? </p>
<p>Buy: Private schools with big endowments… they aren’t obligated to serve the state and give cheaper tuition to in-state students and thus have more flexibility on who they give aid to.</p>
<p>@dadx
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<p>In Karlgaard’s article, or in any of the posts above, what is the objective evidence that "expensive liberal arts colleges " are “going down fast”? What is the objective evidence that “northeastern private schools have suffered mightily”? The closest thing to objective evidence cited in his article is the Shanghai ranking of French universities. fluffy2017 mentioned that Haverford has only a 40% admission yield, but that isn’t especially low. It is higher than Michigan’s, Berkeley’s, UCLA’s, or Iowa State’s (some of Karlgaard’s “buy” schools). </p>
<p>Of the 25 colleges with the highest endowments per student, 15 are Northeastern private schools. 6 of those are private liberal arts colleges like Haverford. All but 1 of those 15 at least claim to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need. Nearly all of them have low admit rates and high average test scores; in other words, demand for their product is very high.</p>
<p>The echo boom of college-age American students is subsiding. Some small colleges may well be hurt by a resulting drop in demand. It may stand to reason that the most expensive of these schools will be hurt the most. However, so far at least, I don’t see it happening. </p>
<p>What I think Karlgaard’s article really reflects is not objective reality but conservative resentment that liberal ideology prevails at many of America’s most selective or prestigious colleges. If applications start falling at expensive LACs, I don’t think it will be caused by “hissy fits” over commencement speakers. It will be driven by costs, changing demographics, or growing demand for subjects they don’t teach. The richest colleges can respond by shifting emphasis to some of those subjects, cutting costs, or marketing to international students. </p>
<p>Well articulated post, tk21769. I think it’s really sad that such fact-free tripe is so easily embraced by people with are predisposed to eat it up without thinking. I am sure it gets page views, but it doesn’t further the dialogue on real issues. I would be curious to see how fluffy responds to what you wrote.</p>
<p>Oh, look! an ignorant, close-minded person sharing his belief that humanities degrees are 100% useless… how original. If Mr. Karlgaard’s belief were true, why would universities such as Stanford and Princeton, which Mr. Karlgaard himself spoke so highly of, be developing new programmes centred specifically around recruiting applicants who are prospective humanities majors?</p>
<p>As a former prospective physics major turned English major, I am tired of hearing constant, nonsensical statements about how non-STEM degrees are worthless and the fastest track to homelessness. I find it impossible for me to garner any sort of respect for those who do not recognize the importance and necessity of the humanities.</p>