http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2016/07/05/americas-top-colleges-2016/3/#7c0f3338585f
The full list of 660 colleges and universities was published today:
http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/
Here’s a link to the wider discussion on the parents board:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1902967-forbes-2016.html
What would you expect from USN next go round? Do you think it will be affected by the campaign results?
It’s possible the campaign will have an effect, but only indirectly via increased spending on faculty salaries, etc, as the methodology is very specific.
What is with the ranking in USN&WR?
Wesleyan is at 21, below schools such as Washington & Lee, Colby, Hamilton, Colgate and Vassar. Yikes!
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges
USNews is to Forbes what an auto mechanic is to Consumer Reports; it will tell you everything you need to know about a particular college, including how many faculty it has, how small the classes are, and how many kids score above 700 on their SATs, but can’t predict which ones will produce the next Joss Whedon, Anna Dewdney, Lael Brainard or Lin-Manuel Miranda (four Wesleyan alum who have all been in the news recently.) Moreover, because it is so mechanical, churning out the same statistics every year, USNews has to figure out brand new ways to make them look astonishing, including changing how each component is weighed from one year to the next. The fact is that, if you examine them closely, there’s never more than a hair’s breadth of difference between the top universities and small colleges in this country. Take Colgate and Wesleyan, for example. Same size. Same endowment. Same number of small classes. Same selectivity. Yet, one is ranked at number 12 and the other is ranked number 21. Why? There is no logical explanation for so many anomalies every year, which is why fewer and fewer people follow it as religiously as they used to.
What rankings do they follow? It doesn’t appear that folks are keying in on the Forbes list.
The Parents Board discussion garnered 400 comments and a gazillion views earlier this spring. Also, I have to question why one has to follow an annual ranking, at all. Almost anything you need to know about any of these schools can be found on the bookshelf of a public library.
I’ve been intrigued with Wesleyan’s apparent drop in the rankings. I’m old enough to remember when one associated Wes with Amherst and Williams. No longer. Seems to be associated more now with Vassar and Oberlin. Strong LACs such as Carleton, Pomona and Davidson consistently seems to best it. Strange.
Kudos to Wes for its creative alums whom you mention.
Don’t kid yourself: Lael Brainard is a voting member of the Federal Reserve Board. And, all of the alum I mentioned are under the age of 60. Where are Amherst and Williams’ young movers and shakers?
Whoa there! A bit testy Circuitrider.
It’s a simple question: Where are Amherst and Williams’ young movers and shakers?
@GreenIndian , not that it’s proof positive of anything, but to your question about the impact of the Forbes ranking … Wes did get an all-time high application pool this year, taking its admit rate down to 17%. It’s something.
I agree though: it is odd that this particular year would be the year Wes takes its biggest rankings hit.
More money. More visibility. It’s really been a great few years for Wesleyan, a few distractions notwithstanding. You’d think they would have moved in the other direction.
Oh well.
.
College Scorecard, is a tax-payer supported website (imagine that!) that does a much better job of publishing pretty much the same data USNews does, but without the two year lag:
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
I like Wes, my kid is applying to Wes, and Wes got hosed in the new US News rankings, no doubt
Nevertheless, it is tiresome to see circuitrider get all insecure and try to deal with it by attacking Amherst and Williams (again). It isn’t the fault of the other members of the Little Three that Wes isn’t getting the credit it deserves.
Where did I attack Amherst and Williams?
Pulled this from another post. I’ve always held Wes about where it appears below. Certainly dates me,
US News rankings became an annual feature in 1988. It looked as follows.
National Universities
(1)Stanford
(2)Harvard
(3)Yale
(4)Princeton
(5)UC Berkeley
(6)Dartmouth
(7)Duke
(8)U Chicago
(8)U Michigan
(10)Brown
(11)Cornell
(11)MIT
(11)UNC Chapel Hill
(14)Rice
(15)UVA
(16)Johns Hopkins
(17)Northwestern
(18)Columbia
(19)U Penn
(20)U Illinois
(21)Caltech
(22)William and Mary
(23)U Wisconsin
(23)Washington U St Louis
(25)Emory
(25)U Texas
National Liberal Arts Colleges
(1)Williams
(2)Swarthmore
(3)Carleton
(4)Amherst
(5)Oberlin
(6)Pomona
(6)Wesleyan
(8)Wellesley
(9)Haverford
(10)Grinnell
(11)Bryn Mawr
(12)Bowdoin
(12)Reed
(14)Smith
(15)Davidson
(16)Earlham
(17)Middlebury
(17)Mount Holyoke
(19)St John’s (MD)
(20)Colorado College
(20)St Olaf
(22)Centre
(23)Claremont McKenna
(24)Vassar
(25)Hamilton
(25)Washington and Lee
^All that says to me is that despite a headwind of thirty years of USNews rankings, Wesleyan has still managed to shave its selectivity in half, graduate a junior senator from a major battleground state, a Federal Reserve Board Governor, a Rhode Scholar, numerous Apker Award finalists for undergraduate physics, and generate at least the cursory consideration of a sitting First Family. It’s clearly doing something right that isn’t being measured by this one magazine poll.
@MiddleburyDad2 Any endowment bump will take years to factor into the rankings, as endowment size tends to show up as an indirect influence (i.e. Increased scores in resource categories like salary and class size)…