<p>It’s silly if not downright destructive to try to turn this into yet another ranking. All the schools with multiple awards are to be congratulated for getting significant numbers of their students interested in the Fulbright program, and for supporting a large fraction of them through to success in winning the award. The rest of it, attempting to rank schools per capita, by the ratio of successful awards to applicants, or in any other way, is just so much b.s. </p>
<p>Remember, this is an academic exchange program, not a merit award. There’s competition for the awards, to be sure, but having a large number of Fulbrights (either absolutely or relative to the size of the student body) is not a proxy for academic distinction, for a whole lot of reasons. First, there are a lot of other things for highly qualified graduates to do, many of them just as prestigious if not more so, such as going directly to top graduate or professional programs here in the U.S., or pursuing other kinds of fellowships, or going directly to work in highly sought-after positions. Second, the bulk of Fulbright awards tend to go to people in traditional liberal arts fields, which is immediately going to skew per-capita counts in a way that disadvantages both engineering schools (you won’t find an MIT, Caltech, or Harvey Mudd listed here, for example, because not many engineers pursue Fulbrights; but that’s no reflection on the quality of education those schools offer) as well as large multi-purpose universities which typically have only a fraction of their undergraduates in liberal arts programs. So per capita ratios are simply comparing apples to oranges; it’s nonsense. The relevant comparison group for Michigan is other large public multi-purpose universities; within that group, their production of Fulbrights is absolutely stellar, though Berkeley is close on their heels and Wisconsin not too far behind.</p>
<p>And mini and stacey: I believe the correct number for Smith is 15 for the 2008-09 award year, the number reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education story linked in post #1. The Smith website you link in post #7 is reporting a total of 17 for the 2007-08 award year. That’s last year’s data. Either way, though, 15 or 17 is a terrific accomplishment, and I applaud Smith for it.</p>