<p>Hey guys, I've been wondering and thinking that USNWR show converge the lists of national universities and LACs for our pleasure to know what the rank of any given bachelors degree granting college is--rather than have two separate lists. For our, and my, pleasure, would you guys try to converge these lists? Rule: You may not rearrange the order of universities or LACs, you must just put the LACs into the universities lists, without changing their order. If there is some kind of formula or if someone has already done this, let me know!</p>
<p>Note that I'm not some sick kid who wants the absolute highest ranked college. I'm just curious and I love stats like this! :D</p>
<p>Universities:
1 Harvard University
2 Princeton University
3 Yale University
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 Stanford University
6 California Institute of Technology
6 University of Pennsylvania<br>
8 Columbia University
8 Duke University
8 University of Chicago
11 Dartmouth College
12 Northwestern University
12 Washington University in St. Louis
14 Cornell University
15 Johns Hopkins University
16 Brown University
17 Rice University
18 Emory University
18 University of Notre Dame
18 Vanderbilt University</p>
<p>LACS:
1 Amherst College
1 Williams College
3 Swarthmore College
4 Wellesley College
5 Middlebury College
6 Bowdoin College
6 Pomona College
8 Carleton College
9 Davidson College<br>
10 Haverford College
11 Claremont McKenna College
11 Vassar College
13 Wesleyan University
14 Grinnell College</p>
<p>I’m especially interested in where Claremont McKenna would sit overall. Would it be higher or lower than Vanderbilt (if so, how much higher/lower). I’m just curious & it definitely won’t factor into my decision.</p>
<p>While I do not want to discourage people from compiling their own list if that’s interesting or fun, I would suggest taking a look at Forbes’ magazine’s list of best colleges 2008. They compare LACs and national universities on the same list, explaining in great detail how they came to their conclusions. Here’s the link to the article. A little bit down the page is a link called “complete college rankings” which will take you directly to their list.</p>
<p>see, I’m not sure you can compare national unis and LACs… they are so different by nature. those rankings for each are on a relative basis. for example, take alumni giving rate. most of the top 15 LACs beat every single uni but princeton (approximately)… resources will vary as well (HYP endowment/student vs. Amherst/Midd/Wes endowment/student)… so you cant use US News rankings as a basis for combining the two. selectivity is this way as well. the ivies are much more “visible” than the top LACs, despite being comparable for an undergrad education.</p>
<p>If you want to compare apples to oranges, dont let the banana (US News) decide. you would have to be careful which attributes to include if doing a numbers comparison. you’re almost better off going by reputation alone…</p>
<p>One can also take some other (imperfect) measure, like the US News-reported peer score (highly contentious) or class size data if that’s what is important to you.</p>
<p>Forbes ranks Brown at #27. Dartmouth isn’t in their top 100. I don’t see what kind of criteria can make Princeton come out #1, Williams and Amherst in the top 10 but Dartmouth at 100+, which would otherwise seem to not have LAC, non-grad school bias.</p>
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<p>In a lot of cases, I don’t think they’re that different. Aside from differences in student quality, I don’t really see how the academic experience at Dartmouth and Brown (in the nat’l univ category but not that much emphasis on grad schools) is much different from the larger LACs like Bucknell, Colgate, Wesleyan.</p>
<p>I agree that some nat’l unis and LACs are similar, like you said, but you’re analyzing one end of each continuum. haverford and harvard would result in very different experiences, as would, say, bowdoin and cornell/columbia/penn.</p>
<p>1 Harvard University
2 Princeton University
3 Yale University
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 Stanford University
6 California Institute of Technology
1 Williams College
1 Amherst College
3 Swarthmore College
6 University of Pennsylvania
8 Columbia University
8 Duke University
8 University of Chicago
11 Dartmouth College
4 Wellesley College
12 Northwestern University
12 Washington University in St. Louis
14 Cornell University
15 Johns Hopkins University
5 Middlebury College
6 Bowdoin College
6 Pomona College
16 Brown University
8 Carleton College
9 Davidson College
10 Haverford College
11 Claremont McKenna College
17 Rice University
18 Emory University
18 University of Notre Dame
11 Vassar College
13 Wesleyan University
18 Vanderbilt University
14 Grinnell College </p>
<p>That we can’t rearrange the National Universities and LAC lists is ridiculous.
They’re very, very flawed in themselves.
But, I’ll humor you.</p>
<p>It must be recognized that, in the above list, for multi-college universities you are lumping together apples and oranges, then comparing them with predominantly liberal arts colleges that have only apples.</p>
<p>For most purposes, a student considering applying to a liberal arts college, such as most of the schools on the above list, should be primarily concerned about the admissions profile of a given university’s liberal arts college, and not the other specialty colleges at that university that the student is not applying to. </p>
<p>For example, at Cornell the comparable stats for its College of Arts & Sciences is 1415. For its engineering college it was 1440. These differences may be material to applicants to particular colleges there. The same applies to other multi-college universities on the list. An applicant is not applying to some imaginary amalgam of a university’s colleges, only to specific colleges there.</p>
<p>jwu: I agree the rankings are flawed, but everyone has their own idea of what the rankings should be, and thus, there is no “one” ranking system that is correct. My thoughts were that if I stuck to a specific (USNWR in this case) ranking system and suggested against alterations, I could see where the LACs fell into the NU ranks. I was specifically interested in where the USNWR rankings would converge–then we could draw our own conclusions on where they should finally be move.</p>