<p>Samatha Power and John Kenneth Galbraith probably put Swarthmore on the list:</p>
<p>
[quote] Samantha Power
Baccalaureate Address, 1 June 2002</p>
<p>This is my first trip to your stunning campus. But it is not my first introduction to it. This college came to my attention as soon as I had entered what used to be known as the real world [until September 11 defied our concept of reality].</p>
<p>When you cobble together a career, you come across all kinds of people. Some stand out. Some stand up. Some stand back. And some, indeed, the vast majority, stand by. Again and again, I have been struck by the fact that those who have turned heads by standing up for what they believe in, have had their start on the Swarthmore campus.</p>
<p>Last week, nervous at the responsibility of this task, I went to see a few colleagues at Harvard for advice on how to prepare a baccalaureate address. One, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who has given hundreds such speeches, told me to relax and enjoy it. "These things are easy," he said, "you'll have a captive audience: they will be sleepy and probably quite hungover." Just as I was leaving his home, though, he asked me which university I was speaking at. When I told him Swarthmore, his complexion darkened. He said, "Oh, that's very different. Swarthmore is not Harvard. At Swarthmore, they will actually pay attention to what you say." </p>
<p>The testament to the seriousness of your purpose may well be my very presence here. My Class Day speaker at Yale was the humorist Calvin Trillin. You have chosen the much lesser-known Samantha Power, who will speak on genocide.
<p>Law is an intellectual and not a professional pursuit for some. In fact, law and theology are the two oldest intellectual disciplines in the Western university tradition. I'm not saying that justifies including JDs in the ranking methodology, only that counting Ph.D.s is a very crude and inexact proxy for "intellectualism." The law schools at places like Yale and Chicago are pretty darned intellectual places.</p>
<p>I'm also not sure I buy the ranking by percentage of total undergraduates getting Ph.D.s. Some of the top publics like Berkeley and Michigan would dwarf a lot of these other schools in total numbers of their undergrads who go on to earn Ph.D.s. </p>
<p>Also, for research universities isn't the relevant comparison group the undergraduate enrollment in the college of arts and sciences---excluding undergrad professional schools like education, nursing, pharmacy, business, etc., where students are obviously engaged in specialized pre-professional education and generally on an entirely separate educational track? Throwing these groups into the denominator for research universities just seems like a transparent effort to elevate LACs at the expense of the major research universities, especially the top publics which are typically multi-functional institutions, coupling elite colleges of arts and sciences with all manner of professional education at both the undergrad and graduate level. Schools like Cornell with all its statutory colleges also get hurt by that ranking methodology. Do we really think it dilutes or diminishes the intellectual quality of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences to have people studying ag or hotel management somewhere else across campus? Silliness. If you look just at the percentage of arts & sciences undergrads coming out of the top research universities and going on to earn Ph.D.s, they'd shoot way up this ranking, some probably doubling their percentages.</p>
<p>Some prominent schools noticeably abset from vossron's top 100: Notre Dame, Emory, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, NYU, UCLA, Southern Cal, UNC-Chapel Hill, Claremont-McKenna.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you look just at the percentage of arts & sciences undergrads coming out of the top research universities and going on to earn Ph.D.s, they'd shoot way up this ranking, some probably doubling their percentages.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>OK.</p>
<p>What do you think would happen if we used "incoming freshmen" as the denominator instead of actual graduates who have completed four years as an undergrad? Hmmm? That might reduce the percentages by as much as half.</p>
<p>There are lots of offsetting variables here.</p>
<p>^ interesteddad,
I don't quite understand your point. Are you suggesting that somehow lower graduation rates at places like Berkeley and Michigan would pull down their rankings? I don't think so, not by much anyway. USNews reports a 6-year graduation rate for Michigan of 87%, for Berkeley 89%. These are not appreciably different from those of Caltech (89%) or UChicago (90%), only slightly behind Columbia, Duke and Penn (all 94%), and comparable to many leading LACS (Mt. Holyoke 83%, Harvey Mudd 85%, Smith 85%, Oberlin 85%, Colby 87%, Barnard 87%, Hamilton 88%, Colgate 89%, Grinnell 90%, Wesleyan 90%, Bowdoin 92%, Swarthmore 92%). I'd be happy to count entering freshmen in the denominator, so long as we excluded the 40+% of undergrads at Michigan who are in the School of Nursing or the Ed School or the Pharmacy School etc., clearly there for pre-professional training and not for the core academic disciplines. It's the 60% of Michigan's undergrads who are in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts who are the relevant comparison group for schools like Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, don't you think?</p>
<p>Maybe look at schools that have strong programs in majors that aren't directly linked to any particular profession. I'm thinking schools with strong philosophy departments would have a lot of creative thinkers who love learning for the sake of learning.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's the 60% of Michigan's undergrads who are in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts who are the relevant comparison group for schools like Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, don't you think?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes, but it's the 40% who are not that make the OVERALL ambience of a big box retailer superstore university less "intellectual". You are assuming that the nursing school students simply don't exist when assessing the overall culture.</p>
<p>BTW, UMich is a bad example. It is quite high in PhD production, especially for a large public all-purpose university.</p>
<p>^ interesteddad,
I know I'm a dinosaur here, but back in the day when I did my undergrad at Michigan it didn't feel at all like a "big box retailer." I started out in the LS&A honors program, living with and taking all my classes with with all the smartest kids in LS&A, kids with stats comparable to the Ivies and the top LACs, and then I moved seamlessly into small upper-level and graduate-level classes in one of the top philosophy departments in the word. It felt like a pretty darned intellectual place. And frankly, I had just about zero interaction with the nursing students; as far as I was concerned they didn't affect the intellectual "ambience" one way or the other. The point is, there are oodles of really, really smart and intellectual people, both faculty and students, at the top publics, and they tend to cluster. So if you're in the philosophy department at Michigan it doesn't feel any different than the philosophy department at Princeton, where I went to grad school.</p>
<p>"Bad" example? Well, atypical of public universities in general, I suppose, but that's the point I keep trying to make on CC that many regulars here keep denying: all the publics are not the same. Some, like Michigan and Berkeley, can provide really extraordinary academic and intellectual opportunities at the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>Big Box Retailer in the sense that they sell DVDs and computers and TVs and stereos and refrigerators, all under one roof. Arts & Science, Nursing, Engineering, Grad Schools, Ag school, and so forth. As opposed to a mom and pop boutique store that just sells one thing (high-end designer fashion, custom-installed home theater, and so forth).</p>
<p>BTW, in my years on CC, I've never seen anyone suggest that Michigan and Berkeley aren't two of the finest universities in world.</p>
<p>Personally, I suspect the undergrad experience at Berkeley these days is miserable as funding has failed to keep pace with over-enrollment. But, that has nothing to do with Michigan.</p>