<p>^ A 50% graduation rate is a fairly low threshold for quality. I’d bump it up to, say, 70%. To get different perspectives on quality, you can click-sort on the columns for median scores, student expenditures, or admit rates (assuming you’ve included those criteria in your search). If you export to an Excel spreadsheet, you can sort on more than one criteria (a primary + secondary key).</p>
<p>If you really want a LAC, specify “Bac/A&S” as the Carnegie Classification (maybe add Doctoral/Research if you want to look for small universites, too).</p>
<p>Below are my own results for Locale = City Large,City Midsize,City Small; College Size between 1000 and 5000; Carnegie Classification = Doctoral/Research,Bac/A & S; Student Related Expenditures / Total FTE between 20000 and 250000; Composite Mediat SAT/ACT Score between 1300 and 1600; Percent Admitted between 5 and 50; 6-Year Grad Rate between 70 and 100. The USNWR “rank” is shown in parens for comparison:</p>
<p>Wesleyan University (12)
Vassar College (14)
Barnard College (33)
Macalester College (25)
Connecticut College (37)
Colorado College (27)
Reed College (57)</p>
<p>6-year grad rate seems to be the default sort key. I’m not sure that’s the best quality indicator. Personally, I’d rank Reed at or near the top for academics. If you lower the SAT floor a bit (to 1250), you’ll pick up Holy Cross, Trinity, Richmond, Occidental and Rhodes.</p>
<p>However, it is more of a pre-professionally oriented school emphasizing visual and performing arts. Most liberal arts subjects there are offered only to the level for student looking for breadth subjects; only history, literature, psychology, and writing, and interdisciplinary combinations of those and the arts (e.g. area or ethnic studies) are offered in depth suitable for someone who would like to major or concentrate in the subject.</p>
<p>Holy cross is not in a city and is much farther from Boston that it looks given traffic. Boston College is more of a big city LAC. Also Emerson.</p>
<p>Emerson is not a typical LAC - it’s a specialized school for people interested in the communication related fields (great choice if that is your area of interest).</p>
<p>In Chicago you can find Shimer College. In addition, there are several universities in the city which have a strong liberal arts component: Roosevelt University, DePaul University, and Loyola University.</p>
<p>UCBalumnus, thanks for educating me on SL. I did not know that! I apprecicate it :).</p>
<p>Agree about Emerson, it’s about as urban as you can get and is strong in communication, creative writing, and film. It takes up a complete city block across the street from Boston Commons so it’s’ by no means a typical LAC. It’s all business type buildings, not a “normal campus”. More similar to New School. Just wanted to point that out. I just visited Emerson this past summer.</p>