Your title refers to undergraduate colleges which I assumed meant schools where undergraduates in particular would have the best educational experience. Since your list is 26 schools long, I decided to check USnews lists for the top 10 undergraduate rankings (not overall, just undergraduate) expecting to see overlap, and was surprised to see 2 obvious outliers among the usual suspects. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/undergraduate-teaching
Now I certainly don’t think that USN rankings are the be all, end all and think that people who hang their hats on any rankings as being definitive for any particular student are a bit silly. Still, I do think undergraduate teaching takes a back seat at many/most highly ranked universities, both public and private, and that if anything makes a difference at the undergrad level, it’s the quality of the teaching.
I haven’t seen any threads which have discussed this topic or why Miami of Ohio and UMBC have risen so high in these particular rankings so I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on the topic.
Miami of Ohio has a very long reputation for undergraduate teaching. This is largely because it is a “research university” in name only, and offers only a limited number of graduate degrees. Miami is among the original eight “Public Ivies” listed in the 1985 book by Richard Moll. No doubt its rise is rooted a complex of factors, but among those factors was the simple decision to stay focused on undergraduate education and pay minimal attention to research. I did not hurt that Miami faced few temptations to change its philosophy. Ohio students who wanted football had OSU, for example.
According to USnews, the sole criteria for their top 10 choices was peer review. If these 10 schools are really the 10 nominated by academics across the entire country, then something worth watching is going on at both Miami of Ohio and UMBC. This didn’t just happen by chance and it didn’t happen because either of these schools was the alma mater of a large number of academics.
Why don’t more of us pay attention to these two schools?
So when you compare those numbers, “60” seems a reasonable approximation for the number of schools it must take to accommodate the top American HS students (depending on how exactly we define & measure “top”). 700 on the SAT-CR puts you in the 95th SAT-CR percentile rank. How many schools would it take to accommodate, say, everyone who scores at least 700 on the SAT-CR and the SAT-M (or equivalent ACT scores), with class rank in the top 10%?
If you assume an average of 6K per entering class for the public RU’s and an average of 2K per entering class for the private RU’s (yes, many are smaller than that, but NYU & USC are huge while Cornell and UPenn are big as well) as well as 500 for each LAC, you’re around 120K.
Plus, there are unis at the UW-Madison/UCLA/UNC/W&M level outside the US as well. If you are an American kid with the stats that @tk21769 described (or even a little worse, so say top 10% by stats) and (key point) your family can afford to spend around $40K a year*, there’s really no reason to fall below the UW-Madison/McGill/Toronto/Edinburgh/St. Andrews level if you apply smartly.
*there are some degrees at McGill that are as cheap as in-state; everything else I listed is more expensive than that, but still below elite private list-prices, ranging from a little below $40K to a little above $40K total.
I like Alexandre’s list (post #31) but New College of Florida seems a funny one to include on the LAC list. Almost 80% of students are from Florida and the 4 and 6-year graduation rates are considerably lower than those of the other schools on the list. I’d substitute Hamilton, which has higher stats and more national representation than NCF.
@Sue22, I don’t think @Alexandre’s list is meant to include every good school in the US, but NCF does have an impressive alumni achievement rate (on par with good private LACs; the only public LAC that can say that, in fact). And yes, it’s going to be mostly in-state kids because it’s a public in a big state, just like Cal is mostly populated by Californians (and for that matter, Rice is 50% Texans, Cornell is 50% Northeasterners and I believe both NYU and USC are overrepresented by locals as well.
BTW, given the composition of the entering student body at NCF, I’d expect their graduation rate to be considerably lower; doesn’t mean it isn’t a good place for a kid who can get in to a good private LAC, however (and it’s considerably cheaper).
Small LAC’s like Williams and Amherst are tough to beat for undergrad experience(full-time Professors vs GRAD STUDENT Teaching assistants at larger schools). Holy Cross is a hidden gem top notch academics with strong pre-med, classics, and poly science majors. HC’s medical alumni is fantastic and the school meets 100% demonstrated financial need. Alumni love HC has one of the highest alumni giving rates in the country.
@Sue22, Reed has a low graduation rate as well. For that matter, UChicago use to also have a really low graduation rate. If the school is rigorous, graduation rate generally has more to do with the demographics of the entering student body.
One could laboriously look up freshmen enrollments at all ~60 schools on Alexandre’s list. Or, one could look at the NCES stats. If there are ~3M graduating seniors per year, and ~40% of them go straight to college, that would mean about 1.2M entering freshmen. The top 10% would give us PurpleTitan’s number (~120K); the top 5% would give us my own rough estimate (~60K). Of course, not all “top” students are even interested in attending “top” colleges.
At any rate, if we define “top” colleges very simply as “the colleges where top students go”, there must be scores of them. Not hundreds … but many more than 8 or 10 (or even 26). 50-75 seems to me like a reasonable search space for a “top” student to build a realistic list of reach and match schools. A student in his or her HS’s top 5-10%, with scores and ECs to match, is not too likely to get shut out of that space. Or so it appears from these numbers.
The graduating rate for NCF, and Reed and Chicago for that matter, probably reflects a higher than average transfer rate. I’d look at the freshman retention rate. These schools are pretty unusual in the grand scheme of colleges and universities. I wouldn’t be surprised if freshmen discovered the school wasn’t a good fit - at NCF, they may not have understood what written evaluations really meant and found they wanted something more traditional or structured.
NCF is a hidden gem. Chicago and Reed were once hidden gems not so long ago.
I don’t think substituting one school for another is helpful. I think the point is to show there are many very strong schools beyond the usual 20, 25 suspects. If you’re finding schools left off Alexandre’s list that even further proves the point.
According to Kiplinger’s, Chicago’s 4y graduation rate is 88% (tied for 4th among national universities.)
USNWR shows the same number, as well as a very high freshman retention rate (99%).
NCF’s 4y graduation rate (57%) isn’t especially low compared to many other state schools.
It’s the same as Rutgers’ and UCSD’s. It’s a little higher than Wisconsin’s or UT Austin’s.