Is there a similar ranking for liberal art colleges?
No
Why?
The only rankings for undergraduate programs that exist are business and engineering.
I do not know why other than to say LACs are judged as a whole and not by major. The mission of an LAC is somewhat different.
Which are you interested in?
Thank you. @OnTheBubble I am trying to compare apples and oranges actually. We are on west coast and my DD was admitted to MIT and HMC. After attending MIT CPW we have no question why it is ranked as it is. But bad weather and 6 hours flight is something to consider as well. She plans major in CS. I see that Caltech, the third school on her short list doesn’t rank very high in CS. For HMC I can only find local rankings and best return on investment ranking.
Well, the weather isn’t always winter, you get a little Summer, all of Autumn, all of Winter and a good part of Spring. People always focus just on Winter.
Harvey Mudd is an exceptionally fine school.
Hopefully, you and your DD is going to the Admitted Student’s Program this Sunday at Mudd. I think that should help her decide. I think you will be quite impressed at what they have to offer.
(BTW- I get it about the weather…as a SoCal resident myself who has visited the East Coast during the winter—it would take a lot to get me to move there!)
@ClaremontMom We have lots of water. I was just reading the reservoirs there are only at 7% capacity. When you can’t take a shower, come visit, 
Yes. We will be attending both HMC and Caltech this weekend. I don’t put much trust into those rankings, but I would like to have statistical information to work with.
@OnTheBubble We took really long showers while in Cambridge. But also used not so nice words when our GPS could not deal with loops and the favorite word of the day was “u-turn”.
There are no such rankings for liberal arts colleges because that type ranking is primarily based on research output, which is much easier to quantify on a per subject basis. The correlation between research output and quality of undergrad education depends on the relative importance you place on teaching vs. research. In some cases teaching quality is inversely correlated with teaching quality.
@Ballerina016 Oh Lord yes, I think you mean traffic circles, most GPS are terrible with those. You must have had a rental car.
Seriously, my son is in Maine and the Cali kids do just fine. On parents weekend, you Cali people clean out the LL Bean store. I was advising some Cali people on the merits of merino wool socks in October.
I see @Mastadon . So what is the best way to measure quality of LAC? I think liberal art colleges, and HMC in particular, offer research opportunities for undergrads if I am not mistaken.
You can view @ucbalumnus ', “Computer science at some smaller schools,” in the math/CS forum for a well-researched assessment of CS course offerings at various LACs, including Harvey Mudd.
My kid at HMC was able to do CS research summer after her freshman and sophomore year, and continued it into fall of her junior year (she had switched to a physics major by then, and started physics research fall of junior year, so was actually researching with 2 profs in 2 subjects at once). She has been to a couple of CS conferences and presented at them. Her CS prof has also been very supportive with recommendations for her when needed (I saw one, and it was great). He has also been a good mentor – I know she feels comfortable just hanging out at his office, too. She had only a small amount of CS background going in. HMC also has great placement of their grads. I was chatting with her senior suite mate at Thanksgiving, and he had already accepted a job at Facebook after graduation this spring.
Thank you @intparent Are those paid research opportunities at HMC?
I was actually attempting to answer the same question myself, so I analyzed the number of Computing Research Association awards won by each school. The full explanation of the methodology is on the thread linked below.
Harvey Mudd, Tufts and URochester are examples of schools that have a large number of undergrad research awards, (especially if measured as a percentage of the class) despite not being ranked highly for total research output.
I am very familiar with MIT (I live fairly close and have family members that have attended and I have recruited there).
I have less familiarity with Mudd.
MIT is very academically intense and offers a broader range of leading edge courses and research projects than Mudd does. In some cases, the academic workload at MIT can make it hard to fit in time for research (it depends how quickly you can do the work, how well organized you are, and the amount of time you are willing to commit to classwork plus research) and there are grad students and post docs at MIT to compete with for the professor’s time. MIT is right in the center of a cluster of computing companies, start-ups and colleges (Harvard and Tufts are a couple of stops away on the subway and BU is right across the river) so there is more opportunity for leading edge internships, hackathons and start-up venture competitions. (This could also explain why MIT does not appear on the list below).
Mudd appears to be less intense academically (they don’t have a beaver as a mascot) which may allow more time for research. It also appears to have a curriculum/environment that is skewed less towards the computer engineering side of the spectrum than MIT. I am guessing that the professors are more accessible to undergrads than at MIT due to less of a research load. The class sizes are bigger than what you would see at a more traditional LAC, but the class offerings are also more varied than what you would see at a more traditional LAC.
Both schools have strong programs and the better choice depends on your personality, learning style, area of interest and career goals, so I can’t really make a recommendation.
…School…#Awards…Weighted…% Class…Grad
- UWashington…13…21…0.7…7
- Princeton…13…20…2.2…8
- Berkeley…10…24…0.7…4
- Harvey Mudd…10…20…2.7…NR
- Columbia…10…17…1.8…15
- Cornell…10…16…0.9…6
- Tufts…8…11…1.9…70
8 . UIUC…7…14…0.5…5 - URochester…6…10…2.8…52
10.Harvard…5…9… …1.0…18
Mudd is not less intense – don’t claim what you don’t know about. Few students research during the school year freshman or first semester of sophomore year due to the difficulty of the core courses. An example of Mudd’s intensity is that typically students cover what is a semester’s worth of math material at other colleges in a half semester class. Here is what Fiske says about Mudd: “HMC rivals CalTech for sheer brainpower and tops it in access to outstanding faculty…the heavy workload is a common complaint”. First semester is P/F, just like MIT, CalTech, and Swarthmore – other notoriously intense schools.
OP, the summer research experiences are paid. During the year the time spent is for credit (graded).
So your child has been accepted to MIT, Caltech, and Harvey Mudd, and you’re trying to decide between these schools? Don’t bother looking for rankings – rest assured that these are three of the top schools in the country. Your child will have amazing opportunities at any of these places. They’re also all noted for being very focused and intense, so I assume your child is looking and ready for that. They do have some differences though – location, size, and Mudd, being a LAC, and part of a consortium, is perhaps the most different. I suggest you consider which of these schools make for the best fit for your child. Try to come up with some specific questions that may tease out some factors that are important. Asking about the research opportunities can be such a question – although I suspect all of these schools will have good research opportunities.
Harvey Mudd is P/F first semester like Swarthmore.
Caltech is P/F for the entire freshman year.
MIT went P/F for the entire freshman year in '68 switched to P/No Record in '73 and switched to ABC/No Record for second semester around 2006.
Olin, which I am quite familiar with is P/No Record first semester - it has a very heavy workload, but I do not consider it as intense as MIT, because it is a much more supportive environment.
I was assuming that the culture at Mudd was closer to Olin than MIT (based partly on some of your posts), but if you want to argue otherwise, that is fine.
I don’t know that I have ever posted to say that the workload is anything but crazy at Mudd. Let me know if you can find specific posts that say otherwise. Again, don’t assume about colleges you don’t know much about.