@privatebanker: About 113 of the 308 US colleges & universities & 9 foreign schools earned a rating of 4 Pens or higher = just under 36% of the schools reviewed.
About 113 of the 317 schools were rated 4 Pens, 4.5 Pens or 5 Pens for academics by Fiske. Fiske added the half pen levels in response to reader complaints for further refinement.
Quoting Fiske guide To Colleges 2020:
“In general, a rating of three pens suggests that the institution is a solid one that easily meets the criteria for inclusion in a guide devoted to the top 10 percent of colleges and universities in the nation.”
“An academic rating of four pens suggests that the institution is above average even by these standards and that it has some particularly distinguishing academic feature, such as especially rich course offerings or an especially serious academic atmosphere.”
“A rating of five pens for academics indicates that the college or university is among the handful of top institutions of its type in the nation on a very broad variety of criteria. Those in the private sector…attract students with high SAT scores and those in the public sector are invariably magnets for the top students in their states. All can be assumed to have outstanding faculties and other academic resources.”
“In response to the suggestion that the range of colleges within a certain category has been too broad, we have introduced some half-steps into the ratings.”
I wonder if Barnard/Columbia and Bryn Mawr/Haverford resources are combined for these purposes. I like all of those schools a lot but Barnard and Bryn Mawr are definitely stronger and have more robust offerings because of their affiliations.
@Publisher- I boast no deep expertise in the college— I just am a fan, as a parent of a once-prospective student! I just noticed its absence from your initial list, which I did not realize was not a full list, so I was surprised.
Quickly looking up some online articles after your question in your post, it appears that Brandeis had an A1 rating from Moody’s in January 2019.
Online articles also indicate that the college itself never invested with Madoff, but some of its donors did, including a big donor family named the Shapiros, who apparently nonetheless were able to honor their financial commitments to the college. The art museum remains open.
According to both Brandeis’s own website and its Wikipedia article, it had a $1.05 billion endowment as of June 2018.
According to College Raptor’s college endowment ranking list, Brandeis had the nation’s 118th best per-student endowment, placing it between Conn College at 117 and Franklin&Marshall at 119, and above University of Southern California ranked at 123 and Carnegie Mellon ranked at 128.
I am no expert on matters financial, but to a layperson, it sounds like Brandeis is in good financial health.
Nope. Of course not. This is what is most flawed about an otherwise excellent guide. It dabbles in rankings without any sense of what happens in the classrooms of different institutions. The U of Iowa provides similar four-star (cough, I mean four-pen) academics as Kenyon? What does that even mean? And while it’s nice to see some idiosyncratic choices (welcome to the four-pen world, St. Mary’s of Maryland and UNC-Asheville!), Fiske’s “penned” choices are so goofy yet predictable that I honestly laughed at both the lists and people’s very serious reactions to them. This has been a somewhat down Turkey Day weekend for me (too much info, I know), but this thread brightened my mood considerably. Thanks everyone.
Are you making a leap from new athletic facility to less partying at Colby? That seems like a bold leap to me. One can’t assume correlation between the two.
I think you shouldn’t have numbered the schools in your lists. It gives the impression there is some kind of order of ranking among those schools when there isn’t.
It’s still opinion. There’s no objective measure and not sure the fact that they are professors from a previous generation accurately reflects today’s reality. No one attends multiple schools simultaneously. But as another data point it’s ok.
I prefer their narratives to these cribs. It’s lazy.
Yes it’s 36 percent of what they consider to be the top ten percent of us and some select foreign schools to be exactly exact. So the 4 4.5 and 5 pen schools represent the top 3.6 percent of all schools. It’s quite a fine line of distinction.
New athletic & recreational facilities provide an alternate outlet for those who prefer not to drink.
Yes, I think that Colby’s new facility offers students an alternative to drinking.
@ucbalumnus : Thank you for sharing the research article. While I realize that students associated with athletic teams often engage in heavy drinking, my focus is on individual students who use athletic & recreational facilities for personal exercise programs.
As to whether or not I should have numbered the schools in my original post in this thread, I thought that it was clear that all received the same academic rating & that they were listed in alphabetical order. I apologize for any confusion.
For a cold weather school such as Colby College to offer its students an option to exercise indoors is an excellent alternative to hanging out & drinking.
One can lift weights, run on an indoor track, swim, use the sauna, play racquet sports indoors, practice hitting golf balls into a net, practice soccer & football kicking, etc. alone or with a friend.
Has nothing to do with organized team sports that represent the school, although informal intra-school soccer & ice hockey games may be arranged.
Has no relation to school teams who join the same fraternity or live in the same housing. Simply refers to individual students who seek an alternate healthy outlet when others might be drinking.
The Fiske Guide To Colleges explains its ratings systems for academics, social life & quality of life with the caveat that “the reason should be evident from the write-up” about any particular school.
Fiske’s co-author (Hammond) worked for many years on the Yale Daily News’s book, INSIDER’S GUIDE TO THE COLLEGES. The knowledge bank among those two and their staffers runs pretty deep.
There are citations dating back to the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, etc. Ancient study. And there’s a difference between attending a football game/tailgate party and exercise.
Fiske Guide To Colleges offers ratings in three areas:
Academics
Social Life
Quality of Life
I am going to start a new thread on “Social Life” in a few minutes in order to share the list of 15 schools which may be “something of a party school.” ( No, BYU did not make the list.)
“The Fiske Guide To Colleges…includes 9 foreign schools (UBC, Toronto, McGill, Queen’s, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews & Trinity College in Ireland).”
That seems like a somewhat random set of overseas schools to choose. Amongst British universities the highest number of US students (apparently undergrad and grad students combined) are found at:
St Andrews: 1575 students (16% of total population)
Edinburgh: 1420 (5%)
Oxford: 1020 (5%)
Cambridge: 720 (4%)
LSE: 645 (6%)