Forgot to list WPI as a 3.5 Star Academic school.
An above poster misinterpreted the editorial âuh oh !â after USC.
Was not a comment on the appropriateness of the ranking, but, rather, an expectation that this may not sit well with some readers.
Also Re: post #78 above. A more complete description of the Pen ratings for Academics appears in my post #20 on the first page of this thread.
What a minute, I thought all these colleges give you the same undergrad education as the other and it doesnât matter where you go to collegeâŠoh never mind.
Easy to confuse competitiveness of admissions with quality of instruction & demands of the coursework.
Univ. or Illinois 5 pens above Vandy, WashU, CarnegieâŠthe list goes on. Very curious.
Illinois is a powerhouse for engineering & accounting.
Very well regarded for undergraduate business as well.
As the Fiske guide cautions, it is easier to understand the ratings when reading the accompanying text / write-up.
According to the Fiske guide: âthe University of Illinoisâ strengths include business, communication, engineering, architecture, and the natural sciences.â
Computer Science is another area held in high regard.
Large class sizes, however, is a bit of a negative.
@homerdog Well, guess what? I passed up the opportunity to attend a five-pen school (my in-state flagship) and instead went to an in-state, three-pen LAC. Do I have any regrets? Nope. Of course, that might be because I have only a three-pen mind. 
I have a hunch that Elonâs list is more aspirational than actual. About a year ago I did a ton of research on Elon, and recall reading about their strategic plan, which benchmarks aspirational goals and names the institutions Elon aims to emulate. I do not think those schools are the overlap schools for current applicants.
There are a lot of schools listed here that get little if any mention here at CC. Which is interesting. Undoubtedly there are great differences in admission rate among these schools, something for prospective students to consider.
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This suggests that a whole-pen school has never moved downward to a half-pen level. In turn, this suggests that some ratings represent a snapshot from the original publication in 1982.
Ga Tech - 5 pens southern university
Davidson - 4.5 pens southern
However, it appears that the Fiske Guide does factor competitiveness of admission in determining its pen scores, according to your quote of it from reply #20 (emphasis added):
It seems to be a common notion on these forums that a student at a big university will be in a huge lecture led by a graduate student instructor. While graduate student instructors are used, they are typically found as:
- Instructors for discussion or lab sections associated with a lecture led by a faculty member.
- Lead instructors of small lower level courses (commonly English composition or foreign language).
rather than as the lead instructor of a huge lecture.
Regardless of class format, the content of courses and curricula can differ between different colleges. For example, intermediate microeconomics courses may use no calculus, single variable calculus, or multivariable calculus (and some colleges may offer more than one version). Math-intensity of economics courses can be a significant difference for an economics major, depending on math skills and post-graduation goals.
The number of available courses in each subject and what subareas of the subject they cover can vary as well (subarea coverage beyond the expected core for the subject is more of an academic âfitâ factor for a given student, rather than anything that can be ranked).
I should tell my kid that she didnât choose the college with the largest number of pens⊠?
In all seriousness, the categorizations make little sense, and the methodology seems to be no more than some mental gymnastics to justify what Fiske had determined, based on his own personal preferences and biases.
Listen, Iâve poked some fun at the whole number-of-pens thing in previous posts, and I understand that the OP is simply giving us the raw lists (and at times she/he has questioned the pen ratings of bizarrely low-penned schools), but I want to make it clear that I do love the Fiske Guide. Its introduction, which I doubt many people read, has very helpful content about types of schools and how to determine what kind of school is right for you.
The pens donât make me angry (I never imagined I would type that sentence). For instance, the college that I attended is a three-pen school. Fine. I wouldnât care if it were bumped up to a 3.5- or 4-pen school. Of course, if the Fiske Guide gave it a 5-pen rating, then I would suddenly care very much about pens.
@ucbalumnus . . .
Per your quote from #74:
Iâll assume youâre referring to Social Science majors.
I know that Computer Science has been getting a lot of love on this board, and certainly well it should. CS students, of course, often start out well out of the gate, often with salaries > $100,000, but I wouldnât write off social-science majors even if they may have a starting salary at one-quarter of those with CS degrees. (And I would agree that the disparity at the beginning can probably never be made up.)
Some SS majors upon graduation, take part-time jobs just to be able to study for tests like the LSAT or GRE (later, the GMAT), and theyâll eventually at least close the gap in salary disparity if not in valuation at a certain point. Or theyâll find some sales/marketing job in which their socializing per your example will come in handy, even if those with the hard-charging academic mindset will pay off better.
And, do you have a school in mind? 
@Hapworth The pens are just silly (even though I did my PhD at a 5 pen college), but what bothers me is that the guide, like every other ranking out there equated popularity with quality. It states very clearly at the beginning that it chose the âbest 200â based on their acceptance rate.
It also gets its information directly from administrators and from students hand picked by administrators. So, as such, it is little more than an advertising tool for the colleges, especially those which serve the wealthy. Iâm pretty sure that almost every one of the colleges in Fiske figures prominently in the list of colleges which have 50% of their students from the top 20% by income. Why not give even more coverage and advertising to these colleges?
Back to the pens, again. It is all in how Fiske chooses to interpret the info that they get. Purdue is relegated to 3.5 pen status, while U Iowa gets 4 pens. As stated, they bestow five pens on Wellesley, while CMC, HMC, Middlebury, are only 4.5 pen colleges though they are equivalent or better academically. Why? Fiske.
Or rather, I should write: Fiskeâs wife.
[quote="Publisher;c-22472351 Just shows how tough the competition is among US colleges & universities.
[/quote]
That is exactly my point - the colleges are competing to be included in publications like The Fiske Guide, so that they can be on of the âpopularâ colleges, to which all the wealthier kids mob.
Colleges and college consultants have made the applications a beauty contest in which a small number of colleges are mobbed by applicants, while the the rest are feeding off of the crumbs. Publications like The Fiske Guide, the different ranking publications, etc are major drivers in this, by bestowing the title of âelite collegesâ according to their personal beliefs, preferences, and sometimes whims.
Colleges pump out enormous amounts of money to advertise themselves to students, ad thus drive up their applications numbers, for the purpose of having lower acceptance rates, so that they can gain the title of âselectiveâ. Then they want to become more âselectiveâ, etc. Why? So that publications like Fiske will include them, and then their enrollment will climb, especially by rich kids, and they will be much better off, financially.
There are those many many people who actually believe that acceptance rates are the primary and often sole indicator of the quality of a college. I believe that on this very thread, there was a post which expressed disbelief that a college with a single digit acceptance rate was being considered as academically rigorous as one with a much higher acceptance rate. No other characteristics of either college were mentioned. Just acceptance rates.
And now, as it gets late, I will step down from my soapbox and bid you all a pleasant night.
Related to my tangential point of low-starting salaryâŠ
Bio majors often have the lowest starting salaries because they take jobs as medical transcribers or some low-paying research position, etc. But many of them are looking for that eventual payday of $250/300k/year as an MD, or $150-170k as a dentist. So again, this board is big into starting salary, but of course, not all fields of study (mostly none) are going to yield big-time returns starting out.
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What does âacademically rigorousâ actually mean in this context?
There are plenty of large state flagships with very high admission rates (80%+) where the bar to graduate is inevitably not that high, because they need to get many not very academically talented students through their programs. That doesnât stop those colleges from having honors colleges with rigorous classes for the top few percent of the student body who could have attended a highly selective college but were (for example) chasing merit scholarships.
A much more selective college may decide to only offer the rigorous classes, especially if itâs much smaller than a large state flagship and canât run so many sections. But a highly capable student may be able to get the same academic rigor either way and also receive opportunities as a standout student at the flagship that they may be less competitive for as an average student at the selective college.
Oh, I agree. For example, I am sure that KU is a fine flagship, and I do love me some Iowa City visits, but why are Iowa and KU rated four pens, while Ohio State and Pitt are rated lower? The answer: who knows?
And I honestly donât care. Sure, the Fiske Guide should simply leave out the ratings, especially when theyâre so unhelpful. US Newsâs numbered and ordered list is a different problematic animal, but at least it is utterly predictable (well, to people like those of us here on this site), listing schools largely by social standing and reputation. US News doesnât have any surprising or idiosyncratic results. Itâs essentially a giant list of schools presented in rough order according to acceptance rate, moving from low to high.
The problem is that itâs difficult to come up with a system that both rates academics and acknowledges reputation without automatically assuming that they are always one and the same. For instance, I will take on faith that Princeton or Amherst or U of Chicago are strong academically, and they are, of course, prestigious in reputation. But there are probably 200+ schools in the book that you or I or Fiske have no idea how to assess. Yes, itâs easy to say that most of the CTCL schools (Reed excepted) are not as prestigious in reputation as the tippy-top LACs. And, sure, those tippy-top schools attract very strong students. So letâs take, again, on faith, that those tippy-top schools deserve their five pens. But how many pens for Beloit? How many pens for Rhodes? How many pens for Lawrence U? Thatâs when things get arbitrary.
I hope Iâm making sense. Rankings and ratings are largelyâthough not entirelyâreputation-driven, but to what degree do the reputations and actual academics match? Iâm from IL originally, and UIUC is a solid flagship, but Iâve never thought of it as some imposing place where only the sharpest minds can handle the ultra-rigorous academic challenges there. And how do you rate schools whose reputations are solid but not as clear image-wise in peopleâs minds (all those flagships that are not UIUC, UCLA, UNC-CH, UT-Austin, UC-Berkeley, UMich; all those LACs that are not Bowdoin, Williams, Pomona, Carleton; all those private universities that are not the Ivies, Stanford, Vandy, WashU, Northwestern?). You guess; thatâs what you doâŠ