New College Ranking (WalletHub)

College Search & Selection
1

https://wallethub.com/edu/college-rankings/40750/?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=#methodology

WalletHub’s analysts compared 973 colleges and universities across seven key dimensions: 1) Student Selectivity, 2) Cost & Financing, 3) Faculty Resources, 4) Campus Safety, 5) Campus Experience, 6) Educational Outcomes and 7) Career Outcomes.

Top 20:

  1. MIT 2.Princeton 3.Harvard 4.Stanford 5.Caltech 6.Yale 7.Duke 8.Penn 9.Columbia 10.Rice

11.Berkeley
12.Harvey Mudd
13.JHU
14.Brown
15.Pomona
16.ND
17.Dartmouth
18.Vanderbilt
19.Williams
20.UChicago

2

@Penn95, seems like it’s hard to tell what the ranking means given they excluded more schools than they included due to what they referred to as a lack of information.

3

Pretty intuitive ranking I think. Nice to see the individual rankings in each category and both LACs and unis ranked together.

4

@Chembiodad yeah not sure about that, but I like the metrics they have chosen to include. maybe the campus safety metric is a bit iffy though

5

Campus safety??? What are the standards? Reported crimes per student? Are urban/rural campuses distinguished?

6

Another useless list. I truly believe that anything that goes beyond large groupings like Elite, Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, etc. is trying to state precision where there is none.

7

“Some institutions were excluded from our sample due to data limitations. Data collected is relevant to undergraduate students only.”

Not certain how this could be the case if the data came from these sources “Sources: Data used to create this ranking were collected from National Center for Education Statistics, Council for Community and Economic Research, U.S. Department of Education, COLLEGEdata and PayScale.”

Middlebury #42? Bates, Bowdoin and Hamilton excluded? I know that Bowdoin and Hamilton are very transparent with all data so not certain what drivers for exclusion were.

8

^^ It appears that a lot of test optional/test flexible schools are not on the list, so perhaps that has something to do with it

9

@wisteria100, yes saw that Wesleyan was excluded as well - seems to have been poorly executed.

10

Why is Pomona College listed as the second most dangerous school in the country? As a matter of fact, why do the small colleges seem to do so poorly on that measure?

11

@nostalgicwisdom, good point as this ranking system makes little sense -how can MIT be ranked #604 in safety and its neighbor Harvard be ranked #77? And Princeton at #562; what could be a safety concern in the pastoral upscale village of Princeton in central NJ - being attacked by a wild turkey?

12

“…what could be a safety concern in the pastoral upscale village of Princeton in central NJ - being attacked by a wild turkey?”

:)) :)) :))

13

@tiggerdad - Have you ever met a New Jersey turkey? :slight_smile:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gang-of-wild-turkeys-trap-new-jersey-mailman-in-his-truck/

14

@Mastadon, yikes, the turkeys in that article appear to be a winged subset of the MS-13 gang!

15

@Eeyore123 ok, sure, but is there an official ranking site that does tiers?

16

@ANormalSeniorGuy, why not just look at USNWR rankings and call top-20 Tier 1, #20-40 Tier 2, #40-60 Tier 3 - I think to slice it more closely than that is myopic as there are hundreds of colleges and universities in the US.

17

Why not use Forbes?

Top 20 LACs Tier 1
Pomona
Clarement McKenna
Williams
Amherst
Harvey Mudd
Swarthmore
Bowdoin
Haverford
Weselyan
Davidson
Bates
Carelton
Middlebury
Colgate
Scripps
Wellesley
Vassar
Oberlin
Barnard
Lafayette
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/2/#tab:rank

18

Re #16:

Bucknell’s not an LAC?

More generally, if the preferred concept is tiers, then the schools should be listed alphabetically.

19

@CrewDad, Forbes lists jump all over the place. Here’s their list of best LAC values of 2017 (The numbers are the overall ranking of all universities and colleges).
State Tuition (in-state for public schools) Total Student Population
#16 Amherst College MA $48,526 1,792
#25 Wellesley College MA $45,078 2,323
#26 Williams College MA $48,310 2,126
#27 Pomona College CA $45,832 1,650
#29 Haverford College PA $47,214 1,194
#32 Claremont McKenna College CA $47,395 1,324
#37 Barnard College NY $46,040 2,573
#42 Colgate University NY $48,175 2,888
#46 Middlebury College VT $46,044 2,533
#47 Davidson College NC $45,377 1,770
#49 Hamilton College NY $47,820 1,904
#50 Vassar College NY $49,570 2,421
#51 Bowdoin College ME $46,808 1,805
#54 Swarthmore College PA $46,060 1,542
#55 Washington and Lee University VA $45,617 2,264
#57 Wesleyan University CT $48,272 3,224
#58 Carleton College MN $47,736 2,057
#59 Bates College ME $47,030 1,773
#61 Cooper Union NY $41,400 966
#62 University of Richmond VA $46,680 4,182

#66 Colby College   ME  $47,350 1,847
#69 Grinnell College    IA  $45,620 1,734
#71 Scripps College CA  $47,378 988
#72 Smith College   MA  $44,724 2,989
#84 Trinity College (CT)    CT  $49,056 2,408
20

@ANormalSeniorGuy there are no official tiers but most people do have tier systems in their minds that are not too divergent from each other.

Like most people would come up with slight variations of something along the lines of:

Tier I: HYPSM©
Tier II: non-HYP ivies, Uchicago, Duke ( top LACs?)
Tier III: other USNews top 20/25 unis, top LACs
And it goes on…

Also depends on how elitist you wanna be. You could very reasonably think of all USNews top 20 schools as Tier I.