Gosh! That sounds so stupid to be upset about being 18th… Should Harvard complain that that they are 3rd?
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They’re smart enough to not do it out loud. But trust me: somebody, somewhere in Cambridge MA has been tasked with figuring this out.
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As someone noted (very far!) upthread, some schools with very low Pell enrollment rates (Duke, Caltech) stayed stable. The scoring system doesn’t give points to schools that are graduating Pell recipients at meaningfully lower rates than non-Pell.
The other thing that hurt Vanderbilt, and I would not have known this had it not been for its tantrum letter!, is that they had been counting some expenditures from its $6 billion hospital system as undergraduate resources, and apparently USNWR disallowed that this year. This could have cost WUSTL, Emory, NYU, and others points as well.
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I can only imagine now panic at Northeastern… They are out of top 50…
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They might wholesale rebrand themselves as Northwestern and pass themselves off as the real Northwestern 
Tulane’s chancelor on Zoom call with Vanderbilt’s Chancelor:
" You think you have it bad? We’re now #73 and behind Stony Brook. Where’s Stony Brook?!.. And Rutgers. Isnt Rutgers the school nobody in NJ wants to attend??"
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Wow, Tulane really got hurt.
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Yes, although large research output and big grad programs are at least pretty well-correlated.
Reversion to the mean, isn’t it?
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At a high level, a lot of research university measures are correlated for more or less obvious reasons. Resources per student, revealed preferences, selectivity/student numbers, research output, various reputational measures . . . .
Basically, if you have enough money, you can buy the other things, and improve your reputation. And then you will tend to get more gifts or state support and such too, and the cycle feeds on itself.
And I don’t necessarily think there is anything really wrong with that. But how that intersects with a given individual student’s goals is complex.
Still, it is not like I think the people who basically want to go to a rich research university where the expenditures per college student are a lot more than even full pay are being irrational. Very often, you can see where the money went.
But in many cases, there are other ways of ALSO getting a good deal, it just depends a lot on the student. Like, in state at a decent flagship is also a good deal, but obviously you have to be in state. An LAC may be very competitive in this sense. And so on.
This has basically been going on since the early 1800s.
Over time, some of what used to be LACs converted to research universities, like the Ivy League. Others stayed LACs (or at least mostly), but have identified some sort of niche market.
Overall, only something like 5% of comparable US students go to a SLAC. And with the growth in engineering as a share of degrees, I would not be surprised if that had declined somewhat. But still, I think in a lot of ways that shift is already complete, and the rest is now happening in small margins.
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Virginia Tech is up. I think it deserves a new ranking. It was severely underanked in the past.
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Only 8% Pell + a Pell graduation rate in the 70s, and possibly the same hospital expenditure correction mentioned by Vanderbilt.
Going to Pitt. Was hoping for a climb in the rankings but in-state tuition is still deciding factor either way.
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Judging by the number of applications to schools throughout, say, the Top 40, of this category, I’d say they’re not going away anytime soon. This is a favorite canard of the “I hate small schools” crowd.
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Yeah, what is sometimes called the “nationalization” of college applications benefits both the most prominent research universities and the most prominent LACs.
That said, pretty quickly once you start looking at more regional/local universities and LACs, you can see a very different picture emerge. That is because the total US 4-year college population is declining. And so far the decline has been relatively mild, but there is a looming “demographic cliff”.
So I doubt there is going to be some mass movement of that remaining 5% or so of people from LACs to research universities.
But I would not bet against a wave of consolidations following that demographic cliff hitting–among both.
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I would say the top 50-60 LACS are not missing on enrolment.
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Agreed. I picked “Top 40” because the original comment, not made by @NiceUnparticularMan but another poster, was that LACs that are not among the very elite were going the way of the Dodo. To me, “very elite” stretches out to T20 at best. Maybe I need to revise that range.
Well, students go not only to top very elite. Some really want to go to smaller but good quality schools.
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Agreed.
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Yeah, there are healthy ecologies of LACs where not all are super selective, or really well known by Great Aunt Mathilda, but they are fantastic choices for the right kids.
I prefer the term niche to elite because I think it basically captures the idea. Like, 99% of kids may not be interested in some particular sort of LAC, but if 1% are, that is over 100,000 kids to spread around. And it goes far in terms of the number of institutions, because they are small.
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