This sounds similar to Columbia’s stated reason for dropping out of USN cooperation in advance. They argued their non-traditional student General Studies program should not be aggregated with their traditional Columbia College and engineering schools and that doing so institutionally discourages them (and others) from supporting non-traditional programs.
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Not quibbling with the business model forensics generally, but worth noting that last year Wake Forest was ranked 29, and a quarter century before that in 1998 it was ranked…28. That seems like a long enough time to discount manipulation of its admissions process to game the system. Tulane, on the other hand, had been a mid-'30’s ranked institution through the mid-late '90’s, slowly declined into the 50’s, and then started rising again 10 or 12 years ago, which suggests a higher likelihood of numbers games. And we all know about Northeastern’s machinations. Just saying one of those three doesn’t quite appear like the others. BU might make a better inclusion to the list.
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I agree those types of schools shouldn’t be included in the undergrad numbers.
Northwestern, U Chicago, and Harvard ( and I’m sure many more) all have schools for non-traditional adult learners too…are those data in their USNWR rankings too?
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I’m not familiar with those other programs but I do wonder if some of them are apples-to-oranges. UCLA for example has an adult-learning program where you can get certificate degrees with mostly after business hour classes. Most of the faculty are different and the courses are unique to that program. Whereas what Columbia has is a full-time undergraduate program, but for non-traditional students (you cannot apply straight out of HS), where said students can take the same classes as core undergraduates, though they also are offered evening course options as many work. You end up with a Columbia BA. It was the program they used for GI’s returning from the war long ago.
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While I don’t love Vandy’s press release re: tell us how much you care about USNWR’s rankings without saying you care, I do think the point about using incomplete data from College Scorecard is valid.
In order to accept this data, one has to take a view that the Scorecard data for 1/3 of the students (those receiving any federal aid) is representative of the other 2/3. I’m not willing to make that leap in the absence of the data, which obviously isn’t available. It is also true that at less generous schools than Vandy, some of those students in the majority group would have had to take out debt, whereas they didn’t have to do so at Vandy.
- Data about earnings, indebtedness and first-generation students are being sourced for the first time from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. The scorecard only captures about one-third of Vanderbilt undergraduates—those who receive Pell grants or federal loans. In other words, U.S. News is not factoring in the two-thirds of our graduates who did not rely on federal funds when determining the value of a Vanderbilt education, resulting in a highly non-representative sample. To put it differently, the U.S. News ranking puts no value on the career outcomes of any of our students not receiving federal aid. That is particularly ironic, considering that the main reason so few of our students rely on federally subsidized aid is because of the generous aid we provide through Opportunity Vanderbilt and other programs—a total of $366 million in 2022–23.
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US News also dropped graduate debt proportion borrowing which would seem to penalize schools that have no loan financial aid.
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This is an important point that gets overlooked by the skimmers. Econ kids go to work, and econ is among the most popular majors at a lot of LACs (I dare say most). CS kids from LACs go to work. Math kids go to work. Frankly, they all do.
The other side to this point is that a lot of people major in non-STEM “liberal arts” concentrations at flagship and regional publics. I have not heard anyone say that the college of arts & sciences at my alma mater (UW), which to be clear does not house any of the professional studies programs, is struggling to fill their classes.
Half the problem is that a good % of the American public thinks “liberal arts” means art history and poetry, and a disturbing % of that % thinks the word “liberal” in liberal arts has political meaning.
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I think the financial ideal for many liberal arts colleges is to have an enrollment of at least 1500-2000 undergrads. If there are 100k students in the nation who want that, it means that approximately 50-67 liberal arts colleges would have financially sustainable enrollments.
Massachusetts is the 44th smallest state in the country (by land size) and 16th in the country (by population). It has 13 schools classified as “National Liberal Arts Colleges” including Williams (2152 undergrads), Amherst (1898 undergrads), Wellesley (2447 undergrads), Smith (2523 undergrads), College of the Holy Cross (3233 undergrads), and Mount Holyoke (2193 undergrads), among others. If Massachusetts gets 6 liberal arts colleges (assuming that the rest of theirs somehow close out), that means lots of states are left with none.
I am always encountering people who seem shocked to learn that some of the colleges which place best into business positions have no undergrad business degrees. Like, Harvard College. Pretty good for business placement. No business undergrad (well, except for a completion program for experienced professionals, but not the typical HS to college student).
Of course the necessary background information is a lot of business employers basically believe studying business in college isn’t very useful, they will teach you what you need to know about their specific business on the job, and so they really just want very smart people with good discipline and well-developed skills. Of course it is fine to go to Wharton and such, but totally unnecessary. And of course after some experience you can go do an MBA, if it would help.
Anyway, just one of those interesting things which if you have seen from the inside, you know all about. But if you are not inside the system, it may come as a surprise.
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Ascribing over-enrollment at non-regional public universities* to a decline at “LACs that are not among the very elite,” which accounts for maybe 4% of college students overall, doesn’t make any sense from a basic numbers perspective. Even if applications and enrollment are down a dramatic 15% at those schools, we’re talking about an increase of 0.60% of high school graduates in any given year, spread out through the rest of the system.
Further, it’s not at all clear that any LAC within the top 60-75 or so are suffering any sort of enrollment and budget issues, so we’d need to extend far beyond “very elite” to see any sort of aggregate market shifting, which of course shrinks the numbers above. Perhaps among a certain demo, there’s an increased desire to be a part of a large school setting with bigtime sports, etc. That’s anecdotally true for my own S25 and many in his cohort of upper middle class good to very good but not quite elite students. But it’s also the case that an increased number of kids who a generation ago wouldn’t have even been aware of the existence of, say, St. Olaf, now have opportunities to learn about and attend it at an affordable price. You can’t conflate the troubles of a couple of small LAC’s in Madison or wherever to a systemic problem at every LAC that isn’t Swarthmore.
It’s much more likely that there are just more kids than there were a few decades ago and most public universities haven’t upsized their campuses and housing and hired enough additional faculty to accommodate increased demand based on that basic demographic crest. Two and a half million kids graduated from U.S. high schools in 1996. Next spring there will be 3.7 million, an increase of almost 50% in one generation. That’s also 250,000 more than just a decade ago, and I’m not doing the math/research but I’m pretty confident that’s more than the aggregate number of freshmen at every LAC in the country.
*using that instead of “flagship,” since the one example you provided, VT, while a wonderful academic institution, is the 3rd most prominent public university in its state, so really wouldn’t be what most people would call Virginia’s flagship university
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and yet USNWR weighs “Reputation” for 20% of the score!
Reputation and citation impact of publications from the college (~5% weight I believe) are completely irrelevant for choosing an undergraduate college IMHO. As long as the college has some science labs (which the top LACs do) those 2 metrics are useless. Ironically, PRINCETON which is at the top of multiple rankings is very similar to a LAC - no med school, no law school, yet USNWR will not rank LACs within “universities” in their categories.
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and many LACs have entire buildings with federally funded science labs for undergrads to do research in . e.g. Amherst , sure many others…
is there anyway to look at USNWR rankings by removing the 20% weight to “Reputation” ? (and 5% to citation impact)… ?
ridiculously irrelevant for undergrads
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There is actually a really, really obvious regional pattern to LACs. Not that this is comprehensive, but if you look at the red dots (some of which become multiple dots if you zoom in), it becomes pretty obvious where “LAC country” is located:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/where-to-find-the-us-news-best-colleges
The Northeast down through Philly is the densest cluster, then there are more down the East Coast into the Carolinas, and a decent collecting in the Great Lakes. Finally, there is a cluster in Southern California, and a scattering in Colorado and the PNW.
So why so few in the deeper Southeast or Southwest? Timing. Higher education really took off in these areas a bit later, and by then the preferred format was more universities like UVA, UGA, UNC, USC, eventually TAMU and Texas, and so on. Regional elites were sending their kids to those colleges, and sometimes specific Greek houses and such inside those colleges, not so much LACs. And so by the time air conditioning and such led to those becoming boom areas, they just didn’t have a deep LAC tradition.
Anyway, point being the 5% or so in LACs is definitely not evenly disbursed nationally, it is concentrated in regions with a strong LAC tradition. Of course if you are either in or willing to move for college to one of those regions, that is not a problem. But in certain now-important states and regions, likely LACs are not really on your radar, because they are rarely if ever discussed in your peer groups and such.
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someone explain to me why Princeton (with no med school, nor law school) is in a different ranking category from for example Swarthmore ?
2 biggest flaws in USNWR rankings
- 25 % weight to reputation and citation impact (useless for most parents choosing undergrad institution)
- not ranking LACs with “universities”; for undergrad it’s crazy to separate them. (Harvard doesn’t have undergrad business or accounting majors, princeton doesn’t have med school nor law school); the dichotomy seems weird in their rankings
And also, at many schools, in many programs, students can’t get the classes they need when they need them, which lengthens the timeline.
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I note that although Princeton lacks professional schools, it has many graduate programs that are among the top in their fields. As usual this is underscoring the pointless nature of generic rankings applied to so many different college and university models, but at a high level Princeton is usually recognized as one of the top global research universities despite its lack of professional schools.
So Princeton has a graduate school with about 3200 students total, about 2600 of whom are PhD students.
There is no equivalent at Swarthmore.
How this affects the undergraduate experience at these two colleges is very complicated, and it really depends on the field. But that is the essential difference (plus then size of the college).
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Yeah, when it comes to studying science as an undergrad, not having a ton of grad students around who need to be doing research has certain obvious potential benefits.
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My understanding is that this is due to the Carnegie classification.
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They sound like a bunch of spoiled kids, bad sportsmanship…
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