<p>It is still in a respectable rank, but I was expecting it to be top 15.
Are the rankings taking the Columbia connection into account?</p>
<p>No, the rankings do NOT take the Columbia connection into account – and that is WHY they are lower than you would expect. US News has a lot of factors that they consider that are related to college resources – for example, they give extra points if a college has a large library – and they look at things like the size of the college endowment. If you look at Barnard on its own, then it has a very small library, small endowment – and rather measly course offerings in some departments – so on all of those areas where a well-endowed LAC might pick up points, Barnard’s numbers come up low.</p>
<p>But the reality is that Barnard’s relationship with Columbia mean that it has an extraordinary array of offerings for its students at very low cost, since Barnard only has to pay for <em>actual</em> use of Columbia resources, not for maintaining all those resources. For example, Barnard has a small math department, but if a student at Barnard majors in math, that student has access to Columbia’s much larger math department and its extensive offerings. But Barnard only has a handful of math majors each year – so lets say that in a given semester, 30 Barnard students have enrolled math courses at Columbia, spread out among 12 different courses. Barnard doesn’t have to pay the cost of offering those 12 different math classes or paying the salaries of 12 different instructors – it just has to pay for the agreed instructional exchange rate for those 12 students. Meanwhile, money is flowing back to Barnard from Columbia, because Columbia pays Barnard when its students take classes there. Columbia has more resources and more classes to offer than Barnard – but it also has many more students, so most of the time the class exchange system is fairly close to breaking even. </p>
<p>I think that if you had a ranking system that factored in the value of the actual resources – rather than the college-specific resources – Barnard would come out much closer to the top in terms of resources. It would still take a hit in the rankings because of its selectivity rating --as a woman’s college, its potential application pool is half of that of any co-ed college, so the current rankings for Wellesley probably reflect the “best” that Barnard could achieve in terms of rankings. </p>
<p>But Barnard’s resources really put it in a league - or ranking category - of its own. That is, Barnard should really be compared to other LAC’s that are part of very strong consortia, where cross-registration is equally seamless and there are no significant geographical barriers to attending courses at different colleges. For example, the Claremont Colleges might have a similar degree of resource sharing. It’s not just the factor of the shared availability – it is the fact that it is there without students needing to do anything extra to make it happen, either in terms of paperwork or planning.</p>
<p>One area in which Barnard takes a hit that is uniquely its own is graduation rate, not that Barnard’s is awful, it’s just not the same as those colleges at the tippy-top.</p>
<p>There are two separate reasons for this. The first reason is that NYC offers so many opportunities that Barnard women leave school to pursue those. The presence of the fashion industry, financial industries and Broadway mean that women are often given opportunities that don’t seem like they can wait, and they pursue them in lieu of finishing college. Some, and Cynthia Nixon is a great example here, really persevere.<br>
She acted on Broadway while attending Barnard.</p>
<p>The other reason is related to Barnard’s being a women’s college. Some cultures really favor early marriage and women leave to pursue that in way that I don’t believe men would. I am thinking here of the Orthodox Jewish community, but there are others.</p>
<p>I agree with calmom’s post. The rankings don’t adequately express the amazing opportunities Barnard provides. Don’t worry about it.</p>
<p>I’d also point out that in the post-graduation world… no one really is aware of US News rankings. Employers are aware of overall school reputation, garnered over many years (not year to year rankings) - and grad schools are very aware of academic caliber. Barnard is widely known and respected. </p>
<p>Also, I don’t agree with mythmom about the graduation rate issue, because Barnard’s figures for first year retention, 4 & 6 year graduation rate are very close to Wellesley’s, and yet Wellesley is ranked #4 by US News – I think it has to come down largely to the inability to properly account for the Columbia affiliation, given that Barnard is also more selective in its admissions (in terms of number of students admitted). Wellesley students tend to have somewhat higher median math SAT scores, but other than that stats are roughly equivalent. (Barnard students have slightly better writing scores). But the bottom line is that Barnard turns away more students every year than Wellesley. </p>
<p>I am not trying to bash Wellesley – it is an excellent college – it is just the college that I think is most comparable to Barnard in terms of size (number of students) and selectivity. It’s when you look at the endowment that things really deviate – Wellesley has a $1.3 BILLION dollar endowment, Barnard’s endowment is about $170 million. So when that is factored in, on paper it looks like you are comparing a mansion to a tent. </p>
<p>Wellesley reports having a larger faculty, with fewer students than Barnard:
Wellesley: 2232 students, 259 full time faculty, 55 part time
Barnard: 2321 students, 204 full time faculty, 136 part time </p>
<p>But again… Barnard students are taught by both their own faculty and by Columbia College faculty. It doesn’t matter to students where their prof draws his or her paycheck. </p>
<p>Here is what US News says about how it factors in faculty resources:
[How</a> U.S. News Calculates the College Rankings - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings.html?PageNr=4]How”>http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings.html?PageNr=4)</p>
<p>So you can see how the large percentage of “part time” faculty at Barnard also hurts the rankings --though I would note that Barnard reports a larger percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students than Wellesley, but also a higher number of classes with more than 50 students-- Wellesley happens to have a lot more in the uncounted 20-50 range. I put the “part time” in quotes because Barnard may be more able to utilize part-time faculty because of its NYC/urban location & because of the ability to rely on Columbia’s faculty as well – plus some of Barnard’s “part time” faculty might actually be faculty who are there full time but split between Barnard and other Columbia schools for accounting reasons. For example, my d’s first advisor was the head of a Barnard department – obviously fully tenured – but she ALSO headed a Columbia graduate level department --so I have no idea whether someone like that would be counted as full time Barnard or not. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that on paper Barnard looks like it is a grossly underfunded and somewhat understaffed school in comparison to Wellesley – but the campus reality is very different. Wellesley is an excellent college, but as a practical matter Barnard students have the benefit of all the academic resources (course, faculty, libraries, labs) of Columbia, as well as being direct beneficiaries of Columbia’s $7 BILLION endowment for purposes of academics, facilities, student life & athletics (though not for purposes of housing facilities or financial aid --Wellesley is able to offer financial aid to a higher percentage of its student body, with slightly stronger average aid packages. ) </p>
<p>I don’t think realistically there would be an easy way to account for this, because you could probably pick any college on the list, no matter how well or poorly ranked, and point to issues that were not adequately accounted for in the ranking methodology. In the end, it just shows the overall folly of trying to create a numerical, linear ranking system. I think it would make more sense to stick with broader categories, much in the way that travel guides rank hotels and restaurants. You know that a 5 star hotel is going to be lot nicer than a 2 star hotel-- but you don’t know from the guide book whether a given 4 star hotel is purportedly better or worse than a competing 4 star hotel.</p>
<p>Wow thanks for the thorough answers!
I find it a shame that Barnard’s resources aren’t really taken into account. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Good point. USNEWS rankings are becoming more and more insignificant.</p>
<p>“…why is barnard ranked so low?”</p>
<p>IIRC, there are a few factors people mentioned in past discussions of this. I have not investigated myself. They said:
-class sizes were relatively high, for LAC (columbia influence no doubt)
-faculty salaries were relatively low, on a cost-of-living adjusted basis.
-peer assessment was relatively low</p>
<p>There are probably points to be made about each of these. None of these embrace the actual intermingling of Columbia. When Columbia first went coed there were some Barnard faculty departures, as I understand it, and some reputation softening which should by this time be irrelevant but may have a lingering impact in the minds of PA assessors. Currently a Barnard prof. may be attached to a Columbia research group and publishing under Columbia, and the PA people might not even know.(Calmom D’s first advisor might be such a case, potentially) Plus, certainly Columbia profs have good PA rankings which are not considered by US News, but Barnard students can learn from them nonetheless. Or, maybe the LAC PA assessors look at the Columbia association negatively, from the point of view of a conventional LAC; more “university-like” aspects. Who knows. Nobody really knows what people are thinking about when they fill those things in.</p>
<p>IIRC its faculty salaries are actually pretty high, but cost of living in NYC is high. Humanities profs, which Barnard probably has relatively lots of, as a group don’t get paid as much as profs. in economics, engineering, professional schools profs., etc.</p>
<p>But the big discrepancy is in omitting to consider access to Columbia’s resources and classes via the affiliation agreement.</p>
<p>Admissions results also figure into the ranking, and here it must be understood that, unlike Haverford, Wesleyan, Middlebury, etc., no boys apply to Barnard. All the women’s colleges take a hit for this.</p>
<p>I don’t think graduation rate is really the culprit, IIRC US News has found graduation rates correlate with a couple of factors, including student entrance stats and the school’s financial resources. It computes a regression line based on all colleges and then compares a particular college’s actual graduation rate to that predicted by its regression analysis, given that college’s scores and resources. I can’t find a US News around here, but I don’t recall Barnard taking a big hit for this. It would only get dinged if actual was worse than predicted, not merely based on the actual rate in isolation.</p>
<p>I’d just point out that if you subscribe to US News you can get a sense of which areas are weakest & strongest for Barnard in terms of US News methodology, by reordering the rankings for each separate category. (I don’t subscribe, so I can’t help out with that one).</p>
<p>Addendum to last post – it would be interesting if someone who DOES subscribe to the US News premium ranking service would take a look and post results for how Barnard ranks or scores within each separate category.</p>