Here’s what I don’t get:
How come Wake’s ranking plummeted while Duke stayed in the Top 10?
Suddenly Wake is barely a top 50 school while Duke’s position stayed the same?
There’s not that much difference between Duke and Wake Forest or Rice/Vanderbilt and Wake Forest is there?
Some would disagree with you.
So I don’t know about Duke specifically, but I know many of the private colleges with larger endowments per student have used some of that money in ways that would be reflected more in the new-era rankings. Like, they tend to rely less on net tuition for operating budgets, which means they can have more economic diversity and might score better in various return on investment measures too.
So Duke apparently has about a $12B endowment and 6800 undergrads, Wake Forest has about a $1.8B endowment and 5500 undergrads, which works out to about 5.4 times as much per undergrad.
That doesn’t mean the quality of the education at Wake Forest is going to scale down with a radically lower ratio of endowment to students, but its economic diversity and ROI and such might well be affected.
I wouldn’t have thought there was all that great of a difference in the areas the methodology change was supposed to be capturing, i.e. that they’d move in unison to some degree, but evidently there is.
More generally, though, yes, there’s a significant difference between Duke and Wake Forest in terms of some of the other factors here, inasmuch as Duke’s been in the top 10 in the USNWR numbers for three decades, and Wake Forest’s been hovering between 25 and 30 in that same time period. That’s through a number of tweaks and overhauls to the USN scoring system.
Might depend on what “much difference” means, I suppose. That’s a small gradient of difference when seen in the context of the hundreds of institutions in the “national universities” category. So if you compare the two of them to the University of Montana, yes, there’s relatively little difference. But in terms of the components of the methodology surrounding things like research $, citations and reputation/prestige within the world of academia, they’re clearly in different tiers. Duke’s closer to (though still behind) Stanford and the Ivies when it comes to those measures. Its endowment is 7x Wake’s, and it spends about 6 times as much on research annually. Wake’s an R2 in the Carnegie classifications while 146 schools, including Duke, are R1’s. That may not have much impact on the average undergrad and their experience, of course.
Montana catching strays
Thank you for the review! Macalester looks like an often-overlooked gem. My takeaways from your and other descriptions are that (1) the campus itself is very small and compact, and (2) that it’s located a pleasant part of St. Paul with interesting shops/restaurants but, on the other hand, isn’t too urban (e.g., skyscrapers, urban blight, etc.).
Carleton sounds great too. Unfortunately, I think it’s just out of our reach financially without the prospect of any merit aid.
That’s exactly right. The immediate surroundings are a lot of tree-lined streets with a combination of mostly very nice historic detached SFHs on small lots, some Victorian mansions, a few smaller apartment buildings, smallish parks, and a scattering of what I would call roughly neighborhood-scale commercial districts. I usually call this development form a streetcar suburb (we live in one ourselves, actually).
Downtown St Paul is about 10 minutes drive in one direction, and Downtown Minneapolis about 10 minutes drive in the other direction. There are also a lot of outdoor recreational areas along the nearby Mississippi River.
We drove around the area a little bit before finding a nice cafe for a late lunch. I thought the area was super charming, super convenient, and I understand it is considered one of the nicest places to live in St Paul, or really the whole state.
The campus is very compact. More or less a big rectangle that is like one-and-a-half long-blocks wide, and five short-blocks long, plus a compact sports center and a row of language/special interest houses on the south end. Walking a circuit around the whole main part of campus (so just not down into the sports center, where I believe a football game might have been going on) took us like 15 minutes total.
I’m too lazy to link to your other post in the main campus visits thread, but if there’s a more “Minnesota” LAC than St. Olaf, I don’t know what it would be! 
(Saying this as a native Minnesotan)
Probably because their enrollment skews much more heavily toward locals than Carleton and Macalester, which are probably less than 20% in-state. Gustavus possibly in the running, I guess.
On the other thread, you commented about William and Mary’s vibe. Do you mind elaborating on that? Based on the things I’ve read and heard from folks (some of whom have kids who went there), it seems like a good fit for my son but we’ve not gotten there yet for a visit (he’s a junior) so I’m curious to hear your impressions. Thanks!
No problem at all!
Our experience visiting William & Mary was really similar to Carleton, as I mentioned in the other thread. We had two guides, and they were both smart, nice, self-confident, humorous people. Definitely into academics, but also into all sorts of fun things about William & Mary. Obviously a very traditional campus in some ways, but also lots of nice open spaces, and social spaces. The Sunken Garden is really neat, and there are woodsy walking paths in the middle of campus.
It was interesting because we saw UVA and Richmond on the same trip, and Richmond was very preppy/pre-professional in comparison, and UVA also felt more that direction. Richmond’s campus was physically very appealing to S24, UVA less so, and I am now getting a really good idea of S24’s preferred type of campus.
Anyway, in contrast to Richmond and UVA, William & Mary stood out as really nailing S24’s sort of preferred academic/fun/traditional mix.
Oh, this was not something specific to our visit, but I have noticed a lot of the colleges my S24 has liked are on the US News peer-survey lists for good undergraduate teaching, whether that is a university or LAC:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/undergraduate-teaching
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges/undergraduate-teaching
So Carleton is tied for #1 on the LAC list (and that is a big selling point for them), and William & Mary is tied for #6 on the universities list (which is very competitive).
Such lists have to be taken with a grain of salt, but I think that academicky vibe which appeals to my S24 is at least often associated with this sort of peer reputation too.
That is exactly how those 3 schools seem to be based on students we know. All great! Just somewhat different
Yeah, it is easy for me to imagine how each could be the favorite for a different kid.
My son is a freshmen at WM now, my daughter graduated in '22. The students there all seem to have something interesting about them. My son’s hall includes the “sporty kids” in track and baseball, a student who marched drum corps over the summer, my son is an elite level dancer. He’s met so many just cool people. Each smart and accomplished in their own way.
The campus is beautiful as has been mentioned. One thing that isn’t important now, but will be, is the strength of the alumni. They support the school, they show up to homecoming, they are available for internships.
Very happy that my kids ended up at WM. Love going there to visit.
Great point, and we have heard the same thing from others, namely that they are one of those colleges where the alums are pretty darn fanatical (in a good way). That is yet another way in which they overlap with the sorts of LACs my S24 is considering. There appears to be something about these academicky+fun+traditional+not-too-large schools that leads to really enthusiastic alumni networks.
And actually, having just written that out, that makes total sense.
Random aside, but before the recent visit I had not been to their campus since my own college days (so, uh, quite a bit ago). But I told my S24 I still remembered it as one of my favorite campuses I saw back in the day. And it still is (to me at least).
It seems to have that magical mix of place and people.
[quote=“lkbtnc, post:924, topic:3609931, full:true”]
My son is a freshmen at WM now, my daughter graduated in '22. The students there all seem to have something interesting about them. My son’s hall includes the “sporty kids” in track and baseball, a student who marched drum corps over the summer, my son is an elite level dancer. He’s met so many just cool people. Each smart and accomplished in their own way. [/quote]
Thanks! This sounds perfect (he’s a Nationally competitive jump roper). I really hope it won’t feel too small to him, can’t wait to bring him for a visit. It’s also a good distance from home for us too which would be great.
Yep! A jump roper would fit right in!
Size-wise, it is was very apparent how it was a smaller college than, say, UVA. UVA has about 17500 undergrads, William & Mary about 6800, and I thought it was pretty obvious how much of a difference that made.
This contrast was a positive for my S24, and in fact that was the end of our exploration of larger colleges like UVA–that clearly is not what S24 is looking for.
But again of course another applicant could feel the exact opposite way.
I vote Gustavus. St. Olaf is now getting some outside attention, and that’s not very Minnesotan of them.