Selectivity Ranking: National Us & LACs combined

College Search & Selection
1

The following list updates the following college selectivity ranking, which was posted in 2009:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/687793-selectivity-ranking-national-us-lacs-combined-usnews-method-p1.html

2015 rank … 2009 rank … College … Weighted Avg Rank
1 1 Cal Tech 3.4
2 25 Chicago 4.3
3 4 MIT 5.4
4 3 Harvard 6.5
5 2 Yale 6.6
6 5 Princeton 7.8
7 11 Stanford 10.1
8 ** Olin 11.6
9 8 Harvey Mudd 12.3
9 7 Washington U 12.3
11 6 Columbia 12.8
12 14 Pomona 17.2
13 9 Penn 17.7
14 35 Vanderbilt 18
15 18 Northwestern 18.8
16 13 Brown 19.3
17 12 Dartmouth 19.4
18 15 Duke 21.3
19 28 Tufts 23.4
20 23 Rice 23.7
21 10 Swarthmore 24.4
22 24 Haverford 25.7
23 19 Georgetown 26.3
24 17 Amherst 26.8
25 16 Williams 26.9
26 26 UC Berkeley 28.2
27 21 Notre Dame 28.4
28 31 Bowdoin 28.9
29 29 JHU 31.1
30 38 Carnegie Mellon 33.7
31 39 Wellesley 36
32 Cooper Union 36.1
33 33 Carleton 36.3
34 ** USC 38
35 22 Claremont McK 39.6
36 34 W&L 40.9
37 51 UVA 41
38 37 UCLA 43
39 ** GA Tech 44.4
40 63 GA Tech 44.6
41 27 Middlebury 45.3
42 36 Wesleyan 45.9
43 46 Boston C 48
44 44 Vassar 48.4
45 47 W&M 48.5
46 43 Hamilton 48.8
47 30 Emory 50.2
48 49 UCSD 50.5
49 ** Rensselaer 51.3
50 20 Cornell 51.9
50 56 Colgate 51.9
52 53 Scripps 52.7
53 ** Northeastern 53
54 40 Davidson 53.2
55 48 Barnard 55
56 45 Michigan 55.3
57 ** UCSB 56.6
58 ** Case Western 57.2
59 ** Rochester 57.8
60 64 Wake Forest 60.1
61 ** UC Davis 60.3
62 50 Oberlin 62.3
63 59 NYU 62.6
64 42 Brandeis 63.5
65 69 Colorado Col 63.6
66 58 Colby 63.7
67 57 Macalester 64.1
68 62 UNC 64.3
70 ** UC Irvine 65
69 ** UMiami 65.4
71 70 Bryn Mawr 66.5
72 ** UWashington 68.2
73 66 Bates 70.2
74 54 Kenyon 71.3
75 ** Smith 72.9
78 ** UIUC 73.4
76 73 Richmond 73.7
76 55 Grinnell 73.7
78 ** Union 75.7
79 ** USAFA 76.3
80 ** U Florida 76.5
81 41 Lehigh 77.4
81 71 Mt Holyoke 77.4
83 ** Gettysburg 78.2
84 65 Whitman 78.6
84 Pitzer 78.6
86 Connecticut Co 78.9
87 60 Bucknell 79.1
88 ** Franklin & Marshall 81
89 67 Holy Cross 81.2
90 74 USNA 83.1
91 ** Boston U 84.2
92 68 Lafayette 84.3
93 USMA 85.9
94 52 Bard 88
95 ** Occidental 88.4
96 ** Wisconsin 91.4
97 72 Trinity 92.1
98 ** Dickinson 95.3
99 ** Skidmore 97.1
100 ** Centre 98.5
101 ** Sewanee 99.9

2

Notes to the Above List

A double-asterisk (**) in column 2 means that that college was not among PapaChicken’s top 75 in 2009.

Calculation Formula
I’ve re-used PapaChicken’s 2009 formula:
enrolled student SAT scores (50% weighted), % of enrolled students who were in their HS top 10% (40% weight), and acceptance rate (10% weight).

These weightings are rather arbitrary; however, I re-used them so I could compare against the 2009 ranks.

I assign a one-up integer ranking for SAT, for class rank, and for acceptance rates.
Ties for each sub-rank get the same integer. Then I calculate the weighted average of these 3 ranks.
That is sorted to get the final rank.

A better approach might be to use Z-scores in order to normalize the 3 sub-rankings to a single scale.
But again, I wanted to re-use the 2009 formula.

Data Source
USNWR “Ranking Indicators” entry for each college (which corresponds to data in each school’s 2013-14 Common Data Set);
However, for 11 colleges, USNWR did not show average SAT scores. I went directly to the 2013-14 CDS for these colleges: WashU, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Claremont McKenna, Michigan, and UIUC. For Grinnell, I could not find a 2013-14 CDS; instead I used the 2011-12 CDS numbers. For the Air Force Academy, I could not find any CDS, so I used SAT averages posted to collegedata.com.

Included Colleges
I have included only colleges that fall among:
the 50 highest-ranked colleges in the USNWR “National Universities” ranking, or
the 50 highest-ranked colleges in the USNWR “National Liberal Arts Colleges” ranking.
The one exception in this list is Olin College of Engineering, which is “unranked” by USNWR.

Near-misses (colleges that are among the USNWR top 50, but fall off the end of my top 101):
Yeshiva, Soka, Penn State

Excluded Colleges
I excluded several schools only because they are not among the USNWR top 50.
However, I did calculate scores that otherwise would have placed them above some of my top 101.
These 4 schools (with their weighted average ranks) are:
Reed College (68.1)
Tulane (77)
UTexas (77.9)
Colorado Mines (84.6)
The trouble is, I do not know how many other schools outside the USNWR top 50+50 might be at least as selective as these. The data is tedious to collect, calculate, and sort. I had to constrain the set somehow.

3

Cooper Union is another “exception” to the included colleges.
It is a USNWR “Regional College”, not one of the 50 top universities or 50 top LACs.

4

University of Texas is an example of how being in different admission buckets greatly affects selectivity. Top 7% in a Texas high school with the specified course work? You’re in. Otherwise? Much more selective than overall admission stats indicate.

Why is Georgia Tech listed twice?

5

^ That would be a mistake :frowning:
Thanks for pointing that out.

6

Appreciate the effort you put into this, but these rankings, no matter how objective you attempt to be, are still based on subjective standards. Additionally, small schools are much more prone to major fluctuations because a couple students can have a major impact. Even worse, when schools are willing to accept students with lower grades or scores because they’re an Olympian, an incredible Oboe player, an entrepreneur, etc. there is no quantitative way to account for that.

7

^ Virtually every college ranking metric I’ve seen has “issues”.
The best I can do is to try to be clear about the methods I’ve used, correct errors as posters point them out … and caution HS students/parents to take these (and any other measurements) with an appropriate grain of salt.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, data is good. Measurements are good. It is better to weigh and consider a variety of measurements than to rely on your Aunt Harriet’s or your HS buddies’ opinions. Looking at this list in particular, I’m pretty confident that the schools in the top ~10 are significantly more selective than the schools in the middle ~10 (#45-#55), etc. … except that one must be alert to issues such as the importance of class rank cutoffs (or other hard cutoffs) used at some schools.

One of the benefits of a list like this, I think, is to help students discover colleges they might not otherwise recognize. If you like Williams or Pomona, for example, what are some other LACs that aren’t quite as selective? If your GC in Florida tells you you have a good shot at Miami, what are some OOS schools where you might also have a decent shot?

8

Thanks for the hard work. I like the fact this is labeled a selectivity ranking and nothing more.

9

My feeling is that USNWR made a mistake in Trinity’s “top 10%” figure, reporting it as 23%.

Interesting that you calculate overall rankings from individual rankings, and not from spread in the raw data. Actually, I’ve wondered how USNWR has handled this as well.

10

^ The figure I used for Trinity’s “top 10%” is 54%. In the USNWR ranking indicators, this number has an asterisk next to it, indicating it was corrected from an earlier, incorrect figure.

No, I don’t know the exact USNWR calculation method. I’ve tried to repeat PapaChicken’s 2009 approach, which attempted to reflect the USNWR results at the time.

11

Cornell appears out of place.

I understand this was a lot of work, but did you consider factoring for both SAT and ACT scores, as available on the Common Data Set?

Btw, as I said elsewhere, your list is at least as good as any I’ve seen in a national publication.

12

^ I didn’t mean to suggest more work for you. I mentioned this about ACT scores simply because it is a practice USNWR follows.

13

I don’t have a kid at either school, but have to wonder about the methodology when Tufts is ranked six places above Williams. Williams has higher test scores (25th/75th%), a higher percentage of kids in the top 10% and quarter of their HS classes, and a lower acceptance rate. What gives?

Tufts
680/760
680/760
690/760
ACT, 30/33
90/99
18.85%

http://provost.tufts.edu/institutionalresearch/files/CDS_2014-2015.pdf

Williams
680/790
670/770
690/780
ACT 31/34
95/99
17.51%

http://provost.williams.edu/files/williams_cds_1415_v2.pdf

14

Not my list, Sue22, but I think tk21769 used the latest available nationally published standardized data. This data would be for fall 2013 entering class.

15

interesting data, but what a fundamental waste of time.

16

^ A post to suggest why someone else shouldn’t have posted. Wouldn’t it be better to just move on to a thread you could contribute to?

17

Good catch, you’re absolutely right.
I went back and found an error.
Cornell’s “weighted avg rank” should be 31.1.
That places it a tie with JHU, right after Bowdoin.

18

As for Tufts and Williams, I double-checked my numbers against the US News “ranking indicators” for each school.
These are the figures I used:

Tufts
1370-1520

91% in top 10% of their HS classes
18.9% admit rate
http://premium.usnews.com/best-colleges/tufts-university-2219/rankings

Williams
1330-1540
88% in top 10% of their HS classes
17.5% admit rate
http://premium.usnews.com/best-colleges/williams-college-2229/rankings

The source of the current USNWR “ranking indicators” is the 2013-14 CDS, not the 2014-15 CDS.

So Tufts has (or HAD) a higher T10% class rank number, and a slightly higher midpoint between its 25th/75th percentile SAT-CR + SAT-M. I weight these 2 numbers higher than the admit rate. I don’t use either the SAT-W score or the percentage of students who were in their HS top 25%.

(But clearly, if you altered the calculation methods or used data from a different year, you’d get somewhat different ranks for many schools.)

19

@tk21769,
Got it. That makes sense. :slight_smile:

20

Entirely misleading thread as this does NOT update the fine work of Papa Chicken in 2009.

The formula used for the update is different and highly suspect

Caveat emptor. In plain English this is pure horse manure