Despite being ranked 12th by U.S. News, Vassar holds ‘modest’ ranks when it comes to other popular ranking sites. Even after reading about their different ranking methods and taking into account the fact that Vassar is an LAC, I am still unable to understand this.
(When I talk about ‘modest’ ranks, I mean Vassar is significantly ranked lower than colleges with similar ranks on U.S. News.)
P/s: the reason I care this much about the ranking table is because as an international student paying a large amount of money for education, I plan to return to my home country when I graduate. Ranking tables are the only measure of competence and prestige in a country where most people have heard of the Ivy League only. That being said, my prospects of future employment rely partly on these rankings.
You should also take the Forbes rankings into account. The business magazine ranks U.S. colleges and universities based on their Return on Investment (ROI) to answer the question “this college is expensive, but is it worth it?”
Among all U.S. colleges and universities, Forbes ranks Vassar 33rd, Colby 41st, Colgate 42nd, Macalester 68th, and Bryn Mawr 70th. Forbes also prepared a ranking of just the top 25 U.S. liberal arts schools: Vassar was 15th, Colby 19th, and Colgate 20th, with Macalester and Bryn Mawr not making the top 25.
^ Sounds like you better get into the Ivy League or Stanford or MIT. Because oversees the vast majority of LACs have no or little name recognition. Jesus, even out West you’ll get blank stares if you tell someone you’re going to Williams - “where is that?” I’d say a full 98% of the people in my home state of Washington think Gonzaga is a more prestigious and rigorous school than Whitman, which is not even remotely accurate.
LACs are not for people who need constant reaffirmation at cocktail parties.
As an American Vassar alum who’s mostly in international circles, the Vassar name seems to do really well with internationals who studied in the US at top schools, but otherwise is pretty easy to explain. When a hiring manager at a major firm in say, Singapore, went to somewhere like Harvard Business School, it’s guaranteed they had a classmate from Vassar (and from other top LACs). You’ll find that if you’re working in firms that hire people from abroad, name recognition is less of an issue than it is at family gatherings and on forums online.
If someone doesn’t know Vassar, usually just explaining “it’s a small school,” “it has a connection with Yale,” etc. and naming some alums is good enough to convince people it’s not some random college anyone could get into.
I’ve never heard of the “Niche” rankings you mention. The only rankings that truly matter are U.S. News. Forbes is arguably solid too. But I’ve only ever heard employers and grad schools reference U.S. News, where Vassar is always in the top 15 (right now, #12).
As a Vassar devotee, it’s distressing to point out that the Forbes ranking is worthless and nothing more than another deceitful ploy to sell magazines and generate clicks. The ranking is derived from data supplied by PayScale.
The data are self-reported, often limited to a handful of respondents and are inarguably unreliable. GIGO
What I really find amusing is that PayScale ranks Vassar #968 in their 2017 ROI report of best value colleges. http://www.payscale.com/college-roi
ROI/outcome-based rankings are problematic for multiple reasons mentioned in countless other threads. Here are two: first, they tend to favor schools with a lot of CS/Engineering and/or Business/Finance majors – since they are most likely to land those lucrative jobs; and second, they tend to favor schools on the coasts, since cost of living (and salaries…) are higher there generally.
Now, Humanities majors at top schools do now and then snag Finance jobs, but not at the same rate as Business/Finance/Econ majors do.
I think Vassar is very good. I think its closest peers, in terms of rep, are Wesleyan, Haverford, and Carleton.
The OP is concerned about rankings. @merc81 supplied a ranking that could be used to offset the modest rankings Vassar has received on some other sites. Forbes as a source is at least as reputable, and would be more recognizable, when compared to the others mentioned, even if the prevailing standard may be low.
I think, in general, the Dept of Education site, collegescorecard, does a much better job of tracking future earnings than Payscale; they match the tax returns of every student who applied for Federal loans, ten years after matriculation. Aside from the same weaknesses pointed out by @prezbucky, there is the rather obvious one of how to treat data from so-called “no loan” colleges like Harvard and Amherst which would have to be remarkably skewed (perhaps, that’s why Forbes uses both Pay scale and college scorecard.) But, it’s hard to argue that the samples are small or self reported.
I went to Macalester and still get back to campus once in a while. My son is at Vassar. The idea that Mac would come out ahead in these rankings is ridiculous, Vassar is clearly better by many metrics. I am suspicious of the Niche ranking methodology in particular.
Whoops, I have to add though, I missed that you were an international student. Macalester’s commitment to international students is genuine and goes a long way back (Kofi Annan and beyond). Internationalism is a core part of the Macalester brand. So there’s that! But in terms of name recognition, Vassar would still beat Mac, abroad and in the US.
@anguyen21 If I was an international I probably wouldn’t attend an LAC to begin with especially if it wasn’t Swarthmore or Williams. In general LAC name recognition is poor in the states I couldn’t imagine how poor they are around the world.
Just a brief note about tone. @WesmoreDad said “LACs are not for people who need constant reaffirmation at cocktail parties,” but the poster had explained that he is an international student and the various rankings he was discussing matter to him for a particular reason. Pretending that the poster wants “constant reaffirmation at cocktail parties” seems odd (since the poster had given a specific reason for his concern) and, more importantly, seems harsh. I had someone call me out a year or two ago for an overly harsh comment I had made in a post, and I appreciated it. I hope we can all try to keep CC discourse constructive!