We can aggregate the Niche instructor-quality responses for the US News national universities ranked in the top 20 and for the national LACs ranked in the top 20. For each school, average the agreement rates for 4 attributes. Then calculate each school’s aggregate “agreements” by multiplying the 4-attribute average times the number of responses. Example:
School responses (passionate% caring% engaging% approachable%) avgagreement% -> aggreements
Princeton 28 (96% 82% 89% 89%) 89.00% -> 24.92 agreements
After calculating “agreements” in this way, I summed all agreements for universities and divided by the number of university responses. I did the same for LACs.
Result:
On average, 1441 of 1705 university students (85% ) agree that their professors have Niche-identified positive qualities.
On average, 563 of 587 LAC students (96%) agree that their professors have Niche-identified positive qualities.
(@IzzoOne, do these averages seem to be consistent with what you found?)
It appears to me that the aggregate samples for universities and LACs are large enough to be confident that T20 LACs students are more likely than T20 university students to believe their professors have these vaguely-defined attributes. For a population of 250K students, to achieve a 90% confidence level with 4% margin of error, you’d need 420 or more responses.
However, among the T20 universities, Niche on average only received 77.5 responses for each.
The responses for the T20 universities range from 93.5% (Rice) to 72% (JHU) average agreement.
It appears to me that in many cases there are not enough responses to support a margin of error small enough to differentiate most universities in the USNWR T20 across a range of agreement rates that narrow. Ditto for the T20 LACs, which range from 97.5% avg agreement (Williams) to 88% avg agreement (USMA) with an average of only 31 responses.
Also, note that there is more variation in school size (and perhaps in research investment levels) among T20 universities than among T20 LACs. Berkeley has the 2nd-lowest agreement level among T20 RUs and contributed by far the largest number of responses. The top 2 RUs (Rice and Dartmouth) have agreement rates as high as (or higher than) 5 of the T20 LACs.