The latest USNWR rankings. What happened?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Davidson College
1

Davidson has completely fallen out of the top ten, and dropped precipitously to 17. In just one year? How is that possible?

2

Davidson is one my favorite schools and has become an admissions “bargain”, IMO

It’s selectivity number has been rising. Fewer apps., my guess

3

That can’t be it. They had more apps last year.

4

What are the top 10?

5

@cptofthehouse – Actually, lowest admit rate ever this past admissions cycle and highest yield. And anyway, USNWR removed acceptance rate from their ranking formula a year or so ago so that wouldn’t matter.

Lots of ties as usual, so Davidson is really only a couple of ‘slots’ from last year’s 10. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I know some folks treat these things as a measure of quality.; I don’t. Davidson is great for learning. It’s been great place for a long time and will be in the future. Sliding up and down rankings is just an external construct that doesn’t have anything to do with what happens on campus.

6

But it’s not sliding "up and down the rankings – only down. In fact, almost all of the the schools in the top 10 from last year stayed the same, only Davidson dropped so far down. Still trying to figure out why.

7

@wisteria100 : US News LACs

  1. Williams College

  2. Amherst College

  3. Swarthmore College

  4. Wellesley college

  5. Pomona College

  6. Bowdoin College

  7. Carleton College

  8. Claremont McKenna College

  9. Middlebury College

  10. Wash & Lee

  11. Colby College

  12. Haverford College

  13. Smith College

  14. Grinnell

  15. Hamilton College

  16. Vassar College

  17. Colgate University

  18. Davidson College

  19. USNA @ Annapolis

  20. Wesleyan

  21. Bates College

  22. USMA @ West Point

  23. Harvey Mudd

  24. Univ. of Richmond

  25. Barnard College

  26. Macalester College

  27. College of the Holy Cross

  28. Colorado College

  29. Kenyon College

8

Davidson’s drop is illusory (as would also be the case for most other apparent changes). By its overall score (86) it places the same distance from the third place colleges (Swarthmore/Wellesley, at 93) as the third place schools do from the first place school (Williams, set to 100).

9

Nice move up the charts for Holy Cross.!

10

My son is a senior at Davidson. The President, Carol Quillen, sent out an email this morning to the community. I’m not sure I can post links to other sites but this is Davidson’s explanation of the change in rankings: https://www.davidson.edu/offices-and-services/institutional-research/college-rankings/notes-us-news-rankings-2020

11

Yeah. I had a feeling that the Pell Grant stats would hurt Davidson. Many of the schools ranked above Davidson have a larger percentage of Pell Grant kids. I got the feeling, even on campus, that Davidson isn’t as diverse as the schools we visited ranked above it (Grinnell, Bowdoin, Carleton). I think it hurt them. Doesn’t take anything away from all of the good things about the school.

1 Like
12

Williams and Amherst in particular do a BIG push for URMs with low SES. I dug deep on this when S19 was applying. At Williams, 50% of the students are students of color and 22 percent receive Pell Grants. Amherst isn’t far behind. Since USNWR is now using those stats to rank, it obviously hurts schools that are less diverse and that accept fewer Pell Grant kids.

13

@needscaffeine : Thank you for posting the email from Davidson’s President. Very well done. Responsive, positive & to the point.

Whether or not one is a fan of US News’ rating & ranking of US colleges & universities, it seems clear that US News can have a positive effect on institutions of higher learning by its emphasis on various factors such as first year retention rate, small class sizes & socio-economic diversity.

14

Actually @homerdog, while Williams and Amherst both do a great job enrolling urms, Amherst has the higher %

15

Yes, thanks for posting @needscaffeine (Love your user name)
President Quillen is very impressive, and I’m not surprised she responded quickly.

16

Does it matter? No. Find a different list where Davidson ranks more highly. You’ll find one.

17

Regarding Davidson’s statement, they seemed to stretch a bit in saying,

Davidson’s CDS registers a 73% level for students reporting a HS rank in the top 10%. In comparison, colleges within the US News top 10 uncommonly report 80% or higher for this figure.

18

I was wondering about this statistic because Davidson has a pretty high percentage of students coming from private schools, and they don’t always do class rank. Our local public school system dropped class rank recently. I looked up the Davidson CDS and only 34 % of incoming freshmen submitted class rank. I don’t know enough about other LAC’s to know if this is typical so I looked up a couple and their percentage of freshmen reporting class rank was even lower? This is interesting.

19

This doesn’t surprise me. When I attended a Davidson info session about three years ago they said class rank had moved down on their rubric in favor of GPA and rigor. In terms of ‘hard measures’ it was: GPA, rigor, test scores and then class rank – in that order. There were of course the holistic aspects on the list too (ECs, leadership, etc.), some of which I seem to recall were listed higher than class rank.

If top 10% of class is hurting them in rankings they may re-think this. If they do change it’s the tail wagging the dog, sigh, but I suppose that’s still the game.

20

People probably figured it out, but I meant “commonly” in #16.