<p>Since 1990, acceptance rate at Washington U has decreased by about 40%, the average SAT at Washington U St Louis has increased by about 150 points (adjusted for the 1995 recentering), and the graduation rate increased by about 20%. I think the main reason is marketing.</p>
<p>I'm not so sure those college presidents were particularly swayed by proximity. Oberlin remains to this day one of the leading per capita producers of phds, so it's profile in academia was probably very high. </p>
<p>Moreover, its level of average student capability used to be somewhat higher in the relative stats pile than is now the case. </p>
<p>For instance, focusing on the particular schools you mentioned,here's some objective stats from about 1971 :</p>
<p>Average SATs of the freshman class
Bowdoin 1272 (est)
Middlebury 1293
Colgate 1256
Washington & Lee 1184
OBERLIN 1307</p>
<p>I analyzed some trends 1971 vs. 2002, a few years ago, and it was evident that a number of high-quality liberal arts colleges and smaller universities had lost some ground over the years. Schools such as: Bryn Mawr, Reed, Smith, Brandeis, Sarah Lawrence, Colorado College, Lafayette, William & Mary, Lehigh, and Haverford. Oberlin as well. Some of these places had trouble maintaining class selectivity during the "baby bust" years, would be my guess. During this time the nation moved towards the South literally, and towards the right politically. And the cities recovered their appeal.</p>
<p>This was precisely the period that these rankings came into vogue, and these possibly made it harder for the schools to get back up to their former station.</p>
<p>They all remain great schools, but back 35 years ago their relative prominence was several notches higher.</p>
<p>"i can see absolutely NO other reason as to how st. olaf, earlham, centre, smith, st. john's could ever rank ahead of washington and lee, claremont, colby, and bates."</p>
<p>Maybe in some cases their ranking ahead of some other schools reflected the fact that, at that time, they were actually BETTER, by at least some relevant objective measures???</p>
<p>For example, how about THIS data point:</p>
<p>Average SAT of freshman class, 1971:</p>
<p>Smith 1273</p>
<p>Washington & lee 1184
Claremont (est) 1221
Colby 1243
Bates 1235</p>
<p>"Maybe they just liked different things about the two schools but nevertheless liked both of them and would be happy attending either one of them, so they applied to both hoping to get in one of them. It doesn't sound that ridiculous."</p>
<p>I agree. I applied to Williams and Columbia (and ultimately chose neither) not so much because of their rankings, but because each had great programs in what I wanted to study, I had friends at each of the schools and I knew I'd have an incredible time at either one.</p>
<p>monydad, as interesting as those statistics are, the discussion on this thread centers around rankings produced in 1983 and 1988, not 1971. smith is not a better school than washington and lee, claremont, colby, and bates; over 90% of people on CC would agree. your statsitics are based solely upon entering SAT scores, which means something, but by no means everything. i am tired of seeing people on CC compare SAT scores to differentiate quality of schools; those numbers are in my opinion only a tiny fraction of what makes a good school a good school. but, if you are so bent on that one statistic, compare the numbers of W&L, colby, bates to smith for the last ten years (and now) and see what you find.</p>
<p>monydad, </p>
<p>Is there a link for those SATs from 1971? I'd be real interested, in particular scores from that time for Lehigh, Penn and Carnegie Mellon.</p>
<p>I had a guide from about 1970 that listed SATs, it may be buried somewhere in my attic. One thing: at the time SATs were kind of private, privileged information almost like an IQ score. A parent wouldn't ask another parent what did little Johnny get on his SATs like you would today. So a guide like that was valuable since you didn't have much to compare to scorewise. Did you locate an old guide through a library or a school? Thanks.</p>
<p>Yes I remember schools like Smith and Oberlin being tops (still great schools). Also Mt. Holyoke. There was an Antioch College in Ohio that was also well respected, I don't know if it even exists, same with Bennington in VT, Both benefitted from "hippie" era of 60's and 70's.</p>
<p>pirt</p>
<p>Perhaps you attend W&L, are an alum or are somehow affililiated with the school, but I believe that there is a simple reason why the data have changed so dramatically and that is co-education. With the societal changes of the last few decades, single sex education at the college level has become less appealing to many of both sexes and thus the applicant pools to schools of this type have declined. </p>
<p>During the 1970s W&L was a good all-male school, but admittance was easier than to UVA or W&M. Beginning in the 1980s, with women as part of the applicant pool, the selectivity of the the school improved markedly and the school's academic reputation has bloomed. </p>
<p>The reasoning is similar for some of the all-women schools that have lost some of their luster as many of the top female candidates may have no interest in an all-girls school and thus the quality of the applicant pool declines. Some of the very top women colleges have been able to maintain their position and reputations, but many, many more have not including some of the schools previously mentioned in this thread.</p>
<p>I would definitely agree that Smith, on a relative basis, used to be considered a better school than it is now and the longer it's gone from the days of all-male schools the further it's fallen; and its SAT avg having been higher than Bowdoin, Colgate, W&L doesn't surprise me. I remember in 1989 that the SAT avg for Colgate was 1258 (so basically no change in 18 years), while Middlebury was 1255 (so a 38 point decline); so it's interesting to see how schools jump up or down (or don't). I am surprised that W&L was relatively that much lower than the others, though. </p>
<p>It is interesting how the rankings have effectively become a self-fulfilling prophesy and schools higher on the rankings (for other initial reasons) get students with higher SATs attracted to the schools; which, in turn, does make their SAT averages go up. While I would agree that there's more that should be considered than SAT to judge a school, I think SAT average is the best single measure of student academic quality because it is more objective than GPA, less able to manipulated or capricious than acceptance rate or yield rate and less arbitrary and more representative of the entire class than % in the top 10% of hs class. </p>
<p>How do you have access to all these old SAT scores? I do agree that schools used to be very secretive about this type of what now would be considered very basic info. Nowadays, you see on May 3, Yale racing to out-do Princeton to report that they had a 70% yield and Middlebury reporting on presentations how they win 63% of their cross-admit battles with Bowdoin. This type of more obscure comparisons would never have been so widely distributed before the last decade.</p>
<p>What happened is:</p>
<p>When my oldest child started looking at colleges, a few years ago now, I started giving her my 2 cents. She responded that my information was hopelessly stale, a consequence of having been formulated during my own college search, and college years, back in the dark ages.</p>
<p>So I checked out of the library the Casss & Birnbaum college book that was the very one that I myself used when selecting colleges years before. I compiled the data on my computer, for the top 100 or so schools, and compared them to the present-day information which was readily available.</p>
<p>IT is NOT true that the information back then was not widely available, or secretive in any way. It was all there, in the college guide books such as Cass & Brirnbaum. OK not cross-admit data, but the relevant basic stats were all reported. In fact, they broke it down in more detail then than they do now. They had SAT scores for most schools broken out separately by gender. The admissions stats for more of the individual colleges within universities, for example at Cornell, were broken out individually. The only thing lacking is that they were not on anybody's website, since there of course were no websites. But if you bought the college guides you had the data.</p>
<p>To pirt8528:</p>
<p>My point was not that Smith is better now than those particular schools. My point was that perhaps the college presidents back in 1983 were disposed to evaluate Smith highly because at that time they believed it was better. Based on its historical status during the years that these people would have formed their impressions.</p>
<p>You had suggested that you could see NO valid reason that Smith could have been ranked higher then those schools. I was suggesting that maybe that the relative status of some of those schools was different then than you may regard it to be now. Hence such valid reasons did exist, back then.</p>
<p>Whether that is the case , or in the last ten years, I expressed no opinion or comment.</p>
<p>I'm sorry I caused you to be tired. Fortunately, apparently at least some other posters seem to be interested in this information.</p>
<p>Have a good day.</p>
<p>sorry if i was hostile before, i did not mean to attack or insult. dajada, you are completely right about the single sex/ co-ed thing. it is very true that W&L's numbers skyrockted, and their acceptance rate began to steadily decline after the school went co-ed in the mid 80s. hampden sydney, similar to W&L in many ways (historical, conservative, traditional, southern), never made the shift to accepting girls as well; as a result, they have fallen behind by not being able to recruit top students b/c, as gellino said, its ranking remains low. a self fulfilling prophecy indeed. monydad, i misread what you were saying, once again i apologize. i accept that the ranking system may have been different then (although much more flawed).</p>
<p>I'm surprised anybody cares what the US News rankings are right now, let alone 23 years ago...</p>
<p>It's just fun, confused_student. It's like caring about a horse race. It doesn't really matter who wins (except maybe for the horses' owners, who stand to gain/lose in money and prestige); it's just something to do.</p>
<p>Well, there are better things to do, no?</p>
<p>apparently not...considering you're wasting your time ragging on a perfectly reasonable thread.</p>
<p>I think these discussions are fun but they are also important. Families spend more money on college education than anything else except a house. Students spend four important, formative years at college. Choice of college can affect your future in important ways. It's important to have good information and choose wisely. It is one of the most important decisions you can make in life. People are foolish if they don't care about the validity and meaning of the information that helps them make the college choice.</p>
<p>I certainly agree with the importance of college selection being a life determining event. USNWR rankings aren't terrible and do seem to have improved in logical methodology and are useful in identifying good schools. However, the concept of the importance of putting any stock in a relative comparison of the #8 school vs the #12 school seems mostly meaningless to me since they can flip-flop the weighting of two of the factors (neither of which may mean anything to me anyway) and the result can be the opposite the next year.</p>
<p>Since perceptions are caused by the evolution of the rankings, it can be somewhat useful to see the initial rankings, which were yet to be tarnished and based more on intuition, rather than to base opinions solely on current constant manipulation by USNWR in order to change rankings in order to sell more magazines.</p>
<p>US News sells more magazines each year because there is new demand for the information each year. Consumers of higher education benefit greatly from rational and objective ratings of colleges and universities. Before US News Best Colleges, consumers were more in the dark and relied more on hearsay. The rankings change because (1) colleges change their information (2) US News occasionally changes its method.</p>
<p>That's quite the spin. Do you work for US News? Clearly, they have an incentive to change the methodolgy in order to create a "buzz" about what is top and what is not. That gets the market to purchase it. Why not make the rankings every 5 years? Schools are clearly not idle bodies, but they are also not football teams that may change yearly. Very seldomly will a school be justified up or down more than a spot or three, except maybe a freak incidient such as Tulane (having no resources... not saying that IS tulane, but the idea of it being possible) and the only rational justification for a year to year publication comes from the economic incentives.</p>
<p>If you take all of the US News rankings between 1989 and 2006 and put them in a spreadsheet form, you'll see that the average rankings leave HYPSM and CalTech between 1-5, whereas the next four are some combination of Dartmouth, Duke, Penn, Columbia, followed closely or tied by Brown, Chicago, Cornell, and NU (with WashU up there for the past couple of years)</p>
<p>Besides Berkeley getting owned by the rankings, the top 10-15 schools have been relatively consistent and a definete pecking order can be seen</p>
<p>If someone could do that, that would be cool, but it goes to show that the same schools have been considered among the top for the past few decades (or 17 years)</p>
<p>So picking a school based on ranking isn't that bad an idea for the relatively short term, lol (unless you actually care about enjoying school instead of pursuing the largest starting salary...shudders at the thought)</p>
<p>Can anyone link to all the past years US News rankings?</p>