<p>truth123</p>
<p>I assume your list is in order by the number of Rhodes Scholars to represent the relative rank of these schools. It would be interesting to compare the number of Rhodes Scholars divided by the number of graduating students for each of these schools over the stated time period.</p>
<p>pierre0193</p>
<p>“Stevens is a technical school, which means tons of engineering and science majors. It’ll probably be easier for engineers to get a job today than say an english/history major and the average starting pay is definitely a little bit higher.”</p>
<p>I agree fully BUT won’t this always be the case? If so, does it raise issues about using job placement and/or compensation as criteria in evaluating schools?</p>
<p>^that’s why we proposed comparing compensation among majors only not schools on a whole. I think this problem would be solved (ignoring cost of living factors) if we did that haha, again there is no perfect way to rank schools as we can see</p>
<p>englishjw</p>
<p>Yes, UChicago had a smaller undergraduate program than many of the other schools on that list during much of the period, though the number of undergrads has grown a bit in recent years. I think UChicago will increase its number of annual winners in the future, because of the larger size now and its increasing selectivity. Completely expect it to pass up Stanford and West Point in Rhodes Winners in future years.</p>
<p>It’ll be interesting to see how Emory fares this coming year. I’m not confident in the least that we’ll remain in the Top 20.</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon and Emory moved up,very unlikely.</p>
<p>when are the rankings released?</p>
<p>Fromcalwithlove</p>
<p>Yes, the list of Rhodes Scholars I presented did not include every school in the country. It does include all the top winners but toward the bottom there are other schools you could add, who had maybe 0-5 winners or so.</p>
<p>@Truth123,</p>
<p>no offense, but if I could have included more schools in the bottom- what was the whole point of posting the list?</p>
<p>Edit: Not in anyway inciting you to pick up an internet debate 
there are too many of those in here.</p>
<p>Truth, not to offend, but I’m not sure what the point of posting this Rhodes Scholar list everyone on the forum is supposed to get at. In the hopes of more substantive discussion, would you mind elaborating on your assumptions and implications, instead of spamming the same post all over the UChicago subforum and now this one?</p>
<p>I agree Rny. Most universities produce 1 or fewer Rhodes scholars annually. It is certainly a very prestigious award, but whether a university does well or poorly on this front does not reflect on its overall reputation whatsoever. Schools like Cal, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and Penn are among the most highly regarded in the country, and yet, their Rhodes production has been no more impresive than the University of Nebraska or the University of Oklahoma.</p>
<p>Someone asked upthread when this year’s edition was being released. [Morse</a> Code: Inside the College Rankings - Education (usnews.com)](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog]Morse”>http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog) The 2012 edition of the Best Colleges rankings for National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges will go live on usnews.com on Tuesday, September 13.</p>
<p>The Rhodes is the most prestigious undergraduate prize. It is simply one more way of assessing student quality (student awards) as is admissions selectivity. Indeed, Forbes uses this and others. Rather than just saying “Oh, this is an Ivy League school so it is good” one can look at actual measures of how the students or faculty perform. Most students are simply fixated on how ‘hard a school is to get into’ rather than how good of an education they are going to get, etc. The point was to list the top schools who win the award. There are a lot of schools and some only have a few winners. (I was more interested in the top than the bottom of the list.)
In short, there are many ways to evaluate universities (faculty and students)–Nobel prizes, Rhodes Scholars, National Research Council Evaluations, faculty publishing, research grants, etc., etc.–oh, and U.S. News. Each are only one part of the story.</p>
<p>Fromcalwithlove</p>
<p>Since you asked for it, I’ll add more schools to the list and publish it on the separate thread devoted to that topic (which schools produce the most Rhodes Scholars.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’d argue that it’s much more indicative of the money that a university spends on staff offices (which is of course a function of how much money the university has). The schools with the most Rhodes awards are those that have set up specific scholarship/fellowship offices for undergraduates, sometimes an actual Rhodes office, and/or at least one full-time staff member whose job it is to advertise the Rhodes, help candidates prepare their applications, and get university endorsement of the candidates. It’s not that schools like JHU, Berkeley, etc. don’t have strong enough students - there just isn’t much institutional emphasis on recruiting candidates from their student bodies and getting them to compete. And that has a lot to do with what staff/offices they’ve dedicated to it.</p>
<p>At Stanford, Harvard, etc. there are so many resources in place for those who want to go for the Rhodes, among other scholarships: staff who will guide you through the process and endorse you, archives of previous students’ applications (including those who won) that new applicants can view, mock interviews conducted by the staff to get you ready, etc. These universities have the money to do this. (Stanford has over 11,000 staff members in total, not including faculty - so it’s not surprising that a few would be hired just for this purpose.)</p>
<p>I think it also has something to do with the Rhodes committee itself. They’ve long been enamored of the top US universities and routinely go for Harvard, Yale, etc. Why? Because that’s proof to outsiders that the Rhodes program is successful, if they can get garner lots of students from the world’s most prestigious universities. And it’s long been recognized that Oxford is a pretty snobby institution that will take prestige into account when selecting students. Not in all cases, but I don’t think that institutional quality can really explain all of why the most prestigious universities have the most awards. IMO it definitely has something to do with how the Rhodes committee views prestige, at least in part.</p>
<p>It’s possible that # Rhodes awards says something about academic quality, but there are just too many other factors at play to say such.</p>
<p>Let us see:</p>
<p>Columbia University 27
Cornell University 27
University of Montana 27
University of Oklahoma 26
University of Kansas 25
University of Mississippi 25
University of Arizona 24
University of West Virginia 24
University of Nebraska 22
University of Georgia 21
University of Idaho 20
University of Pennsylvania 19
Northwestern University 15</p>
<p>I am not sure Rhodes is a reliable measure of academic (or student) quality. As Phatasmagoric pointed out, some universities have hostorically pursued the Rhodes scholarship more agressively than others. Regardless, producing less than 1 winner annually is entirely negligible.</p>
<p>Indeed, no single measure is the absolute criterion for ranking universities. The Rhodes Trust, for instance, advises against comparing the earlier days of the award with the present since the way they select winners has changed over the years, which is why I stuck to recent years.</p>
<p>But admissions selectivity has its own issues as a ranking assessment. Basically no top university admits students solely on how smart they think the students are (even if they were God and somehow knew this in an absolute way.) Schools consider geographic distribution, legacy, ethnic background, athletic ability, potential major, possibly national or state origin, etc., etc.</p>
<p>And then there is the fact that someone like Einstein was a mediocre high school student and might not have been admitted to many schools in these days of competitive, resume-building admissions.</p>
<p>College relies on SAT Scores and GPA in admission. Is the SAT or GPA the ultimate standard for judging human intelligence? Or perhaps an indication of brightness along with how hard you are willing to work? Who designed the test? What about the fact that students from ‘top high schools’ have an advantage over the millions of Americans in small rural schools, etc., etc.</p>
<p>By the way, I just sent this to U.S. News and asked them to consider including Student Awards in their rankings in the future. (Rhodes, Fulbright, MacArthur, etc.)</p>
<p>This is the final list I am posting on this, since Fromcalwithlove asked for more schools.
This list includes all the Top 25 Colleges and Top 10 LACs, according to U.S. News. I am showing the Rhodes since it is easy determine (it is on their website.) It is NOT adjusted for school size, as Forbes does.</p>
<p>Schools that Produced the Most Rhodes Scholars Since 2000</p>
<p>Harvard 38
Yale 26
Stanford 18
Westpoint 17
UChicago 15
Princeton 15
Duke 13
Naval Academy 12
MIT 11
Washington University (St. Louis) 8
Columbia 7
Brown 7
Air Force Academy 5
Dartmouth 5
Swarthmore 5
Georgetown 4
Wake Forest 4
Virginia 4
Cornell 3
Northwestern 3
Emory 3
Williams 3
Amherst 3
UCLA 3
Penn 2
Berkeley 2
Caltech 2
Johns Hopkins 2
Rice 2
Carnegie Mellon 2
Vanderbilt 1
Notre Dame 1
USC 1
Wellesley 1
Bowdoin 1
Pomona 1
Carleton 1
Davidson 1
Haverford 1
Claremont McKenna 0
Middlebury 0</p>
<p>[“Rhodes</a> back home” - Do Something Great - The Ohio State University](<a href=“http://www.osu.edu/features/2010/rhodes.html]"Rhodes”>http://www.osu.edu/features/2010/rhodes.html)</p>
<p>truth123</p>
<p>Individual achievements like the Rhodes would make sense if they are corrected for school size. I think Forbes clearly has this right. Isn’t there also some underlying state allocation involved with the Rhodes as well? Is it reasonable for “every” school or even only the “best” schools to legitimately have a chance at all of the individual awards you are proposing?</p>