@usual, yes understood. But I can still be a cheerleader for Pomona which is tops in my book along with Cal.
Pomona won’t make it into the top 3 in USNews Rankings this year or for a while (if methodology is consistent) due to a number of reasons:
*It has a lower evaluated peer reputation than Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore
*It has less classes with 20 students or less due to consortial sharing of courses; this is a significant factor for the rankings. Unlike schools like Claremont McKenna, which place caps on the number of courses that are over 20 students for the fall, Pomona does not do this. Furthermore, a heavier concentration of STEM kids than other LACS- especially in super popular departments like math, biology, and computer science- makes this a difficult ranking for Pomona to excel in.
*While faculty salaries are among the highest of any LAC, they are weighed down by a cost of living adjustment
*Alumni donation rates are lower against Williams and Amherst
Input factors that Pomona excels in- student selectivity, admissions rate, retention rate, etc.- are not very heavily weighted in this ranking.
You can see some of the US News components from last year in this page: http://pitweb.pitzer.edu/institutional-research/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2015/02/2015-USNEWS-Public-Final.pdf
As to William’s unique offerings among top LACs: Winter Study (though Middlebury has this as well) and Oxford style tutorials
@urbanslaughter “I agree that Williams an Amherst offer nothing other than name-recognition over Middlebury and Bowdoin.”
Curious what makes you say that.
Williams will maintain its position at the top of its USNWR category for the foreseeable future (excepting a methodology change). Williams’ current four-point separation over the second-ranked college is statistically substantial (and equivalent to 18 ranking positions elsewhere in the category).
@merc81 I’m confused where you got the Villanova data, which ranks it in the 80s, from
@ThankYouforHelp I said that in response to preppedparent’s comment #15 “What does Williams have that Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury and Pomona don’t?”
@guitar321 : From a limited analysis based on the standardized scoring of entering students: “The 610 Smartest Colleges,” Business Insider.
@guitar321 @merc81 Here is a link to a 2014 Forbes/Business Insider list that ranks schools by their average SAT scores. Villanova ranks 84th. There is obviously a lot more to rankings than just incoming SAT/ACT scores. Thus BU and GW doing a lot better than their 100 rankings, and Northeastern and RPI doing worse than their 36th/37th by SAT score. Villanova has a great graduation rate/retention rate, but small endowment. Peer reviews are a substantial part of the rankings, that makes it hard to peg where Villanova may be. Anywhere between 40-70s sounds like a good bet.
http://www.businessinsider.com/smartest-colleges-in-america-2014-10
@class0f2017 the 1310-1440 25%-75% figures you are giving are the stats for students admitted to Villanova. That is a fair amount higher than the figure that ranking systems use, which is the 25%-75% for the students who actually enroll at Villanova, which is 1200-1400.
Hopefully Villanova learned a hard lesson in 2011 regarding accurate reporting of admission stats:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/08/16/aba-censures-villanova-law-school-for-reprehensible-conduct/
This may affect peer evaluations.
That’s interesting. I’d agree that anywhere between 40-70 would make sense, but it’s so hard to tell. UVA was 55 on that list but mid 20s on USNWR list. Also, I don’t think that’ll affect peer evaluations, especially because that happened 6 years ago. A few years back, Emory got caught doing the same thing for its undergrad SAT scores, and its rank hardly changed
If rankings must exist, here is how I think they should look…
Top 10. CalTech
Top 10. Chicago
Top 10. Columbia
Top 10. Duke
Top 10. Harvard
Top 10. MIT
Top 10. Penn
Top 10. Princeton
Top 10. Stanford
Top 10. Yale
Top 20. Berkeley
Top 20. Brown
Top 20. Cornell
Top 20. Dartmouth
Top 20. Johns Hopkins
Top 20. Northwestern
Top 20. Notre Dame
Top 20. Rice
Top 20. Vanderbilt
Top 20. Washington U
And so on…
Obviously this type or decile or quartile ranking will NEVER happen as USNWR has created a rich annuity out of their dying publication. I truly believe they play musical chairs with the top 3 or 4 to create “controversy” to sell more magazines. That being said, whether they claim to or not, colleges care deeply about their rankings and many will play manipulative games to improve them. Subjective rankings are the scourge of academia and they only help to incite the mania and to inflate the bubble.
Caltech won’t be a top 10 and Duke shouldn’t be. Cal should be but won’t be.
@preppedparent For simplicity, I used the rankings used earlier in the thread. My point was that deciles and quartiles should be used. I should have been more clear. But I guess people will miss my point and go straight to arguing “my” rankings. Oh well.
Clearly the USNWR rankings are a sham, the last refuge of a dead/dying publication. I would put my 5 degrees, and teaching posts over 3 decades at 5 different unis (mostly from and at so-called “top-ten” schools) up against Bob Morse’s BA from the Univ. of Cincinnati and MBA from Michigan State any day. His methodology is useless as so many of the professionals he solicits just throw his questionnaires in the garbage where they belong. Pointed criticism of his rankings and his methodology from top academics are legion. These rankings and the discussions they generate are symptomatic of a culture-wide status anxiety. That being said, the vast majority of professional academics I know (this includes several current and former college/university Presidents and Provosts, as well as numerous Deans, and Professors) appear to be in general agreement that Stanford and Harvard are the best all around (undergrad and grad school) universities in the US and in the world (there are, of course, many field-specific exceptions to this general agreement). It has been this way for a while and will continue most probably this way for the foreseeable future, the USNWR rankings in all their money-making manifestations and permutations to the contrary notwithstanding.
A good example of elitism that is irrelevant to most people today.
@STEM. Thanks. I get your point now. I put Cal in the top 10 (decile) with Harvard, Yale and Stanford any day. Yes, it deserves a top decile ranking, as a world class university. By other measures and ranking schemes, this top notch research university is among the top in the world. What’s holding it back is not the # of Nobel Laureates, but something like graduation rates.
If “elitism” is indeed “irrelevant,” then what is this entire discussion about?
Agreeing with your tier system @STEM2017
Why are degrees and experience “eliteism”?
Because he is claiming that he is a much better person to judge colleges than an editor who only has 2 degrees from state schools.