Hey all, I know that US News has unfair ranking methodologies and gives schools like Wesleyan ranks way lower than what it deserves. So I was wondering what Wesleyans rank is realistically, or what schools is Wesleyan equal to. I am not going to let something like rank decide where I end up but I am interested to see how Wesleyan stacks up in realty to the other LAC’s. Thanks for any responses!
I guess I’m the rankings guy now. The Washington Post did a great thing – they averaged all the major rankings to come up with a more “accurate” one. They ranked Wesleyan 7th among liberal arts colleges:
When I was at Wesleyan (about a decade ago), it was always around 10 in US News. Up until very recently – all through the 80s, 90s and early aughts – it hovered between 7 and 14.
Thanks so much @farcry that was really helpful!
One of the reasons for Wesleyan’s ranking is the size of its endowment. Endowment is an important element in the ranking system which just tells you how bogus the rankings are. Wes has been making a concerted effort to increase its endowment over the past 2 years not because of the rankings but because its good for the school.
Well, yes and no. It’s a little more complicated than that. Endowment per student was an element of the USNews ranking system for many years, but, changed over to an “expenditures per student” metric some time ago. The results were a wash largely because expenditures per student really ignore economies of scale that are achievable by being a larger LAC - fewer administrators per student; lower IT expenses per student, etc., etc…
The switch also coincided with an important accounting shift in some LAC financial reports. Financial aid used to be reflected on the revenue side of the ledger as the amount of tuition (or lack of it) collected. Nowadays, it is reflected on the expenditure side as a positive cost. What that means is, that a college can raise its sticker price (tuition) as much as it wants and charge the gap - or discount - between it and the actual amount collected as an expense. In other words, it has now become advantageous for a college to adopt a high tuition/high discount business model.
Whether that is good for consumers in the long run is open to question, IMHO.
@farcry thank yo so much for the link! It was super informative xoxoxo
@circuitrider then what do you think Wesleyan’s rank should be?
I’m pretty old-fashioned about these things. In my generation, we put all the highly competitive, highly prestigious colleges and universities into one basket and allowed some leeway for “fit” and differing missions, content to list them alphabetically as they still are in publications like Barrons. If forced to rank them in a beauty contest sort of way, it would be hard not to give pride of place to the Sunbelt schools (even though that’s looking a bit more shaky as climate change lays waste to the region’s erstwhile self-confidence),
Stanford
Pomona
Caltech
Rice
Harvey Mudd
Followed by HYP, MIT and Chicago
From there, I’d plug in Swarthmore as a kind of bridge between the highly charged atmospheres of Cambridge and Palo Alto and the sleepier villages of the east coast.
I’d follow that with Dartmouth, Amherst and Williams
I’d put Wesleyan, Middlebury, and Bowdoin somewhere between Brown and the inner-city Ivies, Columbia and Penn, then, Cornell, the newer “ivies”, like Duke, Northwestern, and Rice, followed by WUSTL, Emory, public ivies like U-Michigan, UVA, UC-Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill.
In summary, my list would look something like this:
- Stanford
- Pomona
- Caltech
- Rice
- Harvey Mudd
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- MIT
- Chicago
- Swarthmore
- Dartmouth
- Amherst
- Williams
- Brown
- Wesleyan
- Middlebury
- Bowdoin
- Columbia
- Penn
- Cornell
- Duke
- Northwestern
- Rice
- WUSTL
- Emory
- Michigan
- UVA
- UC-Berkeley
- UNC-Chapel Hill
Oops, I ranked Rice twice in the above poll. I’ll add UW-Milwaukee to the list in its place:
- Stanford
- Pomona
- Caltech
- Rice
- Harvey Mudd
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- MIT
- Chicago
- Swarthmore
- Dartmouth
- Amherst
- Williams
- Brown
- Wesleyan
- Middlebury
- Bowdoin
- Columbia
- Penn
- Cornell
- Duke
- Northwestern
- WUSTL
- Emory
- Michigan
- UVA
- UC-Berkeley
- UNC-Chapel Hill
- UW-Milwaukee
By relatively recent admissions factors, Wesleyan appears to be easily a top-50 school when compared to both LACs and universities nationally:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-610-smartest-colleges-in-america-2015-9
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10
No Vandy?
FYI, don’t take Business Insider’s ranking too literally. Some schools report superscored test results and others do not.
Anyone else wanna weigh in on what they think Wesleyan’s real rank should be? I am very convinced that it is a top 10 LAC, but what do you guys think. Any insight or links are very helpful!
Yeah, there’s that. But by the same token, attending a northeast school soon may not require the expense of an extensive winter wardrobe. It’s sad to imagine that because of the lack of snow brought about by climate change, it’s conceivable that Middlebury’s Feb freshman will longer be able to participate in the ski down procession at the Snow Bowl as part of their graduation ceremony. X(