<p>
</p>
<p>I’m impressed with Pomona’s wealth. I had no idea they had that much money. They’re really on a different plane from the other Claremont colleges, which are not particularly well endowed in comparison with other top LACs.</p>
<p>Am I “contradicting myself”? I don’t know. Just crunchin’ numbers. I’ve always said I think Pomona’s a great school, and just yesterday I said both that I’d give it a higher PA score, and that US News rates it about equal with Wellesley if you look at its raw rating score and not the ordinal ranking which exaggerates trivial differences. I don’t think I’ve said anything inconsistent, but you tell me. </p>
<p>I will say that I never realized until yesterday the degree to which the U.S. News formula is just a measure of a school’s wealth. Both “faculty resources” and “financial resources” are basically just measures of spending; together they add up to 30% of the US News ranking, or now TWICE as much as PA which is far more often discussed on CC.</p>
<p>I agree that the correlation between endowment and US News ranking isn’t perfect, because many schools outperform their endowments, and some underperform their endowments. On the other hand, if you combine the “faculty resources” and “financial resources” categories, there’s a very strong correlation between a school’s standing on that index and its overall US News ranking. And it only stands to reason that schools with large endowments per student are going to find it easier to spend more money. That some schools do well in “faculty resources” and “financial resources” without huge endowments is impressive. I’d like to know more about how they do it.</p>