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<p>BCK, I tend to avoid discussions about this school is better than this school like the plague. For this reason, I preferred to keep my comments more general nature. I don’t believe that it would be very helpful to make lengthy comparison, but I would be happy to point out or discuss why relying on one year of USNews is misleading. </p>
<p>Regarding the MY numbers, would it be helpful for me to rephrase it as … regarding the USNews numbers you used in your examples…?</p>
<p>Back to the issue at stake, looking at one year represents the same error a financial would do were he or she to look at the balance sheet of one year to perform a ratio analysis. This is why I suggested to reconsider your position by looking at porior years, and this because I KNOW that your conclusions are … not supoprted by prior years. I tried to point this out as tactfully as I could. Perhaps I could have been more precise or direct, by, as an example, sharing that CMC has been ranked much higher than Wellesley in the facutlty resources category, and that this seems to have a trivial impact. </p>
<p>For the 7 or 8 years, I have looked at the annual releases of the USNews to try to understand the impact of subscores to the final rankings … just as you do in this thread. After a while, however, it becomes pretty clear that it is hard if not impossible to reconcile the existing data and the changes in the rankings. However, one can identify “strange” behaviors as schools seem to benefit from a LOWER selectivity by underreporting lower test scores and benefit from generous scores in the expected graduation rates index! To keep it simple, I know that you won’t find the strong correlations that one needs to express a strong opinion as you did, let alone draw the conclusions you made. </p>
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<p>With all due respect, BCK. you should look at previous years and pay closer attention to the last decade. For starters, Pomona has been ranked ahead of Middlebury for years and very close or at the same level as Wellesley. </p>
<p>While I can understand that you have no access to historical data, I do believe that you should consider that the data that you have not seen might not support conclusions that are based on a single year.</p>
<p>Inasmuch as I cannot provide you with detailed links at this time (I am on vacation 4,000 miles away from home) here is a link to data that is a few years old (2008 data) </p>
<p>[Wellesley</a> College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Wellesley-College.html]Wellesley”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Wellesley-College.html)
[Pomona</a> College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Pomona-College.html]Pomona”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Pomona-College.html)
[Claremont</a> McKenna College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Claremont-McKenna-College.html]Claremont”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Claremont-McKenna-College.html)</p>
<p>A quick look at the faculty resources reported in the above links and at the … endowment numbers you reported earlier to establish the rich and not-so-rich, might make your conclusions, well, less evident. </p>
<p>PS Please allow me to also repeat that, in the end, none of this “technical” discussion bears much importance. Despite the annual changes (or lack of changes) in the rankings, the schools remain enormously stable year after year. Should potential applicants be impressed when a school “vaults” to a shared 4th spot and be concerned when it might “tumble” to the 8th spot. Is it truly important to compare schools that do get a lot of ink (such as Pomona or Wellesley or even Smith) with "quieter schools such as Carleton or … Haverford? </p>
<p>In the end, the subtle differences we tend to debate are trivial as the differences between a 4th rank and a 13th rank are trivial.</p>