Anonymous wrote:Prattle on all you want, but the top 10 will always be some combination of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, U Chicago, MIT, U Penn, Northwestern, and Duke. Vast majority of people in this country simply don’t even know of Williams and Amherst, though they are great schools. This is also not helped by the fact that in most parts of the world, a “college” is a lesser institution to a “university” (for example in the UK, where the designation of “university” is closely guarded by a government body).
Although specialized, Caltech is better than most of your top 10 in its areas. Not sure about some of the others as well.
It’s a hyper-specialized school smaller than the local high school.
That produces a hugely disproportionately high percentage of graduates who become influential in their fields.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
Columbia clearly distinguishes GS from Columbia College and Engineering, and provides all the data, so where is the hiding?
The target audience of US News is for the applicants of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, isn't it?
Anonymous wrote:Actually approximately 80% of Columbia’s students are in its graduate programs.
OK so It's not good for your little pampered snowflakes.[/quote
I thought Ivy League schools, with their low faculty/student ratios, were good for “little pampered snowflakes.”
I always wonder how all the top schools in the US News ranking all have a 6:1 student-faculty ratio. Did they have a meeting and have that number chosen?
Same magical things happen in:
1. Duke and Penn always have the same acceptance rate year after year
2. The ratios of students with/without financial aid in all top universities remain constant even though they claim that they are need-blind. How magical hands in selecting students to maintain the ratio.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
Columbia clearly distinguishes GS from Columbia College and Engineering, and provides all the data, so where is the hiding?
The target audience of US News is for the applicants of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, isn't it?
Once again, the GS students are taking classes alongside the CC students. The target audience is being fooled into thinking that a huge subset of students are in a completely different college and not enrolled in CC courses. No matter how you look at it, the overall student academic quality at a smallish undergraduate university like Columbia is not uniform.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
You can also see tha5 enrollment is up substantially at SGS as compared to CC and SEAS. A money grab no doubt that Columbia figured, up until now, would go unnoticed.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
Columbia clearly distinguishes GS from Columbia College and Engineering, and provides all the data, so where is the hiding?
The target audience of US News is for the applicants of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, isn't it?
Once again, the GS students are taking classes alongside the CC students. The target audience is being fooled into thinking that a huge subset of students are in a completely different college and not enrolled in CC courses. No matter how you look at it, the overall student academic quality at a smallish undergraduate university like Columbia is not uniform.
So you are saying as a university, by denying the course accessibility of the GS students, who are top students compared with others with similar backgrounds, Columbia would be a better school.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
Anonymous wrote:Prattle on all you want, but the top 10 will always be some combination of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, U Chicago, MIT, U Penn, Northwestern, and Duke. Vast majority of people in this country simply don’t even know of Williams and Amherst, though they are great schools. This is also not helped by the fact that in most parts of the world, a “college” is a lesser institution to a “university” (for example in the UK, where the designation of “university” is closely guarded by a government body).
Although specialized, Caltech is better than most of your top 10 in its areas. Not sure about some of the others as well.
It’s a hyper-specialized school smaller than the local high school.
That produces a hugely disproportionately high percentage of graduates who become influential in their fields.
Because they get first pick of the most accomplished high school students, not because they're better than other similar schools at educating STEM students.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
I think the suggestion was that Oxford admissions are lower quality than Emory proper; your obfuscation of that there fact is indeed — how you say? — dumb.
Anonymous wrote:Everyone knows Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona are qualitative on a different league, and higher, than UF.
And who the hell is UF?
UF is Florida.
While Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona are good schools, they are assessed separately from full-fledged universities.
That shows there's something fundamentally wrong with the list. I'd seriously question why X college is is ranked Y and not Z. It's too random.
Garbage in, garbage out.
More garbage in, more garbage out.
You're not making any sense. It is perfectly normal for LACs to be assessed separately from universities.
Yes, but should they be? Ranking is not so difficult. And applicants routinely apply to both types of schools. The current classifications are, in any event, silly to begin with: do Dartmouth and Princeton really have more in common with 30k plus undergraduate student factories like Michigan and Berkeley than they do the Williams Colleges of the world?
The top LACs are probably in the lower end of the T20 range. They really are excellent schools, just maybe a little overlooked.
Not fair at all. I cannot believe that Williams and Amherst are lower ranked than Emory in this index. No way. Problem with all these rankings is the methodology is always set up to favor larger universities. Also, Emory is a school that has been caught cheating on rankings in the past.
Where would you rank Williams and Amherst then?
NP. Many colleges on this list are poorly ranked, so I won’t comment on it. But, starting with a blank slate, any competent undergrad ranking list (which necessarily would unify all colleges, large and small, which kids actually apply to) should probably have Williams 10-15; Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona 15-20; and Bowdoin 20-25.
The problem with this argument is that there are already rankings which combine the two, and none of these LACs are ranked that highly.
The rankings you refer to, without analysis, are gimmicky and based on things like ROI or tied in with international ranking schemes, which are really about research/graduate school (although one had Williams at #1 of all colleges in the country a few years ago, if I can recall). This is not difficult: remove the US News criteria that don’t mean anything (amongst others, Pell grants and the self-perpetuating reputation score), include pivotal criteria that US News does not use, like selectivity and endowment per student — and a few other variables — and you have a list. Selectivity would need to be adjusted and properly weighted by penalizing schools with multiple ED rounds (here’s looking at you, Chicago and Johns Hopkins), and the data would need to be smoothed out over four years and weighted to account for huge transfer cohorts with high admissions rates (hello Emory and Columbia). But this can easily be done. Meanwhile, those who say that no LACs belong in the top 20, well, go ahead and believe that; as long as your DC doesn’t apply to them, you’ll be none the wiser. Continue to believe Vanderbilt and WUSTL are better than Williams, or that Bowdoin pales in comparison to the mighty University of Michigan. I wonder if some of you folks are the same people who believed that Columbia should have been tied at #2 with Harvard — because US News said so — or who still believe that Stanford is the #6 school in the country, tied, of course, with Chicago. Hmmnn...
Emory transfers are from Oxford. This is dumb of you to suggest it's close to Columbia GS asinine. Oxford is much more selective than Columbia GS than UVA and other public schools.
Columbia GS is Columbia GS, not Columiba "proper", we all know that, why include the transfer rate of Columbia GS?
Because Columbia GS students are taking most of their classes right alongside CC and SEAS students.
This gives the students more faculty and more course choices, not bad.
yes just count their stats rather than hiding
Hiding or not, it's debatable. The customer bases are different.
This is how much Columbia is sneaky and deceptive.
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