macalester

[Anonymous]

This is a very expensive list!

[Anonymous]

I'm actually working on an opinion piece (hopefully for the NYT) that suggests USNWR should dump their rankings and do what you suggest. They already have the infrastructure in place, so it would be pretty easy for them to do. More useful to the public, and they could also charge more for a much improved product.

Fwiw it's easy enough to do this for yourself. The schools themselves publish tons of information - Common Data Set, enrolled student profiles, etc. Plus there's Naviance and the like to provide a reality check on who gets in from your DC's school. We mined public info and built a spreadsheet to figure out not just where to apply but also where DC would have a good shot at admission. Mac was high on the list.

[Anonymous]

Great List Pp. Though I notice you have Northwestern on there twice! Which is its real slot on your list? (DS today deciding whether to add it to his last-minute additions. It’s a school I know nothing about.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Great List Pp. Though I notice you have Northwestern on there twice! Which is its real slot on your list? (DS today deciding whether to add it to his last-minute additions. It’s a school I know nothing about.)

Oops, thanks very much for catching that...I misread my own handwriting! Number 31 should be NorthEASTern.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a very expensive list!

The USNWR top list is also very expensive!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Great List Pp. Though I notice you have Northwestern on there twice! Which is its real slot on your list? (DS today deciding whether to add it to his last-minute additions. It’s a school I know nothing about.)

PP said the score difference between the top and bottom of that list is only 6 pts. So, really, it doesn't matter which spot it is.

This is why I hate college lists presented as "rankings." This is a list of colleges that are all great options on the criteria PP was focused on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great List Pp. Though I notice you have Northwestern on there twice! Which is its real slot on your list? (DS today deciding whether to add it to his last-minute additions. It’s a school I know nothing about.)

PP said the score difference between the top and bottom of that list is only 6 pts. So, really, it doesn't matter which spot it is.

This is why I hate college lists presented as "rankings." This is a list of colleges that are all great options on the criteria PP was focused on.

Which is exactly why I pointed out the small distance between them and was hesitant to produce the whole list at first. You're absolutely right that all of the schools on this list are comparable academically, so the decision should be made based on what specifics attract the individual student.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did my own ranking of colleges using criteria that make more sense to me than those that USNWR uses: class sizes, total number of classes offered, happiness of students with their faculty and the school in general, and the diversity of the student body and the faculty. I included all schools on the National Universities list and the National Liberal Arts list that have a median SAT score in the 95th percentile (1360) or above.
Macalester came in 13th place on this list (Carleton is #8), and the only National University that's ahead of it is Vanderbilt at #9 (Northwestern is #14). If you look at Princeton Review, which is where I got the happiness numbers, students at Macalester are very happy.
Also, anecdotally, I had a student of mine who was close to the top of her class and won our school's award for best all-around student who went to Macalester and loved it. The cold is an issue, but other than that it sounds pretty awesome.

OP here--this is awesome! Would love to see the whole list! These are great inputs into a ranking!

1) Pomona
2) Scripps
3) Pitzer
4) Mt. Holyoke
5) Bryn Mawr
6) Williams
7) Wellesley
8) Carleton
9) Vanderbilt
10) Vassar
11) U Richmond
12) Occidental
13) Macalester
14) Northwestern
15) Smith
16) Claremont McKenna
17) Barnard
18) Emory
19) Yale
20) Penn
21) Brown
22) Stanford
23) Trinity U (Texas)
24) Reed
25) Rice
26) Colorado College
27) Haverford
28) Washington U in St. Louis
29) Amherst
30) Princeton
31) Northwestern
32) Tufts
33) Boston U
34) Swarthmore
35) NYU
36) William and Mary
37) U Miami
38) Duke
39) Wesleyan
40) UC Santa Barbara
41) Bowdoin
42) Cornell
43) Santa Clara U
44) Harvey Mudd
45) Middlebury
46) USC
47) Hamilton
48) Carnegie Mellon
49) Dartmouth
50) MIT

Obviously, the criteria I used favored small schools (smaller classes and happier students). Others who seemed to fare well were those in warmer climates (more diverse and happier students), and women's colleges (smaller classes, happier students and more diverse).

FYI, some colleges were not considered because they don't make their data public. Notably, this includes Columbia and U Chicago.

Interesting, too, is that Harvard doesn't make the cut. According to Princeton Review, their students are not very happy with the quality of the professors or the overall university. I have a feeling this is at least partly due to higher expectations their students enter college with than their peers at other schools. "I worked my butt off to get into the school everyone talks about, and it sounds like lots of my friends have it at least as good as I do?"

It's fascinating to me that the first three are all part of a 5-college consortium in one location (the other two are numbers 16 and 43). I guess small classes, a diverse student body and faculty, and a warm climate close to mountains, the beach and a major city make for a great combination.

Also notable is that the spread in overall scores on my scale was 6 points between #1 and #50, while it's more like 18 points if you were to combine the two lists on USNWR. The criteria and weights they make use the colleges seem artificially farther apart in quality than they really are.

Take a look at the criteria and weights USNWR uses and I think you'll agree they're they're not what you'd choose if creating your own ranking from scratch. There's loads of data out there and this is a big decision. It's worth taking the time to make your own list, which will not unlikely be pretty different from mine, especially if you insist on a higher median SAT score. I just don't think there's all that much difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th.

Good luck to all!

I has a DS who will start visiting colleges soon-- this is incredibly helpful. Thank you.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if the list PP could start a new thread so this one could be focused on Macalester?

[Anonymous]

Everyone should make their own list.

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much for this list. This is incredibly helpful. Can you list the formula you used and how each criteria were weighted?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did my own ranking of colleges using criteria that make more sense to me than those that USNWR uses: class sizes, total number of classes offered, happiness of students with their faculty and the school in general, and the diversity of the student body and the faculty. I included all schools on the National Universities list and the National Liberal Arts list that have a median SAT score in the 95th percentile (1360) or above.
Macalester came in 13th place on this list (Carleton is #8), and the only National University that's ahead of it is Vanderbilt at #9 (Northwestern is #14). If you look at Princeton Review, which is where I got the happiness numbers, students at Macalester are very happy.
Also, anecdotally, I had a student of mine who was close to the top of her class and won our school's award for best all-around student who went to Macalester and loved it. The cold is an issue, but other than that it sounds pretty awesome.

OP here--this is awesome! Would love to see the whole list! These are great inputs into a ranking!

1) Pomona
2) Scripps
3) Pitzer
4) Mt. Holyoke
5) Bryn Mawr
6) Williams
7) Wellesley
8) Carleton
9) Vanderbilt
10) Vassar
11) U Richmond
12) Occidental
13) Macalester
14) Northwestern
15) Smith
16) Claremont McKenna
17) Barnard
18) Emory
19) Yale
20) Penn
21) Brown
22) Stanford
23) Trinity U (Texas)
24) Reed
25) Rice
26) Colorado College
27) Haverford
28) Washington U in St. Louis
29) Amherst
30) Princeton
31) Northwestern
32) Tufts
33) Boston U
34) Swarthmore
35) NYU
36) William and Mary
37) U Miami
38) Duke
39) Wesleyan
40) UC Santa Barbara
41) Bowdoin
42) Cornell
43) Santa Clara U
44) Harvey Mudd
45) Middlebury
46) USC
47) Hamilton
48) Carnegie Mellon
49) Dartmouth
50) MIT

Obviously, the criteria I used favored small schools (smaller classes and happier students). Others who seemed to fare well were those in warmer climates (more diverse and happier students), and women's colleges (smaller classes, happier students and more diverse).

FYI, some colleges were not considered because they don't make their data public. Notably, this includes Columbia and U Chicago.

Interesting, too, is that Harvard doesn't make the cut. According to Princeton Review, their students are not very happy with the quality of the professors or the overall university. I have a feeling this is at least partly due to higher expectations their students enter college with than their peers at other schools. "I worked my butt off to get into the school everyone talks about, and it sounds like lots of my friends have it at least as good as I do?"

It's fascinating to me that the first three are all part of a 5-college consortium in one location (the other two are numbers 16 and 43). I guess small classes, a diverse student body and faculty, and a warm climate close to mountains, the beach and a major city make for a great combination.

Also notable is that the spread in overall scores on my scale was 6 points between #1 and #50, while it's more like 18 points if you were to combine the two lists on USNWR. The criteria and weights they make use the colleges seem artificially farther apart in quality than they really are.

Take a look at the criteria and weights USNWR uses and I think you'll agree they're they're not what you'd choose if creating your own ranking from scratch. There's loads of data out there and this is a big decision. It's worth taking the time to make your own list, which will not unlikely be pretty different from mine, especially if you insist on a higher median SAT score. I just don't think there's all that much difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th.

Good luck to all!

OP here- this is awesome- thanks so much. You should publish this!

+1000
This is a great list...but the creator of it is on to something. Everyone should be able to weight things differently because people have different priorities. Someone should make an interactive ranking that allows you to select that 10 factors that you most care about--and lets you assign weights to each. THAT would actually be meaningful (not a fan of USNews, if you can't tell...)

I'm actually working on an opinion piece (hopefully for the NYT) that suggests USNWR should dump their rankings and do what you suggest. They already have the infrastructure in place, so it would be pretty easy for them to do. More useful to the public, and they could also charge more for a much improved product.

OP here. Fabulous idea...

I was looking at the USNews methodology last week and it's really bad...the fact that "reputation" gets some huge weight (I think it's 20 percent) is really problematic because USNews so heavily influences reputation. So the top schools continue to get a boost year after year and it's harder for under-the-radar awesome schools to rise up (unless they game the rankings in other ways). And, if there were an interactive ranking approach and reputation really mattered to you, you could weight it 100%. If it didn't you could discount it.

Good luck to you! I hope it works out....it would provide a huge service to families trying to navigate this thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did my own ranking of colleges using criteria that make more sense to me than those that USNWR uses: class sizes, total number of classes offered, happiness of students with their faculty and the school in general, and the diversity of the student body and the faculty. I included all schools on the National Universities list and the National Liberal Arts list that have a median SAT score in the 95th percentile (1360) or above.
Macalester came in 13th place on this list (Carleton is #8), and the only National University that's ahead of it is Vanderbilt at #9 (Northwestern is #14). If you look at Princeton Review, which is where I got the happiness numbers, students at Macalester are very happy.
Also, anecdotally, I had a student of mine who was close to the top of her class and won our school's award for best all-around student who went to Macalester and loved it. The cold is an issue, but other than that it sounds pretty awesome.

OP here--this is awesome! Would love to see the whole list! These are great inputs into a ranking!

1) Pomona
2) Scripps
3) Pitzer
4) Mt. Holyoke
5) Bryn Mawr
6) Williams
7) Wellesley
8) Carleton
9) Vanderbilt
10) Vassar
11) U Richmond
12) Occidental
13) Macalester
14) Northwestern
15) Smith
16) Claremont McKenna
17) Barnard
18) Emory
19) Yale
20) Penn
21) Brown
22) Stanford
23) Trinity U (Texas)
24) Reed
25) Rice
26) Colorado College
27) Haverford
28) Washington U in St. Louis
29) Amherst
30) Princeton
31) Northwestern
32) Tufts
33) Boston U
34) Swarthmore
35) NYU
36) William and Mary
37) U Miami
38) Duke
39) Wesleyan
40) UC Santa Barbara
41) Bowdoin
42) Cornell
43) Santa Clara U
44) Harvey Mudd
45) Middlebury
46) USC
47) Hamilton
48) Carnegie Mellon
49) Dartmouth
50) MIT

Obviously, the criteria I used favored small schools (smaller classes and happier students). Others who seemed to fare well were those in warmer climates (more diverse and happier students), and women's colleges (smaller classes, happier students and more diverse).

FYI, some colleges were not considered because they don't make their data public. Notably, this includes Columbia and U Chicago.

Interesting, too, is that Harvard doesn't make the cut. According to Princeton Review, their students are not very happy with the quality of the professors or the overall university. I have a feeling this is at least partly due to higher expectations their students enter college with than their peers at other schools. "I worked my butt off to get into the school everyone talks about, and it sounds like lots of my friends have it at least as good as I do?"

It's fascinating to me that the first three are all part of a 5-college consortium in one location (the other two are numbers 16 and 43). I guess small classes, a diverse student body and faculty, and a warm climate close to mountains, the beach and a major city make for a great combination.

Also notable is that the spread in overall scores on my scale was 6 points between #1 and #50, while it's more like 18 points if you were to combine the two lists on USNWR. The criteria and weights they make use the colleges seem artificially farther apart in quality than they really are.

Take a look at the criteria and weights USNWR uses and I think you'll agree they're they're not what you'd choose if creating your own ranking from scratch. There's loads of data out there and this is a big decision. It's worth taking the time to make your own list, which will not unlikely be pretty different from mine, especially if you insist on a higher median SAT score. I just don't think there's all that much difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th.

Good luck to all!

MIT at 50, that's rich!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did my own ranking of colleges using criteria that make more sense to me than those that USNWR uses: class sizes, total number of classes offered, happiness of students with their faculty and the school in general, and the diversity of the student body and the faculty. I included all schools on the National Universities list and the National Liberal Arts list that have a median SAT score in the 95th percentile (1360) or above.
Macalester came in 13th place on this list (Carleton is #8), and the only National University that's ahead of it is Vanderbilt at #9 (Northwestern is #14). If you look at Princeton Review, which is where I got the happiness numbers, students at Macalester are very happy.
Also, anecdotally, I had a student of mine who was close to the top of her class and won our school's award for best all-around student who went to Macalester and loved it. The cold is an issue, but other than that it sounds pretty awesome.

OP here--this is awesome! Would love to see the whole list! These are great inputs into a ranking!

1) Pomona
2) Scripps
3) Pitzer
4) Mt. Holyoke
5) Bryn Mawr
6) Williams
7) Wellesley
8) Carleton
9) Vanderbilt
10) Vassar
11) U Richmond
12) Occidental
13) Macalester
14) Northwestern
15) Smith
16) Claremont McKenna
17) Barnard
18) Emory
19) Yale
20) Penn
21) Brown
22) Stanford
23) Trinity U (Texas)
24) Reed
25) Rice
26) Colorado College
27) Haverford
28) Washington U in St. Louis
29) Amherst
30) Princeton
31) Northwestern
32) Tufts
33) Boston U
34) Swarthmore
35) NYU
36) William and Mary
37) U Miami
38) Duke
39) Wesleyan
40) UC Santa Barbara
41) Bowdoin
42) Cornell
43) Santa Clara U
44) Harvey Mudd
45) Middlebury
46) USC
47) Hamilton
48) Carnegie Mellon
49) Dartmouth
50) MIT

Obviously, the criteria I used favored small schools (smaller classes and happier students). Others who seemed to fare well were those in warmer climates (more diverse and happier students), and women's colleges (smaller classes, happier students and more diverse).

FYI, some colleges were not considered because they don't make their data public. Notably, this includes Columbia and U Chicago.

Interesting, too, is that Harvard doesn't make the cut. According to Princeton Review, their students are not very happy with the quality of the professors or the overall university. I have a feeling this is at least partly due to higher expectations their students enter college with than their peers at other schools. "I worked my butt off to get into the school everyone talks about, and it sounds like lots of my friends have it at least as good as I do?"

It's fascinating to me that the first three are all part of a 5-college consortium in one location (the other two are numbers 16 and 43). I guess small classes, a diverse student body and faculty, and a warm climate close to mountains, the beach and a major city make for a great combination.

Also notable is that the spread in overall scores on my scale was 6 points between #1 and #50, while it's more like 18 points if you were to combine the two lists on USNWR. The criteria and weights they make use the colleges seem artificially farther apart in quality than they really are.

Take a look at the criteria and weights USNWR uses and I think you'll agree they're they're not what you'd choose if creating your own ranking from scratch. There's loads of data out there and this is a big decision. It's worth taking the time to make your own list, which will not unlikely be pretty different from mine, especially if you insist on a higher median SAT score. I just don't think there's all that much difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th.

Good luck to all!

MIT at 50, that's rich!

Why? If you look at the factors that the creator cares about that were used as inputs into the ranking, it makes plenty of sense (and the creator notes that there is not much daylight between the top and bottom of the list).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did my own ranking of colleges using criteria that make more sense to me than those that USNWR uses: class sizes, total number of classes offered, happiness of students with their faculty and the school in general, and the diversity of the student body and the faculty. I included all schools on the National Universities list and the National Liberal Arts list that have a median SAT score in the 95th percentile (1360) or above.
Macalester came in 13th place on this list (Carleton is #8), and the only National University that's ahead of it is Vanderbilt at #9 (Northwestern is #14). If you look at Princeton Review, which is where I got the happiness numbers, students at Macalester are very happy.
Also, anecdotally, I had a student of mine who was close to the top of her class and won our school's award for best all-around student who went to Macalester and loved it. The cold is an issue, but other than that it sounds pretty awesome.

OP here--this is awesome! Would love to see the whole list! These are great inputs into a ranking!

1) Pomona
2) Scripps
3) Pitzer
4) Mt. Holyoke
5) Bryn Mawr
6) Williams
7) Wellesley
8) Carleton
9) Vanderbilt
10) Vassar
11) U Richmond
12) Occidental
13) Macalester
14) Northwestern
15) Smith
16) Claremont McKenna
17) Barnard
18) Emory
19) Yale
20) Penn
21) Brown
22) Stanford
23) Trinity U (Texas)
24) Reed
25) Rice
26) Colorado College
27) Haverford
28) Washington U in St. Louis
29) Amherst
30) Princeton
31) Northwestern
32) Tufts
33) Boston U
34) Swarthmore
35) NYU
36) William and Mary
37) U Miami
38) Duke
39) Wesleyan
40) UC Santa Barbara
41) Bowdoin
42) Cornell
43) Santa Clara U
44) Harvey Mudd
45) Middlebury
46) USC
47) Hamilton
48) Carnegie Mellon
49) Dartmouth
50) MIT

Obviously, the criteria I used favored small schools (smaller classes and happier students). Others who seemed to fare well were those in warmer climates (more diverse and happier students), and women's colleges (smaller classes, happier students and more diverse).

FYI, some colleges were not considered because they don't make their data public. Notably, this includes Columbia and U Chicago.

Interesting, too, is that Harvard doesn't make the cut. According to Princeton Review, their students are not very happy with the quality of the professors or the overall university. I have a feeling this is at least partly due to higher expectations their students enter college with than their peers at other schools. "I worked my butt off to get into the school everyone talks about, and it sounds like lots of my friends have it at least as good as I do?"

It's fascinating to me that the first three are all part of a 5-college consortium in one location (the other two are numbers 16 and 43). I guess small classes, a diverse student body and faculty, and a warm climate close to mountains, the beach and a major city make for a great combination.

Also notable is that the spread in overall scores on my scale was 6 points between #1 and #50, while it's more like 18 points if you were to combine the two lists on USNWR. The criteria and weights they make use the colleges seem artificially farther apart in quality than they really are.

Take a look at the criteria and weights USNWR uses and I think you'll agree they're they're not what you'd choose if creating your own ranking from scratch. There's loads of data out there and this is a big decision. It's worth taking the time to make your own list, which will not unlikely be pretty different from mine, especially if you insist on a higher median SAT score. I just don't think there's all that much difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th.

Good luck to all!

OP here- this is awesome- thanks so much. You should publish this!

+1000
This is a great list...but the creator of it is on to something. Everyone should be able to weight things differently because people have different priorities. Someone should make an interactive ranking that allows you to select that 10 factors that you most care about--and lets you assign weights to each. THAT would actually be meaningful (not a fan of USNews, if you can't tell...)

I'm actually working on an opinion piece (hopefully for the NYT) that suggests USNWR should dump their rankings and do what you suggest. They already have the infrastructure in place, so it would be pretty easy for them to do. More useful to the public, and they could also charge more for a much improved product.

OP here. Fabulous idea...

I was looking at the USNews methodology last week and it's really bad...the fact that "reputation" gets some huge weight (I think it's 20 percent) is really problematic because USNews so heavily influences reputation. So the top schools continue to get a boost year after year and it's harder for under-the-radar awesome schools to rise up (unless they game the rankings in other ways). And, if there were an interactive ranking approach and reputation really mattered to you, you could weight it 100%. If it didn't you could discount it.

Good luck to you! I hope it works out....it would provide a huge service to families trying to navigate this thing.

+1000
Not only would it be a huge service to individual families, I think it might put some sort of break on the admissions insanity more generally, where everyone is focused on the same 20-30 schools. I hope it works out!


Not only would