Why is Pomona so special?

[Anonymous]

My student applied to Pitzer and not Pomona because that is the one that appealed to her when she knew nothing or rankings. That said, the draw is all the benefits of a LAC, warm weather, and that you have about 7000 undergrads total in the 5Cs, which is another sweet spot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The factors that make it #1 on this ranking that includes both LACs and universities explain at least part of it.

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/blog/6/

That is a very odd list.

I thought it was an interesting set of criteria, and one that I think my kid would also value in a school (small class sizes yet also a wide variety of available courses; diversity among both professors and the student body; well-educated professors; general student satisfaction). It's at least as valid as the factors that US News values heavily.

But the results are ridiculous, which suggests the methodology is flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. Way too much emphasis (as always nowadays) on diversity, especially when all these schools are committed to diversity. Anyone who chooses a school based on diversity stats is a true imbecile

There's actually a wide diversity of success in achieving diversity on college campuses. And how can a methodology be flawed based on someone's opinion of the results? It is what it is, just like USNWR.

I think even the diversity stats could be misleading- I noticed west coast schools fared relatively well- this could just be a result of a higher level of Hispanics and Asians in California. Is Scripps better than Williams because of that?

It's better than Williams in terms of diversity, but diversity isn't everything. The ranking shared above is based only 20% on diversity, though, so Pomona beats out Williams (and everyone else) based on the totality of the specific set of factors included. If you prefer USNWR's factors, use that. If you like Niche (not sure why you would), use that. If you like Barron's or Forbes or whatever, use them. Or, as ranker above says, make your own list.

I get the idea that we can all draw our own conclusions but we look to these lists because we think they have some kind of credibility or value. Even if I cared a great deal about diversity, I would be hesitant to rely on the particular metrics used. Maybe for example these west coast schools have much lower Black student and professor populations. They are just score well because there are a lot more Hispanics and Asians out west. A methodology is only as good as what it produces, and a cursory glance at this list makes it seem very fishy. Like is Richmond a high diversity school?

You've got it reversed. What is produced is only as good as the methodology. The methodology perhaps seems fishy because you've always assumed USNWR's method defines some absolute truth. It doesn't, and this ranking shows how different the outcome can be if you care about different factors than USNWR does. It also actually encourages you NOT to use it for yourself but to create your own list, which is something I've never seen any other ranking do. They even give suggestions on how to make your own ranking. Why would you not want to do this for something you're going to spend over $100k on?

BTW, Richmond doesn't show up on the diversity lists they provide, so that's not the criteria that give it its high ranking. It's #1 on the class size list, though, and also does well in terms of student happiness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The factors that make it #1 on this ranking that includes both LACs and universities explain at least part of it.

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/blog/6/

That is a very odd list.

I thought it was an interesting set of criteria, and one that I think my kid would also value in a school (small class sizes yet also a wide variety of available courses; diversity among both professors and the student body; well-educated professors; general student satisfaction). It's at least as valid as the factors that US News values heavily.

But the results are ridiculous, which suggests the methodology is flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. Way too much emphasis (as always nowadays) on diversity, especially when all these schools are committed to diversity. Anyone who chooses a school based on diversity stats is a true imbecile

There's actually a wide diversity of success in achieving diversity on college campuses. And how can a methodology be flawed based on someone's opinion of the results? It is what it is, just like USNWR.

I think even the diversity stats could be misleading- I noticed west coast schools fared relatively well- this could just be a result of a higher level of Hispanics and Asians in California. Is Scripps better than Williams because of that?

It's better than Williams in terms of diversity, but diversity isn't everything. The ranking shared above is based only 20% on diversity, though, so Pomona beats out Williams (and everyone else) based on the totality of the specific set of factors included. If you prefer USNWR's factors, use that. If you like Niche (not sure why you would), use that. If you like Barron's or Forbes or whatever, use them. Or, as ranker above says, make your own list.

I get the idea that we can all draw our own conclusions but we look to these lists because we think they have some kind of credibility or value. Even if I cared a great deal about diversity, I would be hesitant to rely on the particular metrics used. Maybe for example these west coast schools have much lower Black student and professor populations. They are just score well because there are a lot more Hispanics and Asians out west. A methodology is only as good as what it produces, and a cursory glance at this list makes it seem very fishy. Like is Richmond a high diversity school?

You've got it reversed. What is produced is only as good as the methodology. The methodology perhaps seems fishy because you've always assumed USNWR's method defines some absolute truth. It doesn't, and this ranking shows how different the outcome can be if you care about different factors than USNWR does. It also actually encourages you NOT to use it for yourself but to create your own list, which is something I've never seen any other ranking do. They even give suggestions on how to make your own ranking. Why would you not want to do this for something you're going to spend over $100k on?

BTW, Richmond doesn't show up on the diversity lists they provide, so that's not the criteria that give it its high ranking. It's #1 on the class size list, though, and also does well in terms of student happiness.

What this amounts to is really just telling kids to come up with their own list of criteria and run the screens on that. I don’t like it because a kid might have a sense of what he or she prioritizes but the metrics they choose may not perfectly capture that. This list for example has a west coast and all female skew. Given the priorities embodied in the criteria, I don’t think the list does it justice.

One thing about USNWR is that it does at least assign weight even if indirectly to things of practical importance that may not be trendy. Things like test scores, which reflect student quality and should be more heavily weighted, and endowment per capita, which reflects resources. And academic reputation. Real variables. So I think it is bad advice to tell a young person to devise their own goofy methodology (where data quality can be iffy and lead to misperceptions) and then take that list seriously. I would be pretty upset if some adult authority figure convinced my kid that Scripps was a better option than Williams. Because every grown up in the real world knows it’s not and if some kid chose Scripps over Williams based on this advice, that kid will be pretty resentful when she turned 25 and realized her college degree has less value in the real world than it could have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people from out of state think it’s in the LA area, but if you live in LA it’s pretty far away. I drive past it on my way to the desert (Palm Springs), and it’s surrounded by exurban wasteland.

However Claremont itself is an oasis in a pit!! The campus is gorgeous and the little downtown district is very cute. I can see why it’s popular.

I think that too. East coast kids think "Wow, Los Angeles!" and it's not. Pomona, has, however, done very well riding up the USNWR rankings so it's now hot simply because it's highly selective.

?? It has ranked at the top of US News since inception. There wasn't anything to "ride up"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jobs and grad school.

It's 10 year out median earning is mediocre at $69,149

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?121345-Pomona-College

Seems comparable to other top slacs?

[Anonymous]

If you're Pomona admit caliber then you could easily get into a top 20 university. And in that scenario I struggle to see why you would pick Pomona. No merit aid, no prestige, lackluster alumni network, poor professional advising.

At least Williams and Amherst have some clout on the east coast. In California, no one takes Pomona seriously. Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna are more famous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you're Pomona admit caliber then you could easily get into a top 20 university. And in that scenario I struggle to see why you would pick Pomona. No merit aid, no prestige, lackluster alumni network, poor professional advising.

At least Williams and Amherst have some clout on the east coast. In California, no one takes Pomona seriously. Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna are more famous.

But Pomona has nice weather!

Williams and Amherst have a lot of clout, possibly more than lower Ivy. I would choose Williams over Cornell any day of the week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jobs and grad school.

It's 10 year out median earning is mediocre at $69,149

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?121345-Pomona-College

Seems comparable to other top slacs?

yea they are not special and mediocre

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you're Pomona admit caliber then you could easily get into a top 20 university. And in that scenario I struggle to see why you would pick Pomona. No merit aid, no prestige, lackluster alumni network, poor professional advising.

At least Williams and Amherst have some clout on the east coast. In California, no one takes Pomona seriously. Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna are more famous.

All good points. Wonderful school environment, lovely campus, small classes with access to professors….but your thoughts above are all legitimate

[Anonymous]

I went to Pomona in the 90s. Almost nobody showed up under the illusion that it was near the beach, the nightlife of LA, etc. There were however a ton of us who took advantage of hiking in the foothills, camping in Joshua Tree, or longer weekend trips to those other parts of LA/CA that were too far for a typical weeknight... but by and large there was plenty to do on-campus (and the broader 5-college campus). There were large weekend parties, and a touch of greek life, none of which I engaged in too heavily (I didn't drink in college, though most of my friends did).

I loved dorm life at Pomona, and yes there was a lot of focus on academics but it wasn't oppressive, plenty of sports and clubs and lectures and concerts and other activities of all stripes to engage in no matter your niche/preference. I was the type who wanted to sample a bit of everything so this worked great for me, I was always hopping about campus attending as many things as I could (and learned my Freshman year that I needed to dial back and couldn't do EVERYTHING... I went a bit overboard at first).

One weird thing was so many of my peers during the first week commenting they loved how "diverse" Pomona was, when I looked around I saw like 80% white kids, whereas I came from a high school that was more like 50% white, and also seemed most Pomona kids were from more affluent backgrounds compared to my HS. It does seem Pomona has diversified since (recent student body profiles looking much more like my HS experience).

I had good relationships with most of my professors, including a couple who I would dog-sit for, and one who taught me to drive stick-shift (so that I could drive his truck to pick him and his partner up from the airport when they returned home).

Contrast to a few classes I took at UCLA during 12th grade where I didn't ever have 1:1 time, two out of three of my TA-led study sessions (weekly supplement to prof lecture) where the TA's accent was so thick I really struggled to follow what they were saying, and one class I learned several months later that an acquaintance of mine (who was Freshman at UCLA) was in the same class, but we never saw each other (it was one of those intro-level multi-hundred student courses). Overall, I was just socially intimidated by the size/scope of the UCLA campus as an 18yo and realized a smaller community in the 1-8k student range was for me.

The linked blog about selecting your own criteria and ranking is good advice too IMO. It's not about which school is objectively "best", but which is best for a given student. Part of that is if you have a specific field you know you want to pursue, but also how much you value student experiences vs. academics vs. "door-opening" for jobs and/or grad school, etc. Do I think Scripps is a "better" school than Williams in some broad abstract sense? No. Williams is clearly the more prestigious and challenging school. But is Scripps a "better" option than Williams for _some_ students, where they will be more likely to thrive and go on to long-term career success? Yep, 100%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The factors that make it #1 on this ranking that includes both LACs and universities explain at least part of it.

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/blog/6/

That is a very odd list.

I thought it was an interesting set of criteria, and one that I think my kid would also value in a school (small class sizes yet also a wide variety of available courses; diversity among both professors and the student body; well-educated professors; general student satisfaction). It's at least as valid as the factors that US News values heavily.

But the results are ridiculous, which suggests the methodology is flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. Way too much emphasis (as always nowadays) on diversity, especially when all these schools are committed to diversity. Anyone who chooses a school based on diversity stats is a true imbecile

There's actually a wide diversity of success in achieving diversity on college campuses. And how can a methodology be flawed based on someone's opinion of the results? It is what it is, just like USNWR.

I think even the diversity stats could be misleading- I noticed west coast schools fared relatively well- this could just be a result of a higher level of Hispanics and Asians in California. Is Scripps better than Williams because of that?

It's better than Williams in terms of diversity, but diversity isn't everything. The ranking shared above is based only 20% on diversity, though, so Pomona beats out Williams (and everyone else) based on the totality of the specific set of factors included. If you prefer USNWR's factors, use that. If you like Niche (not sure why you would), use that. If you like Barron's or Forbes or whatever, use them. Or, as ranker above says, make your own list.

I get the idea that we can all draw our own conclusions but we look to these lists because we think they have some kind of credibility or value. Even if I cared a great deal about diversity, I would be hesitant to rely on the particular metrics used. Maybe for example these west coast schools have much lower Black student and professor populations. They are just score well because there are a lot more Hispanics and Asians out west. A methodology is only as good as what it produces, and a cursory glance at this list makes it seem very fishy. Like is Richmond a high diversity school?

You've got it reversed. What is produced is only as good as the methodology. The methodology perhaps seems fishy because you've always assumed USNWR's method defines some absolute truth. It doesn't, and this ranking shows how different the outcome can be if you care about different factors than USNWR does. It also actually encourages you NOT to use it for yourself but to create your own list, which is something I've never seen any other ranking do. They even give suggestions on how to make your own ranking. Why would you not want to do this for something you're going to spend over $100k on?

BTW, Richmond doesn't show up on the diversity lists they provide, so that's not the criteria that give it its high ranking. It's #1 on the class size list, though, and also does well in terms of student happiness.

What this amounts to is really just telling kids to come up with their own list of criteria and run the screens on that. I don’t like it because a kid might have a sense of what he or she prioritizes but the metrics they choose may not perfectly capture that. This list for example has a west coast and all female skew. Given the priorities embodied in the criteria, I don’t think the list does it justice.

One thing about USNWR is that it does at least assign weight even if indirectly to things of practical importance that may not be trendy. Things like test scores, which reflect student quality and should be more heavily weighted, and endowment per capita, which reflects resources. And academic reputation. Real variables. So I think it is bad advice to tell a young person to devise their own goofy methodology (where data quality can be iffy and lead to misperceptions) and then take that list seriously. I would be pretty upset if some adult authority figure convinced my kid that Scripps was a better option than Williams. Because every grown up in the real world knows it’s not and if some kid chose Scripps over Williams based on this advice, that kid will be pretty resentful when she turned 25 and realized her college degree has less value in the real world than it could have.

A few thoughts:

1) You're arguing that data shouldn't have yielded the results it did. But data is what it is, so you're arguing that your opinion reflects reality better than data does.

2) Suggesting you know the opinion of "every grown up in the real world" regarding Scripps vs. Williams seems pretty presumptuous, as does saying you know that Williams would have greater value for every student than Scripps.

3) You argue that USNWR uses real variables, but imply that those used by this ranking and any created by an individual for themselves are not. Why are you so convinced USNWR has "the truth", and no one else is capable of discovering other ways of looking at the world?

4) I really like the idea of each kid creating their own ranking. If my kids' education is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, I want their choices to be based on what matters to them, not what some "authority figure" (as you say) says should matter to them. How is an authority figure (USNWR) saying Williams is better than Scripps any better than another authority figure saying the opposite?

[Anonymous]

Same poster as above, one other note, I do think there's quite a range of outcomes for financial earnings. I know class peers who have gone on to be successful lawyers, investment bankers, executives, etc. and are doing better than I financially, including one who runs a VC firm. Then there's a bunch like me who are doing quite well in our various UMC careers. And, there's also a bunch who just don't seem to have ever focused on maximizing $$$, and instead work at non-profits, or in the arts, or as educators, or whatever their passion is. My sense (intuition, not data-driven) is that while all schools have these range of outcomes amongst their alumni, that Pomona does tend to draw a bit higher percentage of the cohort with "less financially lucrative" careers and passions into its student body than the top East Coast SLACs do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you're Pomona admit caliber then you could easily get into a top 20 university. And in that scenario I struggle to see why you would pick Pomona. No merit aid, no prestige, lackluster alumni network, poor professional advising.

At least Williams and Amherst have some clout on the east coast. In California, no one takes Pomona seriously. Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna are more famous.

Sounds like you either are in a very insular part of California or you don't know many people who know much about colleges in California (or only know the colleges that produce grads in a particular field). Pomona is definitely prestigious, although private schools generally are higher profile for the average person in the east coast than the west coast, which has better state schools than the east coast. It's true that people going into STEM or CS rate Harvey Mudd higher (as the only engineering/STEM school in the Claremont schools) and Claremont-McKenna send a higher % of kids to business (according to their outcomes pages, about 50% of CMK grads go to accounting/consulting/financial services, while Pomona has about 20% going to consulting/investment banking etc), but the largest single employers of Pomona grads in 2022 were Boston Consulting, Deloitte, Google, and Microsoft. The same big companies recruit and hire at all the Claremont Schools (it's literally one campus and they do events/interviewing for all students). Pomona grads go wherever they want, just like grads of Amherst, Williams and many other small liberal arts colleges, but they go to a more diverse group of employers and industries, plus go to grad school at high numbers. Even so, Pomona's average starting salary is about the same or a little higher than CMK's and other east coast liberal arts schools.

Pomona is harder to get into than most top universities, so it is by definition more selective and those great students choose it over schools you think are more well-known. Employers and grad schools know that it's the place to find those great students. But if it's important to you that your neighbors wherever you live know much about the school, then by all means send your kid elsewhere. Part of its attraction is that the kids are pretty comfortable in their own skin and not going because they or their parents are too worried about that kind of stuff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you're Pomona admit caliber then you could easily get into a top 20 university. And in that scenario I struggle to see why you would pick Pomona. No merit aid, no prestige, lackluster alumni network, poor professional advising.

At least Williams and Amherst have some clout on the east coast. In California, no one takes Pomona seriously. Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna are more famous.

But Pomona has nice weather!

Williams and Amherst have a lot of clout, possibly more than lower Ivy. I would choose Williams over Cornell any day of the week.

Williams is better than all ivies except hyp

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Like what makes it stand out? Why is demand so high?

Prestige huggers. Truth is, no pristige. Just imagination.