New US news rankings: liberal arts colleges

[Anonymous]

Why is Colgate so underrated? It should be up there with Middlebury.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They are all good schools. Really all the same. Ranking is a silly ego game.

This x1000. The amount of hand ringing, gamesmanship, struggle, pressure, and anxiety is ludicrous. This illusion and fallout is the exact reason (among many others) that kids have anxiety through the roof. You can look at a lot of reasons, but one is that their parents are out of control. Keep it in check people! Your children are watching.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think Oberlin and Kenyon both suffer from being in Ohio. The kind of kid who wants to go to Oberlin doesn’t want to be in MAGA land. That’s why they’re trying to attract students with so much merit. If Oberlin was in a blue state, it wouldn’t be handing out money.

Explain Grinnell then. It’s in the heart of MAGA country and in the middle of nowhere and súper left wing and kicks the snot out of Kenyon and Oberlin in the rankings.

Grinnell has a huge endowment and tosses merit aid around like nobody’s business. Money conquers all.

Interestingly, Grinnell ranks 14th for LACs on Financial Resources, per USNWR, despite having the 4th largest endowment/student ratio. It appears there’s more to it than endowment when managing finances. Here’s the description:

“Generous per-student academic spending indicates a college can offer a variety of programs and services. U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures in the 2021 fiscal year. Expenditures were compared with fall 2020 full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate enrollment. New for this edition for all schools, U.S. News only used FY2021 financial resources data sourced directly from the U.S. Department of Education to ensure more standardized reporting among schools. Previously this indicator had used a two-year average.“

Interesting. So it just measures spending, rather than financial aid. But a lot of the endowment funds are used to offset the cost of attendance by allowing for more generous need based and merit aid. In theory, when a school is able to buy better students via aid, the quality of the student body goes up.