Reply to The Top 50 National Universities by Average Rank from the 8 Most Influential Rankings

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]1A) Harvard, Stanford
1B) Princeton, Yale, MIT
1C) Caltech, Duke, Penn, Columbia

2A) Dartmouth, Northwestern, Brown, UChicago, Cornell, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona
2B) UMich, Rice, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, WashU, Notre Dame, Georgetown, UCLA, Berkeley, Wellesley, Bowdoin

3A) UVA, UNC, CMU, Emory, USC, Georgia Tech, Barnard, Carleton, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna
3B) BC, UT Austin, W&M, W&L, Vassar, Davidson, Haverford

There is some separation at the overall top now and a few of the LACs looked off grouping wise. Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore are widely grouped together as the top LACs (and Swarthmore wins most of the cross admit "battles") and Pomona is similar out west.[/quote]

It's hard to really separate Harvard and Stanford from Princeton and MIT. Princeton is the premier undergraduate education, resources strongly centered on undergrads with a massive endowment, mandatory thesis, precept system, etc. and it's the best STEM ivy league school. MIT is the overall king of STEM and STEM has only become increasingly important in today's society. MIT also excels across the board in a variety of sciences and social sciences. The weak link to me is Yale.

For LACs, I never figured that Bowdoin was any weaker than Swarthmore or Amherst. But it also feels weird putting Bowdoin alongside schools like Northwestern and Dartmouth so I think 2B is right for it. B[b]ut I also think more of the top LACs do belong in 2B instead of 2A because I have a tough time imagining that a lot of people turn down Dartmouth and Brown for Amherst or Swarthmore.[/b][/quote]

Yield says more about marketing investment than education quality.  [/quote]

It's fair to say it's both, but I would agree that the educational quality of Williams, Amherst, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Bowdoin are very high. I think Bowdoin deserves to be with WASP as well. They're really the more business LAC compared to Swarthmore and Pomona, which has its values. Ken Chenault, Reed Hastings, and more went to Bowdoin.[/quote]

Fun exercise... ask yourself how much more you think a place like Harvard spends on a typical grad student than on a typical undergrad.  Biggest variable is probably access to professors, but there are others.  If you assume the overall difference is about 2x, then adjust for the percentage of grad students, you can get an idea of how much of its endowment is actually spent on the undergrads, and compare to institutions that do that exclusively.  Try it.  You'll see Harvard wouldn't be in the top 15 of LACs for endowment by student.

If you are genuinely interested in undergraduate education and not on impressing the neighbors, many if not most of the top destinations would be the well endowed LACs, with the well endowed universities with very high undergrad percentages being the best alternative to LACs.

The eventual fallout of what happened to Columbia should be be ranking organizations stop assuming resources are evenly divided amongst grad and undergrad students at universities, as that was a big part of what made their numbers so misleading.  However, there are vastly many more university spots than LAC ones (so, many more of their customers will go the university route and want positive reinforcement for that decision) that the ranking publications have a competing interest that encourages them to avoid the elephant in the room.

Universities have some real advantages... more majors (like engineering), more brand awareness (among the less informed), more central locations, and higher level athletics are the obvious examples.  But college rankings that allocate all the top spots to universities are overly swayed by what's happening at the grad level.

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