I think the Buffett benefit was really his helping to manage the endowment for the 40+ years he was a trustee. Over that period it grew something like 10,000%.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Grinnell SUCKS. It’s a tiny depressing place surrounded by maga and meth. The endowment is strong because farmers are generous, but that is truly all it has: a big endowment. Everyday life at Grinnell is miserable in 2024. I’m there and can’t wait to leave. Don’t let alums fool you. This ship is sinking. Stay out of Iowa.

I guess Warren Buffett us now a “generous farmer”

Yeah, “the endowment is strong bc farmers are generous” = “this is not a comment to be taken seriously.”

FFA has given 25x more than any other donor, Buffett included.

Merced is not a trash town. It's near Yosemite National Park.

Merced sucks. It’s “near” Yosemite but it’s actually in the San Joaquin Valley, which sucks.

Anonymous wrote:Putting aside the inherent problems and silliness of the rankings, it seems like the LACs in the 10 to 20-ish range are particularly susceptible to multi-school ties and large reshufflings. Grinnell and Middlebury went from 11 to 19. Smith went from 11 to 16 to 14 in the past three years. And so on. Even if you believe such rankings are gospel, I think it's fair to conclude that the LACs in this general band are extremely similar and not really amenable to a rigid ranking scheme. Thus even tiny changes to USNWR's methodology cause a lot of reshuffling.

Of course, as an evergreen reminder, these colleges, their students, or the educational experiences they offer do not materially change from year to year. Grinnell is the same school in 2024 ranked #19 as it was last year ranked #11.

True. In fact, it has probably improved and should have gone up in the rankings. The facilities keep improving. Grinnell is remodeling all the dorms to make them more comfortable (they're installing A/C in all dorms). Acceptance rates have gone down. US News gives a vague overall view of college rankings, but one cannot take them overly seriously.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Grinnell SUCKS. It’s a tiny depressing place surrounded by maga and meth. The endowment is strong because farmers are generous, but that is truly all it has: a big endowment. Everyday life at Grinnell is miserable in 2024. I’m there and can’t wait to leave. Don’t let alums fool you. This ship is sinking. Stay out of Iowa.

I guess Warren Buffett us now a “generous farmer”

Yeah, “the endowment is strong bc farmers are generous” = “this is not a comment to be taken seriously.”

Anonymous wrote:Grinnell SUCKS. It’s a tiny depressing place surrounded by maga and meth. The endowment is strong because farmers are generous, but that is truly all it has: a big endowment. Everyday life at Grinnell is miserable in 2024. I’m there and can’t wait to leave. Don’t let alums fool you. This ship is sinking. Stay out of Iowa.

Yikes! Hopefully the professors are mostly good

Anonymous wrote:Grinnell SUCKS. It’s a tiny depressing place surrounded by maga and meth. The endowment is strong because farmers are generous, but that is truly all it has: a big endowment. Everyday life at Grinnell is miserable in 2024. I’m there and can’t wait to leave. Don’t let alums fool you. This ship is sinking. Stay out of Iowa.

I guess Warren Buffett us now a “generous farmer”

Anonymous wrote:US News can't decide what they want to be. Some time ago, the US News ranking was a rough approximation of prestige for the sake of employment. Social mobility isn't relevant to that, except perhaps very indirectly.

Social mobility would be relevant to fit. Fit is subjective. There is no one-size-fits-all best "fit" ranking.

It sounds like you are holding on to old notions of the us news and are not okay with adapting to this change. They are very clear about their methods and what they consider important in current college admissions- whether you see it as a prestige ranking is up to you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
https://thesandb.com/48353/article/grinnell-college-ranking-us-news-liberal-arts/

Grinnell College has dropped eight places in the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of Best National Liberal Arts Colleges in 2025. The report ranked the College nineteenth, whereas last year’s report ranked Grinnell eleventh in the category.

Now.. they along with Oberlin will crib that ranking doesn't matter

What's a Grinnell?

It's a college in Iowa where nearly everyone is smart enough to know how to use google.

Iowa.

That explains why it's obscure.

Thanks!

Grinnell SUCKS. It’s a tiny depressing place surrounded by maga and meth. The endowment is strong because farmers are generous, but that is truly all it has: a big endowment. Everyday life at Grinnell is miserable in 2024. I’m there and can’t wait to leave. Don’t let alums fool you. This ship is sinking. Stay out of Iowa.

Lately DS has been getting lots of “apply early!” letters and emails from Grinnell.

Stinks of desperation.

Anonymous wrote:US News can't decide what they want to be. Some time ago, the US News ranking was a rough approximation of prestige for the sake of employment. Social mobility isn't relevant to that, except perhaps very indirectly.

Social mobility would be relevant to fit. Fit is subjective. There is no one-size-fits-all best "fit" ranking.

This is the thing. The undergraduate experience is dynamic, a shifting alchemy between what the institution offers (resources, class size, majors, concentration, setting, vibe, cost, mentors, personalities/professional expertise/ life experiences of faculty), and what an individual student — each with their own personality, background, ambitions, interests, skills, insecurities, habits, financial reality, and weird little factors that for whatever reason make them more or less likely to thrive) — brings with them.

And that’s before that student even lands on campus and begins their education, which (hopefully) brings new discoveries about themselves and new insights about the world and what they want from it.

A PP’s comment, about how before US News counselors suggested only schools they knew, was a good one. But I’d still be loathe to take an ordinal ranking too seriously. There’s just too much complexity, far too many factors, to be able to say “Princeton is definitively better than MIT, which is definitively better than Harvard, which is in turn better than Stanford, Yale, and Caltech in exactly that order,” or whatever the equivalent would be on the SLAC side.

Anonymous wrote:US News is the only place anyone looks for how good a school is.

In fact, my child is applying to UC Merced, which is basically one of the Top 50 schools in the entire country according to US News..

Now Merced has an acceptance rate of 90% and a yield rate of 9%, and the last time SAT's were reported, it had 25% of their students scoring below a 990. It's SAT average was 1080.

But everyone knows the data lies and US News speaks truth to power.

So we are all in on UC Merced. GO BOBCATS!!! It is Stanford's new rival!

Acceptance rate does not equal quality. And if a great education is to be had at a school with a 90% acceptance rate that people wouldn’t have guessed, that’s a good thing, and USNWR actually provided a valuable service. That said, all rankings are flawed, including USNWR, and UCM probably wouldn’t be the 58th most desirable university for my kids, and fit is what matters most anyway.

US News can't decide what they want to be. Some time ago, the US News ranking was a rough approximation of prestige for the sake of employment. Social mobility isn't relevant to that, except perhaps very indirectly.

Social mobility would be relevant to fit. Fit is subjective. There is no one-size-fits-all best "fit" ranking.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:US News is the only place anyone looks for how good a school is.

In fact, my child is applying to UC Merced, which is basically one of the Top 50 schools in the entire country according to US News..

Now Merced has an acceptance rate of 90% and a yield rate of 9%, and the last time SAT's were reported, it had 25% of their students scoring below a 990. It's SAT average was 1080.

But everyone knows the data lies and US News speaks truth to power.

So we are all in on UC Merced. GO BOBCATS!!! It is Stanford's new rival!

No one in California wants to go to Merced- it’s a trash town with nothing to do and the school is very low quality. US news boosts them out of pity for public universities. The only public university worth its salt against the top private universities is Berkeley, relnown in almost every academic subject. Every other Uc and public university is way over ranked

Excuse me. Merced is not a trash town. It's near Yosemite National Park. And the reason UC Merced jumped up in US New rankings is because they give a lot of weight to Social Mobility (30% of ranking) so UC Merced has been able to propel a lot of 1st gen students to higher social mobility and is being rewarded for that.

UC continues to be a crown jewel public school, esp if you live in CA.