| Even assuming your numbers are correct, the disparity between the placement of the 20th school and the first school would be significant enough that a jump of 5+ places from the selectivity ranking (which also has a pretty significant variance), I believe, would indicate either some degree of outperforming or professional tendencies at that school. Accordingly, schools like Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore, which fall in the 15-20 range in terms of selectivity but the 5-10 range in terms of placement according to both yours and the WSJ's study, are either outperformers or more professional school-oriented than some of the other schools on the list.
Now, none of those schools is particularly well known for being professional school-oriented (on the contrary, in fact--they all have relatively high rates of PhD candidates as well as relatively high rates of students joining Peace Corps and Teach For America), so I think a reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that they must be outperformers.
For full disclosure's sake, I am a fan of LACs so I think this is an easy conclusion for me to reach. An alternative conclusion to draw from the data is not that they are relative outperformers, but rather, that they're selectivity data is artificially skewed lower because they are self-selecting. I think this is also a reasonable conclusion to draw from this--the LACs have a reputation of being self-selecting, at the very least. |