I am pretty sure if Carleton was in New England it would make more kids’ lists, but then would it still be Carleton if it was in New England?
My personal feeling is it is actually good that these Midwestern schools still have a lot of Midwestern vibe to them, even if being Midwestern de facto costs them some US News rankings slots. It gives academicky kids who actually value that sort of thing a different choice, and sometimes a more accessible choice, possibly even a less expensive choice (not Carleton, but others offer good merit). And all that is really tied to them not being part of the Northeast/California Hunger Games.
I was skeptical but for my DD23, my third, this tool worked incredibly well. We saw this tool after she was done with researching/applying to schools but her top five schools were the top five! And people have told us her top schools do not have much in common …but apparently it did!
Seriously - USNews rankings is, has been, and always will be, a beauty contest for colleges, and their ranking system will always have little to do with the factors that determine which college a prospective student chooses. The people who obsess over the rankings are people with white collar jobs and a family income between the top 10%-15% by income or wealth and the top 0.1%.
Since college administrators all belong to that income group, that is why they are also obsessed with those rankings.
It really has less to do with the factors that make a college a good match to any specific kid, and more to do with superficial factors that are indicators of a college being “exclusive”.
While it’s great that USNews is now include social mobility in its rankings, they are actually likely driving themselves out of business.
Let us be perfectly honest - the biggest chunk of people who are obsessed with “prestige” of the colleges to which they want to send their kids are actually looking for colleges which are Exclusive. There is a very wide streak of classicism among this group, and they are mostly not OK with colleges looking to recruit low income students at the expense of what this group perceives as being “merit”. A ranking system which heavily rewards social mobility will cease to be popular among a large segment of the prestige-obsessed.
I think Carleton, St. Olaf, Macalester, Kenyon or Oberlin might be great academic and social fits for my S26. But my NYC-born, CA-raised kid is a little like… Minnesota? Ohio? I hope to tempt him with that terrible weather (he loves winter) with a trip in February!
That’s great to hear. Sounds like DD23 knew more about the schools than the other people.
It would be much more humane for kids and parents if rankings were deemphasized and matching as you mention was the focus.
Companies already provide high-school specific data that tracks admission statistics to colleges based on GPA and test scores. Other companies have “chance me” software that includes data about EC’s and activities. Combining these two data sets would already be very helpful. The killer app would be for colleges then to upload (even secretly) information about their relative institutional values, initiatives, environment etc.
The better a “machine” we could build, the fewer schools most students would have to apply to. There would always be room for exceptions, diamonds in the rough, but overall this would bring a lot more clarity and somewhat less anxiety to the process. It would also end up with Colleges getting more applicants with the qualities they seek and with the priorities they want.
But, that can’t happen because there’s cache to rejecting 96% of your applicants especially if you can also say that 80% of those were perfectly brilliant and great people. That’s what’s baked into the algorithms and system.
Having followed a lot of college visit journeys at this point (and gone through one of my own), I am pretty sure that could go either way (which I think is fine).
Some of what I will call for convenience “coastal kids” appear to have exactly that feeling of “welcome relief” (to borrow the phrase above) when visiting these areas and these schools. And so they start actually seeing the value in not pursuing the same few schools as most of the other coastal kids they know.
And then others are like, “Yeah, seems nice, but . . . nah.”
And then still others are unsure for a long time. It was not until my own S24 was doing post-offer visits that he finally really settled on Midwestern options (Carleton and WashU were his final two).
But as long as your kid eventually follows their own path for their own reasons, I think whatever they decide will be fine.
Well, pure science and math are part of the liberal arts tradition. Making medical education less daunting financially would help restore some luster to a lot of small colleges that are without engineering programs; so many great LACs were known for being feeder schools to top professional schools back in the day. Even the prospect of a lucrative practice is not enough to overcome the fear of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before the age of 30.
Medical education is expensive for the medical schools, so providing it likely means needing a subsidy from endowment or (for public medical schools) state government or other sources (revenue from services or research) in addition to student tuition.
Beyond these obvious errors, it’s a bad idea use this (or any) list to measure universities’ “superiority” over one another. The particular schools mentioned in your post are all outstanding for a variety of reasons. Many more schools are absolutely fabulous as well. There is simply no need for insults and other nonsense. Seriously.
In Carleton’s case specifically, I think the overall vibe is a combination of many things. The infectious “Midwest nice” tendencies, passion for academics (as indicated by grad school matriculation rates), and teaching quality are probably the most discussed. Less commonly cited factors might be the abundance of nature and semi-official embrace of the importance of humor. None of these elements are in themselves super unique, but the combination seems to be more so, and they play off and reinforce each other in interesting ways, imo.
Insults?
Please consider the context…Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth are considered “Bottom Dwellers” with respect to the rest of the Ivy League’s USNWR rankings
And, if it’s such a bad idea to measure universities’ “superiority” over one another?
Why does the USNWR top national universities list draw so much attention?
Repeating what you wrote does not make it correct.
While my larger point is that rankings do not represent ”superiority,” it’s also important to note that your post is factually mistaken on many levels, the most obvious of which relates to Cornell’s national USNWR ranking — #5 in the Ivy League, ahead of Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia — and its global USNWR ranking, which is higher than Duke.
Regardless, let’s agree that these are all outstanding institutions, none of which deserve to be insulted with terms such as “bottom dweller.”
The school’s mission statement explicitly cites humor as a shared value. (Perhaps that’s more accurately referred to as their “community statement” or a “short form mission statement”; their full mission statement, which also mentions the importance of humor, is here.) Their At a Glance page includes humor as one of three things the school is most known for (the others being rigor and curiosity). The first sentence on the Admissions department’s Explore Carleton page lists rigor and humor as the two main ingredients of the school’s character.
The school does seem to attract hardworking students who appreciate its many goofy traditions, some of which are described here, and many more left for students to discover later, as you might imagine. I will add that confident self-deprecation appears far more fashionable there than taking one’s self too seriously.
A fun example of the school’s use of humor can be found in this announcement about a logo change. It was so convincingly written (by their president!) that a number of parents took it seriously. It inspired one of the most popular t-shirt designs sold by the bookstore that year. The prior president was far from stodgy in this fundraising campaign video. The president before that also mentioned the importance of humor and fun in his inauguration address.
Every college has entertaining videos created by its students, and linking to examples proves nothing, but I would be remiss if I didn’t share at least one. Here’s perhaps the best known example from a (now former) Carleton student, just for fun.
