<p>One of the Rhodes Scholars attended the same pre-school as my kids.</p>
<p>One was in the HS class between my two daughters. Public HS, diverse suburban population. When I asked #1D if she knew the young woman, & then told her that she is a Rhodes Scholar, she wasn’t at all surprised.</p>
<p>I thought that cumulative list had been updated for this year’s winners, but it looks like it hasn’t. Which means that this year’s winner is Villanova’s third (!), and there are no first-time colleges this year.</p>
<p>The overweighting of Rhodeses to a few institutions is almost comical. Counting this year, the top three are Harvard (347), Yale (233), Princeton (201), and they have supplied over a quarter of all of the U.S. Rhodes Scholars there have ever been. Stanford (95) and West Point (91) round out the top five, and with the next five, much more tightly bunched around 50 apiece, take the cumulative total for the top 10 (out of over 300) to over 36%. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, if all colleges that had produced a single Scholar over the years were treated as one college, it still wouldn’t crack the top 5 in terms of total Scholars produced (and would represent about 1/4th of Harvard’s total).</p>
<p>It’s like income distribution. The bottom 90% of colleges on the list combined produce less than the top 10%.</p>
<p>JHS, you’re right, although the weighting is a little less extreme if you look at scholars over the last couple of decades rather than over the whole history of the program. They’ve moved in a slightly more inclusive direction of late.</p>
<p>Hanna, the evidence for that inclusiveness this year is pretty slim. Students from colleges ##1-9 on the all-time list represent 19 of the 32 2014 Scholars (and of those nine colleges only ##6 and 7 had no representative this year). Of the remaining 13 colleges, at least two, and possibly more, would be in the top 10% all-time, and all but six would comfortably be in the top 25%. So, 59% of this year’s Scholars are from the top 3%, at least 2/3rds from the top 10%, and over 80% from the top 25%. It’s hard to call that very inclusive.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think it was a lot more inclusive in the olden days. The Universities of Montana and Oklahoma are both in the high 20s all time, slightly higher than Vanderbilt, Cornell, and WashU. That reflects a time when you didn’t have a lot of people from Harvard and Yale competing in District 13, and when the best students in Montana or Oklahoma rarely bothered to apply to Harvard or Yale.</p>
<p>The link I cited has a number of disclaimers, including:</p>
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<p>Huh, interesting stats. I didn’t realize that about Montana and Oklahoma.</p>
<p>The University of Oklahoma is a poor example as the current president was a Rhodes scholar and has made it his mission to have more of them come from OU. As such, advisers in the honors college try to make students aware of prestigious collegiate awards and then do their best to groom top students to win them. I suspect that if one plotted when Rhodes scholars from OU were announced (and possibly other institutions which have recently beefed up their honors offerings), the bulk of them would be from the past twenty years. </p>
<p>I would also be unsurprised if the top Rhodes schools spent considerable money on awards advising. After all, West Point has nearly double the number of Rhodes scholars as the Naval Academy despite being similarly service oriented and geographically diverse.</p>
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<p>This is certainly true in the case of West Point. My brother-in-law went to West Point and he said they were a serious Rhodes factory by design. The Rhodes scholarship is one mark of excellence they have chosen to focus on over the years. They have a formal program with preparation advisers and interview coaches. The identify cadets who are possible strong candidates early in their West Point careers and recruit and groom them, sometimes for years. And their efforts show in their numbers successful scholars.</p>
<p>I suspect that most if not all the schools with double-digit winners have at least a faculty member who serves as a Rhodes prep adviser, but I doubt whether they all put on a full-court press to the same degree that West Point does.</p>
<p>I know from the experience of one of my kids’ friends that the Naval Academy is not currently outdone by West Point in its grooming of Rhodes Scholars. Remember, though, that some of that difference goes back 100 years. In recent years, I think Annapolis has generally done a little better than West Point, though obviously not this year.</p>
<p>The University of Oklahoma has had 3 Rhodes Scholars in the past 20 years. It averaged more than one every other year in the 20s and 30s, and about one every other year from 1947-1975.</p>
<p>The University of Montana basically had 3 or 4 per non-war decade into the 90s, but no one in the past 20 years.</p>
<p>Harvard had 45 in the 80s, 40 in the '90s, and only 30 in the '00s, with actually none in 2001. The next most recent year when THAT happened was 1930, and it only had 1 in 1987, 1982, and 1967.</p>
<p>(You can figure this stuff out from the Rhodes Trust site if you want.)</p>
<p>whenhen, Only 3 of the 27 Oklahoma Rhodes Scholars awarded have been after 1975 (2000,2008,2011). There have had 27 between 1904 and 2011, the vast majority from 1975 and before. All of that info is readily available on the Rhodes Scholar website.</p>
<p>Crossposted with JHS on this issue.</p>
<p>Thank you for the correction. I hadn’t bothered to check the time distribution of when the Rhodes were awarded and instead only relied on anecdotes about how the university had improved under the current president.</p>
<p>“I suspect that most if not all the schools with double-digit winners have at least a faculty member who serves as a Rhodes prep adviser”</p>
<p>Yep. Harvard has outrageous emphasis on this. Every Harvard upperclassman has at least one Rhodes or Marshall alum living and eating with the undergrads in their own house – 1 per 120-160 seniors, or probably per 20 or fewer applicants. This is in addition to university-wide resources.</p>
<p>Though no one got Rhodes this year UGA has had 23 students named Rhodes Scholars.</p>