I’m surprised that Harvey Mudd is only #8 among LAC’s since it is a STEM focused school and has the reputation of getting top paying jobs for its graduates. I don’t know where it was last year though.
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Harvey Mudd was ranked #10 last year. This year’s #8 ranking is Harvey Mudd’s best ranking ever, fitting with the general pattern of tech heavy colleges improving in the new rankings. With the new “earnings by major” metric being weighted at only 5% there is limited impact in overall ranking with the change.
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Harvey Mudd did well on both Times and USWR rankings- maybe the size of 900 students compared to bigger schools limited them in other metrics. Holy Cross is 3,200 students and did well with its education model. Interesting the variety of schools in the LAC category.
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I always think of Mudd as sort of the Caltech of the LAC list. To me it really doesn’t even make sense to rank them in the same lists as very different, general focus sorts of colleges and universities, so I don’t really think there is an obvious right or wrong ranking position for them.
But anyway, Caltech was also benefited by the new earnings approach. So as Data10 pointed out, the direction was as expected, and then the magnitude is basically whatever the marketing team was comfortable with allowing, as implemented by the weightings and other formula details.
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What specifically did you find unloveable other than a particular list of schools moving down?
I guess one competing consideration is that if some schools don’t move others can’t either. If you want to pass a rule that the T10 is reserved for a specific list of schools, I’d like to know which ones get to stay put … forever … and why.
It’s one thing to evaluate the new measure or measures on the merits, regardless of how it affects schools x, y and z. It’s another to consider the rankings implications for certain schools and reason backwards on journey of measure hate (or dislike).
I am as surprised as anyone that Middlebury moved to its current ranking, not “because it’s Middlebury”, which of course is a bias with which I’m burdened. But peeking around that bias, I am still surprised because I know from experience and awareness that Middlebury is a great LAC choice for a kid who wants to go into banking and consulting, which tend to be highly remunerative. IOW, it’s more a point of a suspected misunderstanding on my part about how the new measure works than a point of where I think Middlebury belongs forever. It also raises the question of how well I really know Middlebury.
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My D was recruited to row there. I thought she’d fit like a glove with my conception of the place. She liked very little about it.
It’s obviously a fine school, but I have to admit that my own preconceived notion of the place did not match reality. I also am not quite as taken by their campus as most people seem to be.
That said, they’re loaded, they’re serious, they’re swimming in tradition and they clearly confer an amazing education and, for the right fit, experience.
Here is a good example of what I was talking about a few posts up and why the ratings change arguably isn’t all that bad. Trinity is typically discussed in the lower tier of the NESCACs but those who know it know that they’re sneaky good at getting kids into various commerce pursuits, including banking. Nothing wrong with that … schools like Williams benefit GREATLY in their own reputations for being good at that thing. I see nothing wrong with a new measure that benefits Trinity fair and square and they get to move up.
It’s only one new measure. I assume most of the other measures that have conspired to keep Trinity down are still there.
Wellesley will forever be the “school that got away” for me as a parent.
My D26 got in and then decided that she didn’t want to do an all-women’s school after all.
I loved the campus (feels like a summer camp), the academics, the traditions, and Wellesley’s admission operation is simply outstanding. I felt terrible when D26 turned them down.
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Middlebury is a strange one, surprising enough that their President made a comment today they are trying to figure how how things worked because of the 11 continuing metrics they rose in 9 of them. The distortion of resources because of the FTE calculation including summer school has been discussed here before but the whipsawing is pretty strange in their case. What is unique in Midds structure that has caused such wild strings would be interesting to learn.
The big swings by Wellesley, CMC, Carleton, and Middlebury (I am sure that there are others) just helps make the case for other rankings, all of which are flawed. I’m sure that it drives clicks and maybe college compass subscriptions which to be honest is the real goal.
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What bothers me about the dropped rankings for Barnard, Wellesley, and Smith in particular is that they’re historically women’s colleges. If I were on the US News team looking at the results of our new metric/ranking system, I would do a double take and want to be damn sure that we had not introduced bias into the system. And I would want to be very clear in our communications that we did, in fact, notice and the explain how we became confident these metrics reflected what we believe to be the right set of parameters.
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Not surprised by CMC. They are exceptionally good at placing kids in super charged careers. Great place to go if you value a LAC education and want to reach for the brass ring.
I know the feeling. They recruited my kid hard and I loved the place but the all-women’s school was a major factor in the end. One of the biggest take aways for me in the entire college process was that I wasn’t particularly good at guessing what schools my kid would like and not like.
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Very fair point.
given the “major to major” comparison that was supposed to be the new measure, it occurred to me that, for example, Smith’s tradition of producing a lot of teachers hurt them - relatively more, say, Smith history majors going into teaching than going into corporate life.
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Very much the case for me as well. And the kid who I thought would fight me to go on trips to all women schools was super open about it. The one I thought would fit wouldn’t give them a fair look at all.
Not any better than Middlebury so what caused the divergence? The outcome metric shouldn’t be that impactful but if it is the driver it highlights both some of the confusion and a major methodology flaw in the use of outcome data which is how much geography matters. I’m sure Carleton suffers because of geography on that metric.
I haven’t looked up Middlebury, but I wonder if they get caught up in people majoring in languages that then go work for government orgs or NGOs which don’t pay quite as well?
And speaking of Wellesley, one of the things that I like is that they actually report stats that I think are personally more interesting/useful that get to satisfaction with the outcome the student got. From their career page, they list two:
and
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I wouldn’t expect so, but I don’t know that definitively. But to your point, my understanding is that CMC kids tend to go to NY or stay in CA. Both are high COL places and require higher salaries.
True, and the first place my head went to when I saw the ranking. But then, isn’t that true for everyone? I wouldn’t expect Middlebury’s foreign language people to be disproportionately low paying vs. other, say, NESCAC foreign language people. Maybe there are some random exceptions. Maybe Amherst sends a lot of foreign language majors into finance. But I’d expect that to be the exception and the rankings outcome suggest that the foreign language majors at their fellow NESCACs are getting paid more. I find that that hard to believe myself. But the point is that all the schools have majors and people filling them that traditionally don’t pay well coming out of school.
I think it’s probably that Midd has enough language majors to actually calculate an ROI versus other schools that might not graduate enough. So Midd gets an extra datapoint, but because it’s one that essentially everyone gets paid similarly, they don’t get something that’s above the median. Just a theory.
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That’s as good a guess as any I would have. Good point.
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