<p>I copied and pasted these straight from an online source. So any errors (e.g., Worchester, Brown listed as being in Mass!) were Barron’s fault, not mine.</p>
<p>monydad - I think nothing illustrates the pernicious, self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of the USNews surveys over the years so much as these early barrons rankings. By yanking the top LACs out of direct competition with the Ivies, USNews virtually created an extra ten slots in their premier survey – the so-called, “national university” survey to be filled by universities outside the Northeast (thereby more closely reflecting the magazine’s more midwestern orientation and readership) and added that much more lustre to the remaining Ivies. There are people who, to this day, don’t know what a liberal arts college is because they never get past the initial university ranking, which gets pride of place in the magazine.</p>
<p>Another interesting tidbit from the Barron’s list: What happened to Shimer College? </p>
<p>Maybe part of the answer is found on the U. S. News website:
“This school refused to fill out the U.S. News survey; limited data appear.” Interestingly, Shimer is now simply not ranked at all, while Reed, which took the same course, at least as I understand it, does appear in the rankings.</p>
<p>johnwesley: I was not paying any attention to what was happening with colleges from the mid-70s to 2003, so I can only speculate about causation. Offhand I’m sure US News had some influence, but perhaps there were other causes as well.</p>
<p>Here are some other possibilities, largely unrelated to US news:
- population migration away from the Northeast
-students turning more conservative, more religious, and pro-business - dramatic escalation in costs of a college education, possibly creating more of an economic litmus test/ mindset among purchasers: “If we’re going to pay that much money, the place better be famous”. This name-recognition test would favor the larger universities over most LACs.
- alternatively, more pro-business 'get a good job immediately" mindset which favors universities which have more on-campus recruitment. Or, looking at it another way, no longer a need to stay in grad school forever in order to avoid the draft, hence more emphasis on getting a job rather than grad school, leading to the above result.
- “Baby bust” disproportionally straining budgets of small schools (LACs) that have proportionally higher fixed costs.
- most top colleges going co-ed.
-major cities becoming much safer (less crime; no riots) and economically thriving - individual huge donations to particular colleges and universities
- individual endowment performances</p>
<p>Actually from the “History” portion of Shimer’s Wikipedia entry, it looks like the college ran into serious financial problems and continues to struggle in that regard:</p>
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<p>I got them from the extensive list of historical charts in the on-line Factbook at Swarthmore’s institutional research website – historical SATs, acceptance rates, enrollment by race and gender, and so forth.</p>
<p>You have to hunt around each college’s website. Some provide more historic data than others. Start by searching for terms like “institutional research” or “fact book”. I know, for example, that Yale has a wealth of historic information.</p>
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<p>Financial issues seem to have driven quite a few of the movements (in both directions). There are several specific examples where a lack of endowment (New College) caused a precipitous fall. And, of course, other examples (Duke, Emory, UWash-Stl) where large endowments drove a rise in prestige.</p>
<p>Long-term prestige in higher education is almost always associated with high per student endowments.</p>
<p>Now that I’m thinking about it:</p>
<p>Seems to me more like endowment helps with the cure, but is not necessarily the cause. In times of stress, when revenues start falling below costs, endowment can plug the difference. And if you don’t have it, it can’t. But the real underlying issues are the ones that caused revenues to fall below costs in the first place.</p>
<p>Such issues could be: declining applicant pool overall, even more declining applicant pool for your anti-business, counterculture college specifically when that’s no longer in style, resulting tuition discounting to “buy” students causing lower revenue per student, cost inflation (eg oil embargo & interest rates of 70s-80s) but no ability to correspondingly increase tuition revenues due to the student supply issues. I think you need the endowment to patch over that stuff. So the “long-term” would be involved in riding the storm.</p>
<p>But when all is going well: did New College have a huge endowment when it was ranked so highly by Barron’s? Did Antioch, when it was in its heyday? I don’t know.</p>
<p>I remember “back then” U Rochester allegedly had a huge endowment, built with optics & photog stocks, but its ranking was no different than today and probably was never commensurate. IIRC Texas A&M has a huge endowment; while it’s a fine school I’m guessing there are some with lower per capita endowments that are perhaps more highly regarded.</p>
<p>In other words the general tendency doesn’t surprise me, but not uniformly and not necessarily as root causation.</p>
<p>For a few years I sent my kids to a wonderful NYC private school with virtually no endowment at all, comparatively. In recent years its college list has looked better than most of the “big boys”. If revenues go down and costs go up that school may be in some trouble. But in the meantime they didn’t and my kids were fortunate to be there when they were.</p>
<p>Maybe so, but, no one really knew what an endowment was (or, much cared) until USNews made it an integral part of its bells and whistles. After about ten years and some haggling, they switched to an all-purpose, “expenditure per student” measure, but, by then, it had become a hermeneutic for the same thing.</p>
<p>There are a few other factors that I think are at work, too:</p>
<p>– A whole bunch of demographic factors have leveled the playing field on faculty quality: high grad school enrollments during the Vietnam era, high immigration by foreign PhDs and PhD candidates, and reduced department sizes due to the baby bust and reductions in spending in the 80s. The result being that lots of high-quality young faculty have been up for grabs.</p>
<p>– The traditional LACs were institutions of the pre- and post-WWII northeastern WASP establishment. The path to success for immigrants and working class people used to be imitating the northeastern WASP establishment, and that kind of acculturation was necessary for access to capital in many cases. But capital-raising has gotten much easier, and not that many people care about the northeastern WASP establishment anymore. Harvard adapted to that long ago, and effectively made itself a necessary institution for all kinds of groups. Many LACs were behind the curve.</p>
<p>– Science is much more capital intensive than it was 30 years ago. You need a bigger institution to get the critical mass to support a full range of equipment.</p>
<p>– Schools that can provide two jobs to married couples, or that are in areas that offer a wealth of spousal employment possibilities, have an advantage over the competition when they are hiring faculty. That’s been good for Penn, NYU, and a lot of other urban or suburban schools, and for places like Duke and Stanford. It’s been tough on Cornell and lots of the LACs.</p>
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<p>Exactly. The declining applicant pool and energy inflation put all colleges under pressure in the late 1970s.</p>
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<p>The student revenues at all highly ranked, presitigious colleges fall below the operating costs. That’s ultimately why these colleges have high demand - they spend more on you than you pay. Pretty simple formula for attracting customers, really.</p>
<p>BTW, sometimes the financial wounds are self-inflicted. There have been several examples of elite colleges that undermined their financial positions with ill-timed enrollment growth. By diluting their per student endowment, they were unable to pay for incremental costs (mostly faculty) of enrollment growth and their budgets become unbalanced. Spending down their endowments to cover the shortfalls hurt their relative position viz-a-viz the competition, as did skimping on the operating expense side.</p>
<p>At an elite college (i.e. one with high per student operating expense), it is impossible to “make it up on volume” because the amount of incremental revenue is less than the incremental cost (assuming you intend to keep quality, such as student/faculty ratios, consistent.</p>
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<p>I don’t agree with that at all. Reading some of the history of these schools, they were very aware of the importance of endowment funding as early as 1900. I think it could be argued that many of the reputations we see today were cemented between the two World Wars and much of that was fueled by endowment contributions from the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller’s General Education Board, etc.</p>
<p>One of the reasons that many colleges ended their early religious affiliations was that the Carnegie Foundation would only contribute to non-sectarian colleges. They were providing major support at the time with endowments for faculty and libraries. To put this into perpspective, Swarthmore completed a $500,000 endowment campaign in 1911. One quarter of that ($125,000) was a grant from the Rockefeller General Education Board. Note, of course, that these were all northeast industrialist foundations (because that’s where the money was) so it’s easy to understand why collegiate “prestige” has always been so Northeast-centric.</p>
<p>The regional schools that have risen to prominence have often done so on the back of regional industry – Stanford (transcontinental railways), Duke (tobacco money), Emory (Coca Cola money), etc.</p>
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<p>I went to a college that was founded in 1965, and served on the alumni board for several years after graduating. Our school marketing person (oh, excuse me, “Director of Development”) told the board frequently, “A university is never truly successful until after its first graduating class dies of old age.”</p>
<p>Most public schools did not worry much about endowment until relatively recently (like the 1970’s on). Now they are playing catch-up and doing a pretty good job of it, out fundraising all but a handful of top privates. In 20 years I think you will see publics as half of the Top 20 in total endowment.</p>
<p>Interesteddad - that’s all very, um, interesting, from an infielder’s point of view. I was talking about the general public.</p>
<p>And, while it’s true that an endowed chair, here and there or a trust devoted to purchasing a few books every year, were nice things, I doubt that before 1950, there was one private college in ten that didn’t depend on tuition for 95% of its costs. In fact, I’d say it was still true today.</p>
<p>Interesting that Boston College appears on the “highly competitive” list that long ago. One would think, based on reading a good number of the (I dislike saying “ignorant” – especially on this learned forum) postings on cc, that it is more of an upstart, which hardly can be mentioned in the same breath as the more esteemed ones on the same list. </p>
<p>Funny, really, with an endowment back then of only few million (and on the verge of insolvency), that it could compete with its more “established” peers. Of course, to those who knew the College it was no suprise, since it has always had challenging academics. It is gratifying for them to see that BC now has the financial resources to match.</p>
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<p>I don’t doubt the 95% figure if you are looking at the entire universe of colleges. It’s only the top “x” percent that have significant endowment earnings.</p>
<p>I don’t have historic data going back to the 1950s. However, I can tell you that the published sticker price at Swarthmore was 57% of the per student spending at Swarthmore in 1970. In 2005, it was…57%. </p>
<p>Increasing financial aid has reduced the actual per student revenues as a percentage of spending. Actual student revenues (after aid discounts) were 41% of per student spending in 2005.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>I would note that the spread of high quality faculty throughout the system and the importance of endowments are quite related.</p>
<p>Research on the careers of economists in the top 10-20 departments indicates that faculty who left the top tier departments (for example, in the 1970s and 1980s) to go to lower ranked departments suffered in terms of productivity, ability to co-author, visibility, etc. In contrast, the evidence is that productive economists from the 1990s on suffered no such penalty from a move. This has meant that the top schools have had to pay large premia to their superstars to keep them from leaving and even then often fail. It also makes for a lively labor market in academics and wider disparities in salary even within departments. Although there’s no proof that this holds for other fields, I suspect something like it is true.</p>
<p>This has made endowment and budgets extremely important. Why? Because good, lower ranked schools can challenge the elites if they have enough money which was less true in earlier times. [If you suffered a big reputation hit from leaving the elites, the elites had to pay less to keep you and competition from upstart schools was slow to appear.] Moreover, success in individual programs meant that schools don’t have to challenge Harvard or Stanford on every margin. They can just choose to build up molecular biology or sociology or law and bid away some very good people. Hence, those that are on top and will remain on top are those that can accumulate a war chest to match their standing. Those non-Ivies that developed a big war chest (NYU, Northwestern, Wash U, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, and most famously of course, Stanford) have/have been muscling their way into the big time. This is a common subject of lunch time discussion with my colleagues, and many believe that most state schools will suffer greatly unless they find creative solutions to the endowment problem that keep them at least even with the richest privates. Some well-known state schools are already starting to decline, but given their current high status, it will take time before losses of faculty translate into general loss of prestige in the public at large.</p>
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<p>Yes, it was considered a new thing when my alma mater had a development office and investment manager when I was an undergraduate there in the 1970s. The endowment funds have been crucial for keeping taxpayers happy while still maintaining in-state “flagship” status.</p>
<p>This thread prompted me to open a thread asking about today’s view of highly selective colleges </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=335907[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=335907</a> </p>
<p>and I’m wondering what all of you parents think about what the most selective colleges are today.</p>