One way to compare colleges that I haven’t seen done before is by their number of alumni who become notable enough to garner a Wikipedia page. There is a list of a bunch of top liberal arts colleges by notable alumni per thousand at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sdkb/Alumni (it unfortunately would be harder to create one for non-LACs because of subcategories, but LACs are generally far superior anyways).
Disclaimer: This data obviously has a bunch of limitations; be a responsible information consumer and don’t tout it as a definitive measure of comparative alumni success. But I found the results quite interesting—there’s a ton of variation, with some top schools having 8 notable alumni per thousand and others only 2.
Why are LACs far superior to non-LACs? Also, a school having a lot of notable alumni doesn’t mean much for the students unless they are mentored in some sort by said alumni.
Having a wikipedia page is a definition of success? This sounds like a popularity contest. People in public fields are much more likely to have a wikipedia page than people in others. For example, most actors and actresses have wikipedia pages. Many athletes do as well. Most doctors do not. This seems like a pretty strange way to evaluate schools.
On so many fronts this is basically using a celebrity magazine to determine which is ‘best’. ‘Best’ isn’t necessarily fame (or notoriety).
So, a few easy reasons why this is a bad idea:
Only 17% of Wikipedia entries are for women. This isn't just historical: famously, in March 2 years ago a Wikipedia moderator refused to allow the creation of an entry for Donna Strickland on the grounds that she did not "qualify" (note that Strickland's collaborator (a man with a virtually identical CV, had had a page since 2005). Strickland got her listing 7 months later on the afternoon of Oct 3: hours after she won the Nobel prize for Physics.
It will inevitably overweight older, richer schools- which will tell current applicants absolutely nothing about the strength of the school, in their area of interest, now.
It presupposes that the college is the *cause* of the alum's success, with an implied comparable causality for a potential applicant: 8 people per thousand grads from college X became successful v 2 per thousand from college Y so your 'odds' of becoming successful are 4x higher at college X than Y?! Obviously nonsensical. There are many very successful people who would argue that their college experience was more of a negative than a positive. There are also plenty of successful people whose fame came from something that was a career change and was unrelated to their college experience. There are much, much better stats - by area of interest! available.
LACs are not "far superior anyways". LACs are great- but they are not the right or best or even viable choice for everybody. And I would stake a pretty hefty bet that the # of people with wikipedia pages who went to universities (v LACs) dwarfs the # who went to LACs.
Oh, that’s what is so off about this list. The colleges are listed by their USNews rank. A more interesting examination would be to look at how much their ranks would change if re-sorted by alumni with wikipedia pages per thousand. Just sayin’.
There are only about 230 liberal arts colleges in the USA, and almost all have fewer than 2,000 undergraduates. So, at very most, there are 450,000-460,000 students attending a LAC. The total number of undergraduate students attending a non-profit, 4 year college in the USA is about 11,000,000.
So maybe 4%-4.5% of all students attending a non-profit four year college attend a liberal arts college. This has likely not changed much at least since the mid 20th century.
I think this is largely a matter of who chooses the update the college’s Wikipedia page. For example, the list mentions that Pitzer only has 41 “notable alumni”, while Weslayan has 912 “notable alumni.” The 41 at Pitzer are the names listed on the Pitzer notable alumni Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitzer_College#Notable_alumni . There are certainly far more than 41 Pitzer grads with Wikipedia pages, but only 41 were linked to the Pitzer college page at the time of the count.
However, whoever updated Welsayan’s page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wesleyan_University_people#Alumni provides a far more extensive list of Alumni including categories for alumni who have won awards, alumni who are professors or scholars, alumni who have founded businesses, alumni who are judges, alumni who are authors, alumni who are activists, alumni who are athletes, etc. I don’t care to count them all, but I trust that there are close to 912, as listed in the ranking page. I’m sure Pitzer also has grads in all of these categories but most are not linked on the colleges Wikipedia page. If someone reading this thread updates Pitzer’s page to link to more alumni, then Pitzer could also have hundreds of links for Pitzer too… perhaps even exceeding Weslayan’s count.
They appear to just be counting the number of alumni links from the college’s Wikipedia page, which makes it straightforward to do for non-LACs, as well. For example Harvard’s alumni page is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harvard_University_people. It is ~60 screen lengths on my laptop. Stanford’s alumni page is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stanford_University_people . It is ~80 screen lengths on my laptop. So if non-LACs were includied on the ranking list, I’d expect they’d list Stanford’s “notable alumni” count to be higher number than Harvard’s. This is obviously a silly way to rank colleges.
The laudatory Wikipedia page mirrors another roll-call of achievement popular in the 1950s, “Who’s Who in America”. Basically, anyone who did anything in politics, the military or corporate America got their name and a short biography. There was also The Social Register for which all you had to be was Protestant, rich, and white, probably in that order (certain colleges even had their own abbreviations included in the footnotes).
Forbes has its annual “500” from which people cull the baccalaureate origins of the country’s biggest CEOs (lots of diversity there, btw.)
Well, it appears most of you skipped reading the disclaimer; I guess I should’ve known better than to expect this forum to be a haven of information literacy.
@Collegemom3713, re point 2, the last column is adjusted for the size/age of the school. That still probably gives an advantage to older schools, since a school will likely produce more notable alumni per year once it’s 100 years old than when it’s 20, but again per above, I don’t present this as anything other than a curiosity.
I don’t think “typically” a lot more comprehensive" is a good description. Instead the alumni listed on the 2 types of Wikipedia pages appear to be typically nearly identical for the discussed LACs. For example, the Reed alumni page you linked above has ~340 persons, while the Reed category page has 329, suggesting that the alumni page is slightly more comprehensive than the category page in this example. The extra people on the alumni page and not the category page appear to primarily be alumni who do not have a dedicated Wikipedia page. The manually edited alumni pages can include names of “notable alumni” who do not have Wikipedia pages, while it appears that the category pages does not include such alumni.
Sorry, I had no idea the OP was claiming pride of authorship. Glad to see someone rearranged things alphabetically, at least. The “work-in-progress” aspect of Wikipedia is another reason I don’t lean on it too heavily.