Agree, as is “Public Ivy,” “New Ivy” and the rest of the pseudo-Ivy naming. Most of those schools are great in their own right, the Ivy groveling feels gross/weak.
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Oops! I missed that. Thanks!
Excuse me while I go clean the egg off my face.
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No worries. At least you stayed on topic!! 
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The synergies of being in the Claremont Consortium may have benefited the individual member colleges, Pomona, Scripps, Claremont Mckenna, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer (5Cs), in terms of their rankings as small colleges. However, they are separate and individual colleges so trying to rank the “Claremont Consortium” as a sole entity won’t work. Anyone using the rankings will look for the individual college. Also, the Claremont Graduate University is a completely separate school, and not operated by any of the 5 Cs. Each of the 5 Cs is still a small college, with their individual personalities and academic areas of focus, so they should be treated as such, and not ranked collectively.
There are many other small LACs on the Forbes list that are part of consortia, also trying to gain some of the advantages of a larger University. Olin College works with Babson and Wellesley College to allow students to cross-register for classes. There is the Five College Consortium in Amherst, between Mt. Holyoke, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Smith College and UMass Amherst. There is the Quaker Consortium between Brynn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, and UPenn. Wellesley has cross registration with MIT and Brandeis. There is the Five Colleges of OH consortium with Denison College, Kenyon, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster College.
All of these small colleges are on the Forbes list but their rankings should not be lumped together because they are part of a consortium.
How are the 5 C’s any different for a student than the multiple undergraduate colleges of any university that they are part of? I understand that they are legally independent and administratively separate, but other than that, I don’t see how the student experience is any different.
The other consortia which you mention are not physically adjacent to each other, so they are not going to form a single community of learners who do things together outside the classroom as they do at Claremont. Physical distance is also a factor in just how often students are going to take advantage of cross registration opportunities in these other consortia. At Claremont, it’s just a matter of walking across campus as it would be at any bigger university.
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I’ve visited these campuses a few times and grew up not far from there, and it’s different than a university. You do get the benefits of shared resources and some collaborative programs, but at the end of the day, your college is your home base, and each one has a distinctive identity and aesthetic. And the collaboration is not the same across the board (some programs are two- or three-college programs, not five-college, etc.). It’s really not the same as a small/medium university.
Help me out since I didn’t grow up near Claremont.
At a university with 5 different undergraduate colleges, isn’t your undergraduate college your home base? And doesn’t it have a distinct identity and aesthetic? For example, at Columbia University, you can be in Columbia College for A&S, or Fu College of Engineering, or the School of General Studies, or Barnard College for Women. Isn’t each distinct? I’m not saying it’s the same as Claremont, but no 2 universitues are the same.
How about NYU? A student could be in the College of A&S, Stern School of Business, Tisch School of the Arts, Tandon School of Engineering, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, or Meyers School of Nursing. How much overlap do you think there is among those 6? Do you think that the vibe is remotely the same among any of them?
That seems analogous to Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and University of Colorado - Denver.
I don’t know enough about how the colleges at a University work to fully answer you. But, my initial instinct on one of the ways that the Claremont Colleges don’t seem to fit your analogy is that they have completely different core curriculums. So, an economics major at Claremont McKenna vs. Pitzer vs Scripps vs Pomona will have very different classes they must take. They have a multi class “Core” set of classes for Scripps for example and also have a race and ethnic studies requirement and a women’s and gender studies requirement for all students. That is not the case for all of the others. Pomona I believe has a speaking requirement or something. Some schools require a fine arts class, others don’t. The number and type of humanities or social sciences class requirements are different between the schools. So, two students at different Claremonts who major in the same thing will be required to take different classes. Even if they may be in some of the same classes for their major (I don’t know if the requirements for the major are also different between schools), how is that like a university if two students studying the same thing have different obligations to graduate? Not to mention that the supports for the students in terms of career may be different as well due to the differing administrations, career offices, etc.
There are likely other differences from a university with colleges that would be obvious to one who is more knowledgeable, but the above seems a significant difference to me unless I misunderstand how such Universities work (I didn’t go to one with separate colleges).
No – I work on that campus, and I can tell you it’s very different. CCD, MSUD, and UCD are separate institutions with some shared facilities, including a shared campus. There are some shared initiatives (but these are extra-curricular). There isn’t a whole lot of cross-listing or cross-registration anymore (I’ve been teaching at Metro since 2009, and I used to have a lot more). But it’s one uniform campus, with one student union, one library, many shared buildings.
For the Claremont colleges, the campuses are separate but adjoining. They each have a different look and feel. There is more collaboration than there is at Auraria – combined majors, some combined athletics, and students can use each other’s libraries, dining halls, etc. But the campuses are separate, and possibly other than athletics, there are no shared facilities.
There is a shared library. And Scripps and Pitzer share a science center. There may be more shared facilities, but I know of those for sure from our visits.
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At some universities, there may be similar majors in different divisions. A somewhat common example is computer science in the liberal arts/science division and also in the engineering division. The divisions may have different general education requirements.
Perhaps the main difference between a university which has various divisions within it and the Clarement colleges is that students at the university are expected to take courses across divisions, and often have to (e.g. engineering students taking math, science, humanities, and social science from the liberal arts/science division), while students at the Claremont colleges can choose to stay fully within their own colleges when choosing courses.
Interesting, why would a university have two computer science majors in different colleges? So, students from two parts of the university graduate with the same degree (bachelors in computer science) but different requirements? Strikes me as odd and inefficient among other things.
Sure, but at a university, the facilities for the various colleges are distributed throughout the campus, so your college doesn’t control a separate sector of campus with a different vibe and feel from other parts of the campus (for the most part – medical schools, ag schools,or whatever are different). But your university is your institutional identity. For example – if you’re an engineering student at BigName U, and someone asks where you go, you’ll say BigName U, and maybe add that you’re in engineering. And your college usually doesn’t determine where you live. Again, there are probably some exceptions, but even then, the housing systems don’t have fundamentally different cultures based on an affiliated college – at the Claremont colleges, they do. And a big university has a big-university feel. The Claremont colleges feel like separate small colleges, each with a different culture. They look different, attract different kinds of students, have different traditions, etc. If you’re a Pitzer student in the environmental studies program (which is a three-college program), your main identity is still Pitzer.
All I can tell you is that I’m familiar with the Claremont colleges, and I’m familiar with large universities with multiple schools and colleges, and it’s not the same.
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There might be a shared library (I don’t remember), but I do remember that Scripps also has its own library (which anyone can use).
Yes, and this highlights a key difference. Each Claremont has the full breadth of a liberal arts college curriculum (math, science, humanities, social science, arts), a college at a University does not.
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Both are true. They all have their own library and there is a shared one.
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Interestingly, this was an explicit part of the pitch that Arts & Sciences made when we were attending one of WashU’s Admitted Students weekends. In their breakout section about academics, A&S suggested that it functioned academically like a Liberal Arts and Sciences College, but then was also part of the larger university community.
I don’t entirely NOT buy that, but I do think there are a variety of potential differences as well.
One is just I think if there are grad programs in your departments, that can obviously make a difference to how your department functions, what individual professors do, and so on.
There may also be significant scale differences. WashU’s Arts and Sciences is already 4200 undergrads or so, which would make it very large by LAC standards. At, say, Pitt, not even a very large public, their Arts and Sciences school is over 11000. At Ohio State, it is over 16000. And so on.
Then as others are pointing out, there may still be quite a bit of curriculum interaction, particularly for schools outside of Arts and Sciences. As in Engineering students may be taking a lot more of their non-Engineering classes in, say, Arts and Sciences classes along with a lot of non-Engineering students.
And then as WashU was pitching as a positive, non-academic interaction, including with housing, dining, and non-academic student activities, may be a lot higher too.
Of course these are all the sorts of things where you could see them as pros or cons, or indeed a mixed bag. But I do think they add up.
As a final thought, I sometimes think the closest analog to the Claremont Colleges might well be something like Oxford or Cambridge, with their constitutent college system. Still not a perfect analog, but maybe at least a notch or two closer than something like WashU.
Probably historical reasons at schools where CS originally developed out of EE but they wanted to make it available as a major to non-engineering students.
Some of it is like code-sharing on an airline. If you look at the actual course and when it meets- same building, same time slot, same professor. Just numbered differently depending on which college/academic program you are looking at.