Interesting Comparisons of Top 20 Nat'l Unis vs Top 20 LACs

College Search & Lists
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<p>If you compare the numbers for the Top 20 National Universities with the Top 20 LACs, you see some interesting numbers.</p>

<p>TOTAL UNDERGRAD ENROLLMENT
121,371 National Universities
38,863 LACs</p>

<p>TOTAL FIRST-TIME, FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS
29,876 National Universities
10,082 LACs</p>

<p>FRESHMAN RETENTION
97% National Universities
95% LACs</p>

<p>TRANSFER STUDENTS
2610 (equal to 9% of the entering class) were transfers into the National Universities
636 (equal to 6% of the entering class) were transfers into LACs</p>

<p>Observation: It appears that National Universities actually expand their class size over the four years while LACs contract slightly. </p>

<p>% OF TOP 10% STUDENTS
88% National Universities
77% LACs</p>

<p>Observation: This was actually a surprise to me. Six LACs were below 70% (Wesleyan, Vassar, Grinnell, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Colby). </p>

<p>SAT CRITICAL READING
707 Avg. for Top 20 National Universities
(25/75 range of 658/755)</p>

<p>694 Avg. for Top 20 LACs
(25/75 range of 644/743)</p>

<p>SAT MATH
726 Avg for Top 20 National Universities
(25/75 range of 680/771)</p>

<p>688 Avg. for Top 20 LACs
(25/75 of 644/731)</p>

<p>Observation: While the Critical Reading is relatively close, the engineering students at the National Universities likely are responsible for the noticeably higher Math score. The only LAC with engineering students is Swarthmore where they make up 5% of the majors.</p>

<p>COST
$34,397 National Universities
$35,468 LACs </p>

<p>% OF IN-STATE STUDENTS
19% National Universities
20% LACs</p>

<p>% OF FEMALE STUDENTS
50% National Universities
59% LACs</p>

<p>Observation: The % of female students number is skewed because of the women’s colleges (Wellesley, Bryn Mawr & Smith). For the other schools, the % of female students is 52%.</p>

<p>GREEK LIFE
National Universities-12 of the 20 schools have fraternities and sororities
LACs-7 have fraternities, 4 (of those 7) have sororities</p>

<p>ATHLETICS
National Universities-14 of the 20 schools are Division I
LACs-2 of the schools are Division I (Davidson and Colgate)</p>

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<p>Isn’t Harvey Mudd on the list?</p>

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<p>afan,
You’re absolutely right, but they are the only school among the 20 LACs that did not provide the majors data to my source (collegeboard.com) so that is why I didn’t mention them. They did provide their SAT scores so the LACs group got the benefit of HM’s terrific scores (CR 680-750 and M 740-790).</p>

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<p>MOST POPULAR MAJORS
National Universities: 22% Social Sciences, 10% Engineering (+1% Computer & Info Science), 7% Business & Marketing, 6% Biology, 5% Psychology, 4% English, 4% History, 3% Performing and Visual Arts</p>

<p>LACs (not including data from Harvey Mudd): 29% Social Sciences, 11% English, 10% Areas & Ethnic Studies, 9% Performing and Visual Arts, 9% Biology, 7% Foreign Languages, 7% Psychology, 7% History, 7% Physical Sciences</p>

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<p>RE enrollment statistics- are you including both private and public universities in the top 20? Some Public U’s [for instance the UC’s in Calif] are mandated by Calif law to take in transfer students from Calif community colleges, so that is why their enrolllment #'s go up.</p>

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<p>good stuff hawkette…while you have your spreadsheet handy, how about enrollment-weighted alumni giving ratio? I always liked that one as a sign of school spirit.</p>

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<p>It would be interesting to see how this correlates with private/public h.s. school ratios at unis and LACs.</p>

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<p>% OF STUDENTS FROM PUBLIC HS
(source: collegedata.com, schools equally weighted)
67% National Universities (data not provided for WashU)
62% LACs (data not provided for W&L)</p>

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<p>Another interesting comparison is merit aid. Amoung top 20 National Universities 9 offer it: Caltech, Duke, Chicago, Wash StL, Northwestern, JHU, Rice, Emory, and Vanderbilt. Among top 20 LAC’s (I think) only 3 offer it: Davidson, Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna.</p>

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<p>curious14,
I have also been doing a little investigation on merit scholarships to top national universities and hope to have more on this later. </p>

<p>Including your information above, of the Top 20 USNWR, the 8 Ivies don’t offer it (at least not in that form) nor apparently do Stanford, MIT, and Notre Dame. Does that sound right to you or others?</p>

<p>And can anyone else please help confirm curious14’s thinking above that only 3 of the Top 20 LACs offer merit scholarships.</p>

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<p>papa chicken or others,
I would like to do some type of endowment analysis. As you probably know, some posters believe that there is a heavy connection between endowment per capita and SAT scores. My problem is that the endowment numbers that I have are from NACUBO and everytime I use them, someone challenges them with better information that shows how outdated the NACUBO data is (I am drawing on info as of 6/30/06). Do you have any suggestions on good sources of absolute endowment levels and, probably more importantly, per capita endowment levels (including grad students)?</p>

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<p>papa chicken,
I’m not completely sure of my calculation, but I think that the weighted alumni giving numbers are as follows:</p>

<p>39% National Universities
50% LACs</p>

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<p>Looking at the gross numbers there were about 50,000 first-years at the top 20 Nat/LAC combined.</p>

<p>The 75th percentile for SAT critical reading was about 750, slightly more for Nat, slightly less for LAC. </p>

<p>Thus, about 12,500 first-years scored 750 or better on CR. </p>

<p>For college-bound seniors in 2006 there were 25,994 that scored 750 or better on CR.
source: <a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools;

<p>This indicates that almost half of the top scoring CR group are attending top 20 Nat or LAC’s. </p>

<p>Note: I only looked at CR because the 75% for the top 20s lined up well with what college board reports.</p>

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<p>standrews,
I think all of your calculations and conclusions are correct, but the combined number of entering freshman at the Top 20 National Universities and the Top 20 LACs was about 40,000 (39,958). </p>

<p>Birds of a feather apparently do flock together.</p>

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<p>hawkette-- I think the NACUBO listing ( <a href=“Page not Found”>Page not Found; ) for 2006 endowments is the best info you are going to get that’s consistent. Yes, many schools have been fund-raising since their FY06 closed (example: W&L announced today of a $100M gift, which is huge compared to their '06 endowment in the mid 500’s)…but you gotta snap the chalk line somewhere.</p>

<p>I wholeheartedly agree that any analysis of endowment, particularly one intended to compare classes of schools with differently sized enrollments, should be on a per-student basis. It gets tricky when assessing the universities, however, that have graduate students and added overhead costs associated with graduate schools and who also have grant income from research and public funding for the state schools, the latter revenue streams which offset the need in part for endowment…lots of confounding issues here. If one were to just assume all student counts and $ issues had parity across all universities, then one could just divide endowment by undergrad enrollment to enable comparison of like universities to one another…but the LACS are a different animal, so such a simplistic approach will yield much weaker validity. Still probably worth cranking the numbers with those big caveats. One aproach would be to make the assumption that graduate research funding offsets the graduate student headcount…this can’t be true across the board, but if partially true might provide a slightly more valid comparison of universities to LACs if the per student endowment used only undergrads as the denominator.</p>

<p>I am sure you have read this recent thread on endowment and the issues described above:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=345002[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=345002&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Perhaps Interesteddad, for whom I have tremendous respect especially on these kinds of issues, will kick in here.</p>

<p>I am not aware of any web-available download that already has calculated (at least from FY06 data) per student endowment. You’ll need to input current enrollment for each school then. One pet peeve here, beware of those enrollment numbers…Middlebury for instance reports their official enrollment (~2400) excluding off-campus-study students, which would be around 2650-2700 if corrected & reported like everybody else…this kind of inconsistency can materially change their calculated stats that have enrollment in the equation…I haven’t found any others that do this (but I’m looking!) Note that, given I’ve only found Middlebury to be at issue here, individual school perturbations should probably not materially affect a broad comparison of universities to LACS.</p>

<p>goodluck…nice to have some fellow lovers of quasi-quantitative analysis on this board.</p>

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<p>Thanks for your comments. We’re all trying to learn more and this site, including many of your posts, has been very helpful to me. </p>

<p>Re endowments, I think it best to wait until the new numbers come out again (do you know how soon after 6/30/07 we can expect that?). There has been a lot of fundraising and market appreciation over the last year and the current numbers just don’t seem accurate enough to include in any discussions. </p>

<p>Over the last year I have come to appreciate the importance of a school’s financial resources and what this came mean for an institution in terms of attracting/retaining faculty, attracting students via merit scholarships, building new facilities both academic and athletic, hiring faculty to reduce class size, investing in staff to help in a variety of student areas from academic advising to career counseling/placement, etc. This is particularly acute for some of the state institutions as they face budget cutbacks and seek ways to make up the difference. Endowments are very, very important to the strategic plan of any university, but the public’s awareness and appreciation of this fact is unfortunately low.</p>

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<p>So, over half of the freshman applicants in the 76th and greater precentile of CR don’t attend top 20 schools. </p>

<p>Does someone have the stats for Math? If the stats for Math are similar, that means the top 20 schools don’t end up with over half the top 25 percentile math scorers.</p>

<p>While the top scorers in CR and Math may not be the same students, it may well be that half or more of the students with combined scores over 1525 aren’t at the top 20 Nat and LAC.</p>

<p>That seems to bode well for the non-top 20 schools and helps account for some non-top 20 schools’ willingness to find merit scholarship money for those top scoring students (NMFinalists) that aren’t stuck on attending the top “rated” schools.</p>

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<p>Last year’s endowment news came out in mid-December…here’s the short thread I started back then with links to the news:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=275066[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=275066&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The importance of endowment was an eye-opener for me on this board, too. As I became more aware of its importance as it related to my child’s college selection, I used that revelation of importance in two ways while college hunting: (1) as the parent looking for these kinds of subtleties that a child would never consider (at least not mine), I checked out infrastructure condition and signs of capital spending when on tour…the well-endowed schools IMO tangibly showed better upkeep and investment, likely signs of investments in less-observable student and faculty resources, and (2) I asked lots of pregnant questions about the schools’ endowment and importance during info sessions…my son got used to my assertiveness on this subject after a while, and I got bolder as i went through the campus visit process.</p>

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<p>Papa,
As I understand it, Federal definitions stipulate that enrollment numbers should only include students who have registered for classes at a particular institution during an academic term. If students are not taking classes at a particular college (e.g., studying at another institution, on academic leave, etc.), then they are not by definition considered full time students.</p>

<p>I know you’ll research this, and I’m looking forward to your analysis.</p>

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<p>07DAD,
I like it that you see the glass as half-full! The reality is that there is a limited number of spots at the most highly ranked schools and with demographic changes (higher number of high school graduates, higher college matriculation rates among high schoolers, increased interest/matriculation by non-US students, etc), there are more high quality students now than ever before. They have to go somewhere and that is why we are seeing some of these lower ranked schools significantly improve the statistical profile of their student bodies and seeing a concurrent dropping in the acceptance rates. </p>

<p>Last year, about 69000 students scored 700 or better on the SAT Critical Reading and almost 96000 scored 700 or better on the Math. With only 40,000 students entering as freshman to the Top 20 National Universities and LACs, that leaves 30000 or more students who end up elsewhere (and that assumes that all of the 40000 at the most highly ranked schools scored above 1400 which they definitely did not). As you so aptly point out, the wealth is spreading.</p>