<p>
</p>
<p>Many popular schools aren’t reported. Correct, none of the Ivies show up, but many public universities are missing, too. My state’s public flagship isn’t reported. </p>
<p>One of the most selective schools I can find is Middlebury College (USNWR #4 LAC). I looked up its NSSE scores along with those of several other LACs that have a wide range of selectivity and US News rankings (Claremont McKenna, Grinnell, Kenyon, St. Olaf, Centre, Bennington, and Earlham). Middlebury has the highest score among them for “level of academic challenge”, but the lowest scores for “active and collaborative learning” and “student-faculty interaction”. What does this really mean? Maybe Middlebury has more distinguished professors who are busier with research. Maybe Middlebury gets stronger students who need less help. Maybe its students are more competitive. Really, I don’t think it tells us too much. These 8 schools have composite “Senior” averages between 55 (Grinnell) and 62 (Centre), which appears to be too narrow a range to very clearly differentiate them. So maybe that is the take-away message. Perhaps USNWR exaggerates the differences of schools that in fact offer very similar learning experiences, at least from an “engagement” perspective. This is assuming that the NSSE sampling is consistent from school to school, and that students at different schools apply similar standards in answering the same questions.</p>
<p>I also tried averaging and comparing scores for some Big Ten schools (Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, Minnesota, and TOSU). These scores, too, are tightly clustered (46.7 to 51.7, which is somewhat lower in every case than the LAC averages.)</p>