Here you go - goldwater count for last 5 years (northwestern and brown still at bottom). It’s telling that despite thousands of STEM undergrads who may qualify for the award, some schools have barely 1 or none a year. Definite underperformance. But hey, at least you’re better than Brown…=).
Total Count School
15 Stanford
12 JHU
12 Rice
11 Harvard
11 Yale
11 Cornell
11 MIT
11 Caltech
10 Princeton
8 Columbia
7 Duke
6 Dartmouth
6 Vanderbilt
6 Northwestern
1 Brown
The reason why schools consistently have large pools of Fulbright applicants is likely because those schools provide ample support for undergrad research opportunities and plenty of students are involved in them while having foreign language proficiency. More participants in funded research translates to more students thinking they have a shot which leads to more winners. While I see your point about normalzing, it also seems to me schools deserve some credit for such support.
Northwestern had 4 winners in 2010 (or was it 11?). So if you go back a bit further, the numbers can look pretty different. It’s a matter how you slice and dice the data. Different period ranges yield different perspectives…
I think you are overestimating the number of STEM students at Duke/Northwestern relative to Rice. Rice’s engineering school has 1500 studens vs 1600 at Northwestern, which is not a significant difference I wouldn’t be surprised Rice has more physical science majors given its reputation as a good school for STEM. Even Northwestern has the 7th ranked chemstiry department, the number of chemistry majors is only around 30 or so per year.
Actually, for goldwater, we’d need to compare Stem to Stem including all science majors. I still think Rice would have a smaller student body including all STEM.
It’s all about recency however. Brown has a total of 2 goldwater scholars in the last 10 years. Northwestern is also towards the bottom as many of the other schools have had 4 goldwater scholars in a single year in past years as well.
I asked for 10 years but you gave me 5. I just found that during the 5 years you excluded (2007-2011), Northwestern had 15 winners, more than anyone had during 2012-2016. I am a glass half-full kinda guy.
There is an asterisk next to K-state. Clearly that has some significance. As for the Goldwater itself, it doesn’t need somebody on college confidential to vouch for its prestige.
Duke is #3 for the Goldwater scholarship, an award that goes to no more than 4 students per college per year. The spread between Duke and NU (or JHU and Brown) in this one award doesn’t necessarily say too much about the quality of random STEM departments, unless it is part of a bigger pattern. Duke at least deserves credit for cherry-picking 3 or 4 exceptionally brilliant STEM students per year, then educating them well enough that they get Goldwaters. What evidence is there that whatever Duke is doing right for the Goldwaters translates to equally distinguished outcomes, relative to other top N schools, for a bigger cross-section of graduates?
Duke ranks about 30th for the per capita number of alumni-earned doctorates in STEM fields, a distinction that typically goes to over 100 alumni per mid-sized T20 university per year. Hopkins is ranked slightly better than Duke for STEM PhD production (according to NSF 2013 data) … but Duke is better ranked than Hopkins for overall alumni PhD production (according to Washington Monthly’s 2015 college ranking). Do we care more about some doctorates than others? If we could track where the doctorates are earned (which AFAIK we can’t), would it matter?
Although I like the concept of outcomes-based rankings, they seem to be at least as problematic as the much-maligned USNWR rankings. One big problem is choosing which outcomes matter, then measuring, normalizing, and weighing them appropriately. Another is separating treatment effects from selection effects.
I enjoyed reading these posts and consider myself as better informed than beore. Honestly speaking, all of you have made your points and many of you added value to the meaning of quality. Now, I am talking from the perspective of a parent, who had gone through the process of selecting the ‘schools to apply’ based on the ‘popular rankings’ and the so called ‘fit factors’. I heard the word ‘prestige’ more during this arduous process than the whole of my professional career. Simply put, most of the parents prefer ‘private’ over ‘public’ and often Michigan CoE will be turned down in favor of NU SEAS. Please, I am not making a value judgement or trying to convey Michigan as a better option of the two! I am trying to highlight the preference based on perception which are founded on the ‘prestige’ factor. All that OP has done, which in my opinion, is a good way of analyzing the relative strengths of the colleges and universities, will make very little meaning to a large section of the parents trying to find the ‘schools to apply’ ! I wish, we look beyond the so-called prestige factor.
Since 2007, the University of Alabama has produced more Goldwater scholars than any university in the land, even more than Harvard. Historically, KSU is among the top 5. Montana State University blow Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn out of the water…so does Tulsa.
Most of those scholarships are given to so few, and primarily based on regional affiliation, that they really aren’t all that telling.
Incidentally, I went over the Marshall scholars figures last night (this is the sort of stuff I do for fun), and here is what I came up with:
Harvard 242
Princeton 126
Yale 118
Stanford 85
MIT 65
Brown 46
USMA 36
Cornell 33
Berkeley 30
Columbia 28
USNA 28
Dartmouth 26
Duke 25
Texas-Austin 25
UIUC 24
Rice 24
Georgetown 23
Tulane 23
Chicago 21
Northwestern 21
Wisconsin-Madison 19
Bryn Mawr 18
Michigan-Ann Arbor 18
Indiana University 17
Williams 17
ASU 16
Michigan State 16
UNC 16
USAFA 15
Emory 14
Johns Hopkins 14
Penn 14
Caltech 13
Occidental 13
Pomona 13
Vanderbilt 13
Kansas State 12
Smith 12
Swarthmore 12
Wellesley 12
Georgia Tech 11
Boston College 10
Pitt 10
Amherst 9
Kansas 8
Mount Holyoke 8
Penn State 8
USC 8
UVA 8
Wesleyan 8
Arkansas 7
Bowdoin 7
Notre Dame 7
Purdue 7
Arizona 6
Colorado-Boulder 6
Davidson 6
UGa 6
Haverford 6
Nebraska 6
Oberlin 6
Oklahoma 6
Washington University-St Louis 6
Boston University 5
Carleton College 5
Claremont McKenna 5
Colorado State 5
Fordham 5
Hope College 5
Kentucky 5
Lehigh 5
Morehouse 5
NYU 5
Ohio State 5
Spelman 5
Washington 5
Wheaton 5
And here are the Truman numbers:
Stanford 62
Yale 61
Harvard 60
Duke 48
Brown 39
Kansas State 38
Chicago 35
USMA 35
Princeton 34
UNC-Chapel Hill 31
UVa 31
Columbia 27
Georgetown 26
Cornell 25
Michigan-Ann Arbor 25
Swarthmore 25
Utah 25
Dartmouth 24
Penn 24
Texas-Austin 24
USNA 24
MIT 21
Wisconsin-Madison 21
Minnesota-Twin Cities 20
ASU 19
Claremont McKenna 19
Georgia 19
Boston College 18
Bowdoin 18
BYU 18
Kansas 18
Oberlin 18
Indiana-Bloomington 17
USAFA 17
Wesleyan 17
Williams 17
Alabama-Tuscaloosa 16
Michigan State 16
Vanderbilt 16
Wyoming 16
Johns Hopkins 15
Nebraska-Lincoln 15
Washington University-St Louis 15
Amherst 14
Montana 14
Northwestern 14
Oklahoma 14
Pomona 14
NYU 13
Notre Dame 13
Rice 13
Tufts 13
Emory 12
George Washington 12
Grinnell 12
Middlebury 11
William and Mary 11
Colorado-Boulder 10
“There is an asterisk next to K-state. Clearly that has some significance.”
NerdyChica, the asterisk next to KSU merely denotes that it is a public university.
“Simply put, most of the parents prefer ‘private’ over ‘public’ and often Michigan CoE will be turned down in favor of NU SEAS.”
It is important to remember that 50% of NU students are ED. As such, it is only natural that Michigan would not do well in attracting students away from NU. But if you look at non-ED applicants, I think Michigan would hold its own well vs Northwestern. In the case of Engineering, I think Michigan would have a slight edge over Northwestern. I also think Michigan would have the edge when it comes to Ross preadmit vs NU. Where NU would likely have an edge over Michigan is Weinberg vs LSA, although I am not sure of the extent.
It makes no sense to list raw numbers for these scholarships and not account for student population. There are schools listed next to each other with forty times the number of students. I hope it’s obvious why that is not an apples to apples comparison.
urbanslaughter, comparing LACs to research universities would indeed not be apple to apple. But I am not sure that applies to research universities. Do you think Berkeley will have more applicants than Cornell? Or Michigan more applicants than Penn? etc…
