LAC's by Rhodes scholarship winners

College Confidential Community
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I made a list of top liberal arts colleges by number of Rhodes Scholarship winners and compared it US. News ranking and then made adjusted rating by the number of students. Here you can have a look at it https://■■■■■■/ex5DcQ

Few notes before starting discussion. First of all, I made top 26 colleges first and then made adjusted rating by the number of students within the list, so there are actually might be colleges that would have better adjusted rating than some of these colleges, but didn’t make the list, because they were not in the list initially. Second, I believe that in order to win Rhodes scholar you need to be very bright student, as well as have a great undergraduate education. That’s why I added admission rate of colleges, but in reality it would be better to add 75 percentile SAT scores. And lastly, obviously this rating doesn’t include all factors. Colleges that accept students from more different states should fare better. Some colleges possibly have great merit scholarships for strong applicants, so even though their acceptance rate is high, the top of student body would be in fact quite strong. Also, different colleges have different focus, colleges like CMC maybe don’t care to send students to academia.

Honestly though, the winners here are Reed, Sewanee, Wabash and College of Idaho. The fact that College of Idaho, ranked 168 in the country, with acceptance rate of 85%, fared better than Pomona (ranked 7, acceptance rate only 9%) is incredible. Some respected colleges didn’t make the list: Colby, Colgate, Hamilton, Vassar, Richmond…

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Rhodes awards scholarships by state (of either residence or college attendance). For this reason, it should not be surprising that colleges in relatively lightly populated states with relatively few other colleges indicate disproportionate representations of recipients (a factor which will not be accounted for by normalization for student population). Women’s or formerly women’s colleges would be negatively impacted as well by the Scholarship’s historical exclusion of women.

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agree with @merc81 College of Idaho is competing with the University of Idaho and Boise State. That’s it. Wabash and Reed are competing with a few more schools in their slightly larger states, but not many. In contrast, Pomona is competing with hundreds of colleges and universities in enormous California. Amherst and Williams and Wellesley many others are competing in Massachusetts, the state that is most densely packed with elite universities and LACs.

It just goes to show that you can throw data into a table but it doesn’t mean very much without context.

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Rhodes Scholarship winners since 1904, selected universities:

28 University of Oklahoma
27 Columbia University
27 University of Montana
24 University of California - Berkeley
24 West Virginia University
20 University of Pennsylvania
20 Johns Hopkins University
20 University of Idaho

http://www.rhodesscholar.org/assets/uploads/RS_Number%20of%20Winners%20by%20Institution_1_30_17.pdf

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Several things beyond what has been mentioned above:

  1. Looking at a full list of Rhodes Scholars means accounting for more than a century of performance, which means trying to make analogies to the current student body is flawed. Also, many of these schools are much larger than they were before (Pomona in 1925 had 800 students, for instance), so your student representation may be off.

  2. Rhodes is just one competitive fellowship. There are others like it such as the Churchill, Gates Cambridge, and Marshall Scholarships which should also be considered if trying to make comparative analysis of performance among LACs. You also have to situate a time frame. For instance, if you look at the last ten years, Pomona leads the LACs in winners receiving Churchill Scholarships (5) and Gates Cambridge Scholarships (6). Williams and Wheaton College MA lead the LACs for winners of the Marshalls Scholarship in the last ten years (3).

  3. These competitive fellowships are a reflection of a tiny group of the strongest students at the school- maybe the top 5% or so. They should not be used to judge institutional quality.

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Seems like the ideal school for Rhodes college competition would be one that:

(1) is located in a relatively unpopulated state, with little or competition from other elite schools;

(2) draw lots of students from highly competitive states (e.g. CA, MA, NY), who could compete in that relatively unpopulated state, instead of their home states.

This basically describes Reed College. It looks like the only other school in the state that has produced significant numbers of Rhodes Scholars (more than 3) is University of Oregon. And Reed is noted for drawing “long distance” students; they were recently ranked #1 in the “students farthest from home” category

http://www.rhodesscholar.org/assets/uploads/RS_Number%20of%20Winners%20by%20Institution_1_30_17.pdf

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As far as I know Rhodes scholarship s distributed by the state of residence, not college attendance. Anyway, I agree that it is important factor.

Agree, this is very good point. I wish every scholarship had the list of colleges by scholarship winners.

But, still looking at the list, you can say that Williams, Amherst, Haverford and Swarthmore live up to their reputation, despite being in very tough neighborhood, but Pomona doesn’t. And Massachutes certainly is tougher than California.

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Also, it would be great if someone who studied in Luther, Idaho, Centre, Wabash or Sewanee share their academic experiences or any other insights on why these colleges do so good.

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I’m afraid you have it wrong. The Rhodes website itself confirms that students are eligible to apply in the state where they attend college (not just their home state). The Rhodes website also confirms that (1) schools in states with little competition have an advantage, and (2) schools with national recruitment have an advantage.

As noted previously, Reed – which is a top performer on your list – stands out in both respects.
http://www.rhodesscholar.org/winners/college-and-university-winners/

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@Corbett,
my bad. Thanks for correcting me.

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Reed recruits top students nationally, and it is pretty much the only school in the state of Oregon that can do that. So Reed – with a total enrollment of about 1500 – dominates in terms of Rhodes scholarships statewide. The Rhodes list shows 32 winners from Reed. That’s more than all other Oregon schools combined (I counted 29 at UO, OSU, Lewis & Clark, Linfield, and Willamette).

These are all LACs that may not be highly ranked nationally, but which are nonetheless among the most elite schools in their respective states. The College of Idaho, for example, isn’t particularly elite by national LAC standards - but it compares favorably with University of Idaho and Boise State, which are the only other schools in Idaho with Rhodes scholarship winners.

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Even the best performing California school- Stanford (14 on your scale)- is considerably behind Harvard (53), Yale (45), and Princeton (38), suggesting that the difference between Pomona and its east coast peers is historical rather than intrinsic. I’m looking at the full list and there aren’t that many California schools represented or that many winners from the big names. USC, UCLA, Caltech, and Occidental have fewer winners than Pomona, Berkeley only has two times as many despite being 17 times larger, the only other UC is Irvine with 1 winner, and the only other California schools with 2 or more winners are Santa Clara, Mudd, and CMC.

Reed’s performance is interesting, but as pointed out, the state of Oregon isn’t filled with top tier schools like California is. California has ten universities ranked in the top 50 (Stanford, Caltech, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSB, UCSD, UCI, UCB, Pepperdine), seven LACs ranked in the top 50 (Pomona, CMC, Mudd, Scripps, Pitzer, Soka, Occidental), and six of the top 10 ranked public schools (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, UCD, UCI). Oregon has 0 (though I believe Reed to be underrated and a top 25 LAC). Furthermore, because of California’s huge population, the California school with the smallest in-state percent is Pomona at 26%, which is still considerably behind Reed (6% in-state from Oregon).

Interestingly, Reed has a higher percent of students from California (30.9%) than does Pomona. So if those students are getting placed in the less competitive Oregon pool, they’re definitely benefiting compared to in-state California students.

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You’re right. Reed’s USNWR ranking is totally meaningless – Reed is an outspoken critic of the rankings, and refuses to cooperate with USNWR. They don’t provide USNWR with the data that their system needs. But USNWR ranks Reed anyway; they just punish Reed by substituting very conservative values for the missing data, which kills Reed’s rank.

Back when Reed played ball, they were ranked as high as the Top Ten for National LACs by USNWR.

https://www.reed.edu/apply/college-rankings.html

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Rhodes Scholarships are awarded by district, not state. The US and US territories are divided into 16 districts and each district awards not more than two scholarships. According to their web site Idaho is part of a district that includes Washington and Oregon among others. California is split between two districts. The site indicates a California North and a California South in different districts. I suspectsvthat the districts have changed over the mqny years the scholarships have been awarded.

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Any school ranking that is heavily weighted by number or per capita numbers of Rhodes scholarships will probably tell us more about the strength of the schools’ scholarship prep programs than about their actual academic strength.

Some colleges take the Rhodes very seriously and have committees, advisers, and coaches that identify and groom potential candidates from early in their college careers - helping them build portfolios of achievements and drilling them to prepare for the interviews. Other colleges either don’t have the will or the money to spend on this sort of prep and give it short shrift. Any students who win a Rhodes from those schools do it all on their own.

Thus the numbers of Rhodes winners coming out of any given schools can be heavily biased based on their institutional focus on winning lots of Rhodes. An example of schools that do put tremendous effort into their Rhodes programs are the US service academies.