LAC's by Rhodes scholarship winners

nostalgicwisdom
Fri, 01 Sep 2017 05:01:52 +0000

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.