Just wondering if anyone has views on why Midd’s ranking has dropped back so much in the past few years? From top 5 LAC to the bottom of the top 20 is a big fall. Is the decline real?
It’s not a big fall, for one thing. And Middlebury is still a fabulous college.
Are you concerned about the quality of the school…or the ranking? Might I suggest that you concentrate on the quality of education Middlebury provides.
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Fabulous school! As a rule, I don’t pay a much attention to the rankings and would not worry about the change.
If you do have specific concerns, I’d suggest you look to see if there is a reason behind the ranking drop (ex. check that finances are sound etc.).
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For insight into this question, consider the density of the distribution curve. Middlebury received an “Overall Score” from U.S. News of 90 (https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/middlebury-college-3691/overall-rankings). This can be compared to the scores for other schools. This may influence your perception regarding what constitutes a significant drop.
Or perhaps view another ranking, such as this one, in which Middlebury places more highly than a few LACs that placed more highly than Middlebury in U.S. News:
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I would not worry about it. Middlebury is a great college, as long as you can get accepted, you can afford it, they have your major, and you don’t mind real winters.
Rankings will change from time to time. This can be attributed to fashion, difference in criteria, or the need to change rankings in order sell magazines.
Rankings will not tell you whether any one particular college is a good fit for you.
And there are a lot more than 20 very good liberal arts colleges in the US.
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The rankings methodologies will often change year to year and schools will rise or tumble as a result. The underlying quality of Middlebury is beyond dispute. We were impressed on our campus tour this past summer.
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One thing worth noting is US News has recently been playing around with socioeconomic diversity/outcome measures that have observably caused some instability in the last couple years of rankings. I have not looked at the details for Middlebury specifically, but I would not be surprised if such measures were not relatively favorable for Middlebury in comparison to some of its usual peers.
As always, whether that should be a concern for you when you are making a college choice is not obvious.
For example, at a minimum, you should be concerned about YOUR cost of attendance, and not some average COA that is different from your COA, an ROI-type outcome measure that depends on an average COA, or so on.
And then the relative degree of socioeconomic diversity in, say, your class year by some measure might be considered by some an important factor when evaluating the instititution from a social policy perspective, but that does not necessarily mean you have to see it as an important factor in your individual college choice. Or you might. That is up to you.
Edit: By the way, one of the other things that has happened with the US News LAC rankings in the last couple cycles is Harvey Mudd has gone up. Between 2019-2023, Mudd had been going down, and some had wondered why as it has an excellent reputation. But then it has rapidly recovered in the last couple cycles.
Again I have not studied this at all in detail, but a lot of the new measures have somewhat favored tech-focused colleges like Mudd. So maybe that is happening here too.
I am raising this just to illustrate again why all this kinda doesn’t matter at all. There may be a few people who cross-shop Middlebury and Mudd, but I will dare say for the most part those are usually going to appeal to kids looking for pretty different things in an LAC. And so what really is the significance of Middlebury being above Mudd and therefore pushing Mudd down a slot, or now Mudd being above Middlebury and pushing Middlebury down a slot?
That’s just one example–another notable one is the service academies. The new measures are great for the service academies, but is that really relevant to most kids considering Middlebury? What about women’s colleges?
The more you really think about this, the more generic rankings make no sense. There is a more limited subset of schools any given type of student is going to be looking at, and information about how those schools compare in relevant ways might help them make a choice. But generic rankings erase any sense that different students are going to be looking for different things, which is not how real world college decisions are being made (or at least they shouldn’t be).
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The single greatest factor contributing to Middlebury’s movement in the rankings is its financial resources score.
- In 2020, Middlebury ranked 4th in terms of financial resources (weighted at 8%) and had a student-faculty ratio of 8:1 (weighted at 4%)
- In 2025, Middlebury ranked 45th in terms of financial resources and had a student-faculty ratio of 9:1 (again, weighted at 4%)
There are two main reasons for this drop:
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Middlebury’s enrollment surged during COVID, with the college going from 2,500 students to nearly 2,900. That negatively impacted financial resources (including endowment per student and spending per student) and student-faculty ratio. According to the college, plans to decrease enrollment back to pre-COVID levels are well underway: Middlebury returns to typical enrollment this spring, with plans to sell Inn on the Green in 2025 - The Middlebury Campus
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USNews also changed how they calculate financial resources in 2025. They used to calculate spending per student based on fall enrollment. They now calculate it based on enrollment throughout the entire academic year. Because Middlebury has a February admissions program (that fills spots taken by students who study abroad in the spring), summer language schools that enroll hundreds, and the Bread Loaf School of English (also in summer), this resulted in a huge increase in the number students counted when determining spending per student.
Lastly, Midd isn’t well ranked when it comes to social mobility–ranking 120th among LACs in 2025. That factor now makes up 11% of the ranking (up from 5% in 2024) and is based on the graduation rates of students receiving Pell grants and borrower debt.
So an increase in student-faculty ratio, decrease in financial resources score, and a weak social mobility score (that now holds more weight) account for Middlebury’s drop. There also are a lot more ties than there used to be, so the difference between #8 and #19 can be just a couple of points.
Is Middlebury in financial trouble? I would argue no, with an endowment of $1.6 billion and an ongoing capital campaign that’s raised $521 million toward its goal of $600 million. They just need to do a better job managing enrollment.
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If you would like a prediction regarding this September, expect Middlebury to place from 12th to 23rd in U.S. News. This is based on technical aspects and does not reflect an opinion on Middlebury’s fundamental aspects.
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The yield rate remains among the highest of the LACs (highest except for Williams). I think that says it all about students who choose Midd. Thanks for all the feedback.
That is an extraordinarily frank analysis. Thank you. I think it’s important to remember that these are small places, bunched pretty tightly together in the rankings and minute differences tend to be magnified as a result. For example, as I discovered recently just playing around with the annual NACUBO reports, a small change in an LAC’s enrollment, up or down, can determine whether the federal government will slap a 14% tax on its endowment income; the cutoff is half a million dollars of endowment per student and that’s of much bigger consequence than any magazine poll.
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If you haven’t seen Ian Baucom’s “Hello, Middlebury” speech, it’s very impressive.
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“In many ways, we are less like our NESCAC peer, Williams, than our Ivy League peer, Dartmouth.”
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Midd is a great school. As others mentioned, the criteria for the “rankings” change. The rankings should not be a concern, IMO.
For fun, check out this “ranking” site, and be sure to keep refreshing it 
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For the curious, it looks like Middlebury placed 11th among LACs in this site. However, the service academies and, through a quirk in the methods, Williams and Bowdoin were not included.
Middlebury’s Overall Yield is somewhat misleading.
Looking at Regular Decision Yields among the most academic 7 NESCACs (no CDS for Colby, and Tufts is an outlier size-wise) using 2024-2025 CDS data, the highest RD yields in order are:
Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst, Hamilton, Middlebury, Bates, Wesleyan.
Middlebury’s yield appears high, because it admits a much higher proportion of its incoming class through ED compared to its peers (68%). This distorts its yield calculation. Furthermore, Middlebury has a sizeable February Admit cohort (more than 10% of its class) that doesn’t factor into yield and acceptance rate calculations.
Great school, but it is known to struggle with its regular yield, and it is the most heavily reliant on ED of the well-known liberal arts colleges.
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In the NESCAC, Middlebury falls about in the middle in terms of RD yield.
Bowdoin:
Overall yield: 53.6%
RD yield: 35.1%
Williams:
Overall yield: 43%
RD yield: 29.1%
Note: Williams admitted an unusually high 113 from the WL in fall 2024, which, similar to ED, has a very high yield rate
Amherst:
Overall yield: 38.8%
RD yield: 25.8%
Hamilton:
Overall yield: 39%
RD yield: 22.5%
Middlebury:
Overall yield: 44.4%
RD yield: 20.1%
Bates:
Overall yield: 36.6%
RD yield: 17.7%
Wesleyan:
Overall yield: 34.8%
RD yield is 17.3%
Trinity College:
Overall yield: 27%
RD yield: 16.3%
Connecticut College:
Overall yield: 15.3%
RD yield: 8.6%
Tufts’ overall yield is 45%, but they don’t publish ED numbers, even in their CDS, so we have no idea what their RD yield is.
Colby doesn’t publicly release its Common Data Set, so we have no clue.
It’s also worth noting that the larger the school, the more seats you have to fill, and the more “shoppers” you have to admit to fill those seats. That can be offset by a really strong brand (Ivy, top rankings in USNews, etc.), but the pool of applicants for SLACs is limited. If you want to maintain that high yield and low acceptance rate, a good strategy is to stay small.
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Just to be clear…the CDS reports the number admitted from the waitlist (the 113 for class of 2029) but we have no idea how many of those students who were admitted actually enrolled…could have been 40, could have been 80, or? So, we have no idea the waitlist yield. The number of admitted waitlist students who enrolled would be part of the enrolled RD numbers (if Williams is completing CDS correctly.) Waitlist yields are highly variable from year to year, even at a school like Williams and often won’t approach the ED yield.
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68 posts were merged into an existing topic: NESCAC Spoken Here: