@LucieTheLakie: Those are fair points. I do agree that honors colleges are both interesting and hard to get information on, and that does tie-in to your thoughts on LACs. Really, the main reason I posted was to provide some objective information for any discussion that might surround my post – I’ve seen so much speculation in the forums about things that can easily be looked up.
So …
I respect the many hard-working students at large universities.
I hope your son found a perfect academic home.
If you are interested in how my username matches my profile picture, it’s actually merc81 and the image is the planet Mercury in transit across the sun. (Maybe @Englishman will see this as well.) And for the record, I love dogs.
@merc81, sorry about botching your name. I don’t know why I try to read posts on my tiny iPhone, let alone attempt to compose anything remotely coherent.
Seriously, my issues are not with any of the schools in question, just their prominence in CC directories. I mean, what do the owners here mean by “Top” – top quality, top value, top standardized test scores, most popular among CC readers circa 2010 (or international students who live and breathe by rankings)?
I’m with @merc81 on this one. USNews and CC have done the SLACs no favors by separating them from the rest of of the prestigious places to attend college in the United States. It’s not enough that they suffer from lack of name recognition in many parts of the country, but, they have to also rely on readers having the time and curiosity to further dissect another category of colleges. Under the previous web design, the top CC universities were listed “above the fold”, as it were. The same was true for the top designated CC liberal arts colleges. My sense is that traffic for the latter has definitely suffered since the change.
Nerdyparent you are so correct. merc81 used SAT/ACT as a quantifiable measure of school quality and posted that a “15 of them (LAC) would have higher scores than the highest-scoring public CC Top University”.
However, LucietheLakie pointed out that most LACs “have fewer than 2,000 in their entire student bodies”. If defining top freshman students is those having an ACT of 30+ or SAT of 1330+ and the most important factor in assessing the rank of a school is the number of top students that attend a school then the following would demonstrate that UA could be considered a CC top university. The list below includes all of CC Top Universities and the list of Top LAC provided by merc81.
As one can see, University of Alabama has more “top freshman students” on its campus in 2014 than all but 5 Universities on CC Top National Universities List.
Believe it or not, UA has more top students than Stanford, Duke, UNC, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice to name a few. Only UCLA, Berkeley, Southern Cal, University of Michigan and University of Virginia have more top freshman than University of Alabama. BTW UA does not superscore like many LAC and Universities.
Approximate Number of 2014 freshman with ACT 30+/SAT 1330+ attending each school.
Harvey Mudd - 197
Pomona - 330
Amherst - 385
Swarthmore - 320
Bowdoin - 451
Williams - 448
Carleton - 404
Claremont McKenna - 262
Wellesley - 485
10 ) Haverford - 269
11 ) Washington and Lee - 415
12 ) Wesleyan - 610
goinggoing the Common Data Set of each university. Most were 2014-2015 data but some have only posted 2013-2014 data. I went to the effort of collecting this data so that others would know that top students attend colleges and universities in bulk and to schools that many would not consider “elite”.
One of the reasons stated by many parents and students in wanting to go to a “Top School” is to be around other high achieving students who can push a student to higher achievement, but my post shows that one can achieve this by going to “lower” prestige schools like University of Alabama where a lot more top students attend.
Schools like Alabama are pushed to second tier or worse levels because as a State Public Flagship, it enrolls many top in-state students but it has not decided to abandon its lower achieving in-state students. The price University of Alabama pays in doing this is lower overall average SAT/ACT scores, lower perceived prestige and academic worthiness, as well as lower USNWR rankings etc.
I found it interesting to read @voiceofreason66’s figures. They actually don’t surprise me, as I already thought a good number of high achieving students would choose to attend Alabama. But as for the strength of the LACs, keep in mind that all of the fifteen listed have average ACT scores of 31 (or SAT equivalent) or higher across all students. And, by combining two data sets, it appears that every single freshman at Harvey Mudd College, for example, scored 30 or higher on the ACT (or equivalent). Certainly, a college cannot be held accountable for not having more high-scorers than it has students. SImilarly noteworthy is that LACs achieve their academic profiles with varsity athletic participation levels typically exceeding one third of students. This compares to the less than 5% levels common at large public universities.
On the point of superscoring. Superscoring is used for internal purposes only at some institutions, and has no bearing on what colleges are permitted to report under the guidelines of external data collection agencies.
Finally, for Alabama fans: according to UA News, “More than 2,100 freshman scored 30 or higher on the ACT.” I appreciate your conservatism, @voiceofreason66.
@merc81, @voiceofreason66, one more … GTech…had 1844 out of an enrolled class of 2673 (for CDS 2013). It is definitely higher for 2014; CDS 2014 not yet posted.
And GTech is not even in the list of the top CC Universities. UA has to wait its turn. But I agree, some of the LACs do not deserve to be in that long list.
@i012575: I actually commented favorably on Georgia Tech on another thread. (Community and Forum issues, CC “top colleges.”) … Bear in mind, even a LAC near the bottom of “that long” list of Top Liberal Arts Colleges, such as Whitman College, still has higher standardized scores than, say UNC, a school in the shorter list of CC Top Universities.
The current ranking also does not account for sample size, which likely impacts the average brainpower of the student body. For example, large state schools, such as UC Berkeley, likely have a group of students in the right tail of the distribution with similar SAT or ACT scores as some of the top Ivy League and other elite schools (e.g., see discussion in Pinker, 2014), however, their average is lowered by the large number of students with lower scores which are typically admitted. Therefore large state schools, if anything, are likely slightly penalized in the current ranking relative to smaller private schools which draw primarily from top students.
@i012575: I actually commented favorably on Georgia Tech on another thread. (Community and Forum issues, CC “top colleges.”) … Bear in mind, even a LAC near the bottom of that “long list” of Top Liberal Arts Colleges, such as Whitman College, still has higher standardized scores than say, UNC, a school in the shorter list of CC Top Universities.
merc81 The point of my posting the number of “top student” list was to show that there are high concentrations of high achieving students at schools that are not considered “elite.”
You are correct that most public flagships have lower average ACT/SAT than private universities and LACs, but as I posted earlier, it is the result of these institutions serving the citizens of their respective States by taking lower achieving students.
Also, in the case of the State of Alabama, there are essentially two flagship universities in Auburn U and UA for a state with less than 5 million residents. Compare this with University of Michigan that selects its freshman class from nearly 10 million residents or Berkeley and UCLA having a pool of nearly 40 million residents to make their selections.
i012575 I agree with you that GTech is another outstanding public school, one of many that could/should be included in the CC’s Top Universities List. It is because whoever is in a position decided to exclude schools such as GTech, University of Alabama, Penn State, University of Georgia, University of Tennessee, University of South Carolina, University of Maryland, University of Minnesota, etc from the CC Top National Universities List.
Since this site is run by those who are not part of USNWR, it could rewrite how it formulates its criteria for entry of a university into its Top University List with some or all of the recommendations for entry provided on this thread.
Thanks for the interesting link, @i012575. I found even this article did indeed compare small and large schools directly (Whitman College: 74th; UNC: 84th, etc.) … I’m not sure what you mean by “sample size.” I don’t think its normal statistical usage applies here (the sample size of students reporting scores is, with exceptions for test-optional schools, 100% of attending students – all a school could possibly provide … What you are saying is that the right tail of a public university is statistically like a high-quality LAC. No arguments there. … It’s interesting that CC posters often single-out Ivy League colleges – in the referenced link they are in a minority in the top ten schools.
@voiceofreason66: I appreciated your figures as much as the ardent Alabama supporters on this thread. (In fact, I am a supporter of the many high-achieving students at Alabama.) But everyone should be aware that Alabama has better national name recognition than any of the LACs we have discussed, so some of the perceived unfairness flows both ways.
Some might argue that there’s an inverse relationship between Alabama’s athletic achievements and its stature here on CC (and this thread is about how CC favors/highlights certain schools over others).
For whatever reason, in the alternate universe that is College Confidential, a successful football program somehow diminishes the school’s overall worth, with the obvious exceptions of Stanford, Michigan or HYP and a few others.
merc81 Not sure what your point is about name recognition. I agree that Alabama has better name recognition than the LACs but the recognition is not associated with its academics but rather with its football program. If one asked random people on the street which college had the best chance at winning next year’s national football championship, Alabama would be named by quite a few individuals, but if any of these people were asked which of the schools listed in my list of schools enrolled the most top achieving students based upon ACT scores 30+, you would be hard pressed to find one person who would have named Alabama.
If I had posed this question of Alabama in comparison to where it would rank among the 8 Ivy League schools in the number of top students that attend, it would be fair to say that Alabama would not have fared very well when in fact, Alabama has more “top students” (those with ACT 30+ or equivalent SAT) than every Ivy league school except Cornell.
If I also posed this question to high school guidance counselors across America, I believe they would be shocked at the results and they might change their minds about what a “Top University” is as a destination for their top students and that CC powers that be should also reconsider their formula of what is a Top University for listing purposes.
Cornell 2673
Princeton 1156
Harvard 1493
Dartmouth 1036
Yale 1224
Brown 1110
UPENN 1930
Columbia 1275
