One big factor missing from this ranking is “quality of teaching” – which is not the easiest thing to define, but it is the most important feature of any college. Figuring out how to measure it is no easy feat, but some attempt should be made to include this critical element.
As for including post-grad salaries, I’m generally against it due to:
Self-selection: students choose their major and largely, thus, their job… which favors schools with a lot of STEM and business majors, and
Salary differences for the same job, due to differences in state and regional COL.
They should have a comparison of how much the graduates are making, relative to others in their field and their geographical region. They did it for graduation rates, so they could do it for salaries.
So a person who is a high school teacher in a rural area won’t be compared against a software developer in Silicon Valley, but against other high school teachers in rural areas. Within such categories, the salary, ten years after graduation, is generally correlated to how well the graduate is performing, how many of those 10 years they have been working, and how much they were offered initially, which generally has a lot to do with the reputation of the college in the field.
So much can happen after 10 years that has nothing to do with the college, including changes in career and intervening graduate and professional degrees. I agree that segmenting by major is critical (geography would be nice), but I would look at the 1-3 years post college graduation, and in addition to employment and income, I would look at grad/prof school admit rates by type of grad/prof school. In fact data like that should be standard disclosure for all colleges.
Colleges can only get the data that students report to them, and sadly that number decreases with every post-grad year.
The only reason we have the College Scorecard data is because the feds have the info of those who received any type of federal financial aid, and can easily track their incomes, locations, etc.
Williams
CMC
Amherst
Bowdoin
Pomona
Wellesley
Swarthmore
Middlebury
Wesleyan
Hamilton
Haverford
Harvey Mudd
Davidson
Colby
Carleton
Vassar
Colgate
Smith
Barnard
Holy Cross
Bryn Mawr
Lafayette
Grinnell
I thought this one was interesting, mostly because it’s by the Times Higher Education people, who I figured wouldn’t know a LAC if one fell out of the sky and hit them on the head. People on CC seem to like that ranking service, and I found a LAC ranking from 2022. Here’s the T20 (again, in order):
Amherst
Williams
Pomona
Swarthmore
Wellesley
CMC
Carleton
Haverford (there you go @gotham_mom )
Bowdoin
Smith
Middlebury
Wesleyan
USMA
Barnard
Colgate
Mount Holyoke (you don’t normally see MHC ranked with this crowd, but good on the Times Higher Ed people for showing some love to the Seven Sisters; I’m in support)
Hamilton
Wake Forest (whoa! where did that come from?)
Bates
Vassar
I’ve thought about what I just wrote some more. With Mudd’s common core requirement, perhaps it’s unfair of me to think of them as belonging elsewhere. They are a small college that requires their students to be well rounded in their educations, and they just happen to be REALLY REALLY good at engineering and STEM in general.
So, yeah, let’s say it is surprising they aren’t on the list. I think the makers of those lists must think of them as “other”, because there’s no denying Mudd is a tippy top place for very smart kids.
Yeah, I think of them as similar to MIT in that they are very much liberal arts tradition schools, to the point you need to understand their HASS requirements are going to be very rigorous, and they want kids who will enthusiastically and successfully participate in those classes.
That said, I could also see ranking them separately because of their STEM focus in terms of primary major. And I think it kinda depends on the nature of the ranking. Like it doesn’t make much sense to me to compare average outcome statistics between colleges with radically different mixes of major. So if that is a big part of your ranking, maybe separate them out.
Although honestly, outcome statistics just have so many problems in general. Like, your mix of students going into PhD programs versus Finance after graduation could move your outcome statistics around a lot. But I think there are lots of examples of where maybe College A is 60/40 pre-professional/academics, and College B is 40/60, but really they are both equally good for both. So maybe College A does better in IB feeder or income measures, College B does better in PhD placement studies, but none of that actually means anything when it comes to college choice as both paths would actually be equally open to you as an individual at both colleges.
Obviously this is just poking at an easy target–generic rankings never make much sense. But I always feel compelled to stand up for the idea that the real virtue of a great LAC, or great liberal arts tradition college in general really, is not that it will make you into a certain sort of person with a certain sort of life, but rather that it will empower you to explore your options and end up following the path that is truly best for you–which may in fact not at all be what you imagined it would be when you were in high school.
Well heck, there’s not much to do for the next 40 minutes, so: behold, the illustrious Prezbucky LAC Ranking:
Williams
Amherst
Swarthmore
Pomona
Middlebury
Bowdoin
Wellesley
Carleton
Claremont McKenna
Wesleyan
Vassar
Haverford
Hamilton
Washington & Lee
Barnard
Colby
Smith
Harvey Mudd
Davidson
Grinnell
Bates
Colgate
Bryn Mawr
Macalester
U of Richmond
Well done for including my favorite LAC in the top 10.
I can’t get behind CMC in the T10. Pomona gets the spot in the top order, but my impression is that CMC isn’t the complete liberal arts college the others are. To get there, they rely on the other colleges, but those colleges are not CMC. Otherwise, you have to credit, say, Haverford, BMC and Swat with each other.
Of course if you as an individual actually do make a lot of use of a consortium, that would seem like part of the value to you for having chosen a consortium LAC. Then again if you choose a consortium LAC and make little or no use of the consortium, then it was not part of the value.
This sort of thing underscores why to me all generic rankings are really pretty pointless. And not least of LACs.
