Wrong thread bucko!!!
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Interesting to look at the list, and how it has changed over the years (Fulbright website).
Bowdoin seems to have dominated the Fulbright Students list for the last several years - by a fairly wide margin. Before that, Pomona, Pitzer, Smith, Bates, and Oberlin produced a lot (and continue to). The same colleges keep cropping up on the list as one looks back over the past ten years. Some that one might expect to rank high on the students list in terms of both grants and applications (Middlebury, among others) are fairly low on the list.
What institutionally causes certain schools to dominate these rankings? Is it funding? Exceptional advisors? There must be certain champions at these schools pushing kids to apply and are helping with that process?
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People willing and able to take themselves out of the workforce immediately after graduation?
Certain schools have a significantly higher proportion of students willing to do so?
I know it is true that colleges might have offices or at least officials specifically tasked with supporting various fellowships and such, including but not limited to Fulbrights. And I assume it is possible there are differences in such offices, including possibly just where they steer different interested students. And in fact, I think if you really wanted to try to evaluate the value added by these offices, you would have to include a pretty wide range of different programs (not just Fulbrights).
As a last thought, I also wonder if student peers have played a role in all this. Like, I know in other areas like law schools, PhD programs, and so on, certain such schools/programs can seem to be more popular than others at a certain college, for reasons that are not always complete clear. But these preferences seem to get reinforced by the students.
So who knows, but maybe there are just more peers talking positively about Fulbrights at some colleges, and other programs at other colleges.
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This would make a lot of sense to me. I’ve seen discussions of how certain majors are popular at various schools because they have great professors. I could imaging a self-reinforcing mechanism here where an advising office is particularly good at steering students to apply for Fulbrights and helping them do so (and the students know to do so from their peers).
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And as another poster was implicitly pointing out, in some sense Fulbrights are not just “competing” with other fellowships, they are really competing with other next steps that smart and ambitious college students might find attractive.
Not to get overly meta, but this is always a concern to me when looking at per capita placement rates in some one competitive next step thing. That is going to be in part a function of whether that is a popular next step at that particular college, but just because it is not as popular at one college as another doesn’t necessarily mean that college is any worse at supporting kids who do want to do that thing.
So my preference is usually to treat these sorts of lists as inclusive but not exclusive. Like, this list shows Bowdoin should be included in the group of colleges that do a good job supporting kids interested in the Fulbright Students program. I have zero doubt that is true!
But it does not necessarily show that any general peers of Bowdoin that are not so high on this list should be excluded from that group.
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That’s what I’m saying. Call it a thought experiment.
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Besides it being an institutional priority, as reflected in application support resource allocation, my view is more or less @circuitrider 's. As it relates to Middlebury, for example, I would hazard a guess that all of those kids headed to finance careers are not the crowd who are interested in a Fulbright pit stop along the way. Then again, you’d think Middlebury’s excellence in foreign language study would be a fertile source of Fulbright applicants.
There is no question that this has been Bowdoin’s category for quite some time.
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If you go back through prior years, Middlebury is typically right up there. Some years less, some years more. But overall they seem to have lots of Fulbrights. Bates and Amherst show up frequently too.
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I agree. They bounce up and down a bit more than some, but they do bounce up.
Williams, Bowdoin, Amherst and Hamilton represent the NESCACs among the 27 colleges to have received a financial grade of A+ in Forbes this year.
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It’s behind a paywall. Can you list the schools?
@randommom1 posted them in this topic: Forbes 2024 Financial Grades.
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From that thread, here are all the NESCAC financial grades:
- Williams = A+
- Bowdoin = A+
- Amherst = A+
- Hamilton = A+
- Trinity = A-
- Middlebury = A-
- Wesleyan = B+
- Bates = B+
- Tufts = B+
- Colby = B+
- Connecticut = B-
All schools listed:
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As a statistical observation, the median financial grade of the NESCACs is A-.
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Mean roughly is A- as well. Two modes: A+, B+.
#statsnerding
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Colby dropped from A+ in 2021 to B+. Wondering if the new Athletic Center mega project had an impact. Time to reinstate application fees?
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Someone noted on the other thread that Wesleyan has issued bonds recently for construction, likely accounting for a drop from A+ last year(?) to B+ this year. Seems reasonable to guess that’s what’s going on at Colby, too.
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Wesleyan - the new science center. $250 mln.
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