NESCAC Spoken Here:

College Search & Lists
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845

Alright, well, hoping for the best for the Tufts Lx players and on to women’s golf. Final results for the George Phinney Classic, hosted by Middlebury:

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Adding 'em up, there’s a decent gap between Williams, winning their second tournament of the fall season, and the next tier in the conference.

Wellesley and Williams: 46
NYU: 56
Middlebury: 62
Amherst: 62
Hamilton: 72
Wesleyan: 73
Middlebury B: 76
Bowdoin: 81
Vassar: 133
St. Lawrence 155

So, Williams is still the program to beat in this sport, with a pretty decent gap here between it and the next tier of teams. Bowdoin had an off weekend or they don’t like that course. Who knows with golf? Wes seems to be acquitting itself admirably for a program that began play in 2019-20, nipping at #21 ranked Hamilton’s heels. Hang in there Cards. And Middlebury has a B team! In women’s golf! And they beat Bowdoin. Wow. Nice.

Up next is the Williams Invitational at the Taconic Golf Club, and the following weekend Hamilton hosts its invitational at the Rome Country Club. If you’re in either area - I am not - and have nothing else going on, head on out to watch some fine young golfers do their thing.

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846

Those five Tufts players are still hospitalized, a week later (workout was last Monday.) No word on their prognosis.

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847

They updated the article, now it’s 3 hospitalized.

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U.S. News Rankings

National Liberal Arts Colleges

:black_small_square:︎1. Williams
:black_small_square:︎2. Amherst

:black_small_square:︎5. Bowdoin

:black_small_square:︎14. Hamilton
:black_small_square:︎14. Wesleyan
:black_small_square:︎19. Middlebury

:black_small_square:︎25. Colby
:black_small_square:︎26. Bates

:black_small_square:︎36. Trinity

:black_small_square:︎55. Connecticut College

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges

National Universities

:black_small_square:︎37. Tufts

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities

849

Poor Middlebury. Maybe the new president will Make Middlebury Great Again. :rofl:

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850

Yeah that’s a big drop from 11 to 19. My daughter is a freshman there. And my son is a first year at Wesleyan, also dropped from 11 to 14. Tho they both seem to have stayed in higher rankings on Niche and Forbes. :woman_shrugging:

Both kids are happy so that’s what actually matters but I was surprised to see this !

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Bates 25
Colby 26

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I still can’t get over the fact that, of the T20 LACs listed, 14 are located in the northeast.

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I think there are some glitches in the LAC rankings. My version shows Bates at 24, Colby 25, and I noticed Scripps and Hillsdale are each named twice (in the 30s and 40s), so possibly Trinity and Conn would be slightly higher once the duplicates are removed.

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I’m in the live system on USNWR right now, and it has Colby at #25, Bates at #26. Scripps once at #44, Hillsdale once at #50(T).

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Strange. I just went again and the duplicates are gone (and same numbers as you listed), but Bates 24, Colby 25 (which is what I think it was last year). Maybe there’s an issue with a previously loaded version on my system or something.

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856

By the time a lot of higher education institutions were being founded in most other regions of the country, the most popular form had moved on to what became modern research universities, as opposed to LACs.

In fact here is a quick (Wikipedia based, so accept some errors) accounting of the founding dates of the top 20 on the US News list:

1: 1793
2: 1821
3: 1864
4: 1845
t-5: 1794, 1887
7: 1870
t-8: 1802, 1866, 1946, 1954
t-12: 1861, 1955
t-14: 1793, 1837, 1839, 1871, 1889
t-19: 1749, 1800, 1846

The only three in the 20th Century are two of the Claremont Colleges (CMC and Mudd), and the Air Force Academy. In fact even a lot of the later ones in the 19th Century are specifically women’s colleges, which trailed in founding a bit.

You can actually see this too if you look at this map. It is a couple years out of date now, but still gives you the idea:

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/where-to-find-the-us-news-best-colleges

Compared to the blue dots (T50 National Universities), the red dots (T50 LACs) are relatively concentrated toward the Northeast. There is a cluster down in Southern California, and Whitman (1859) and Colorado College (1874) also in the west. But really you are mostly looking at a map of where people were founding a lot of colleges between the 1790s and 1870s or so, after which the modern university form mostly took over.

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857

I was just looking through Middlebury’s profile. They list the graduation rate as 71%. That’s not correct.

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858

Do you know the correct figure for Middlebury’s 4-year graduation rate?

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Are they using 2022-23 common data set info?

Here’s Midd’s CDS for that year:

For Fall 2016 cohort, 85.6% completed degree in 4 years or less.
For Fall 2015 cohort, 83.7% completed degree in 4 years or less

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For years, maybe even decades, they hovered around #5. Then fell back a tad back to like 8 or 9… and then to 11. Now to 19.

Has their academic quality dropped? I’m guessing it has more to do with USNews monkeying with the formula.

A similar thing has happened to Haverford.

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Isn’t that a tough thing to determine, “academic quality”? What even goes into that? I don’t think that’s the case here. Rather, U.S. News changed their ranking methodology a couple years ago. Things that matter now that didn’t before:

  • graduation rate performance
  • Pell graduation rates and performance
  • first generation graduation rate
  • borrower debt
  • college grads earning more than a high school grad
  • the frequency and quality of publications from a school’s faculty member
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For academic quality, I might want to know:

  • Mean and median class sizes
  • % of classes led by a prof with the terminal degree in their field
  • Research opportunities
  • Some survey component trying to gauge prof/student interaction, teaching quality, etc. – ask students to rate their own school and deans (who might know the landscape…) to rate other schools.
  • Course availability (IE, how much of the course catalog is actually available at any given time?)
  • Breadth of majors offered
  • Faculty and graduate awards
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Per that article I linked, these were eliminated in the rankings methodology:

  • class size
  • terminal degree faculty
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That’s a step in the wrong direction, imo. That is not to say that kids can’t learn in larger classes, or that someone with a Master’s degree is less able to teach undergrad courses… but I think that in the main, most kids learn better in a less-populated classroom and someone with a PhD probably has greater depth of understanding (even if their PhD work was extremely focused…) than someone with a Master’s.

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