No Bates or Colby, but Antioch!
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And then NiceUnparticularManās typically excellent response:
All true. But I would add to this one complicating factor: The upper-Midwest has a darn strong history of liberal arts colleges, and a much stronger history of co-ed liberal arts colleges than the NE.
When USNews first started doing this dog and pony show back in the early 80s, the Midwest LACs were rated quite well - Oberlin was a locked-in top 5 school, many years number 1, I believe. Carleton, Grinnell - top 10. And you cannot convince me that schools like St. Olaf, Macalester, Kalamazoo, Dennison, College of Wooster, Kenyon, Lawrence, Earlham, Ohio Wesleyan, Beloit, Luther, Cornell, Coe, Gustavos Adolphus, and others, arenāt the equal of their more highly ranked NE peers. As pointed out in posts on CC all the time, look at the percentage of kids getting PhDs as proxies for teaching quality and academic climate at the schools, and the Midwestern schools clean house.
The Northeastern LACS are excellent. NESCAC is excellent. Both of my kids are in the NE. But the past couple of decades, their reputational advantage over other regions, particularly to me the upper Midwest, has become almost farcical.
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Good to see 60+ years later, same questions apply.
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Indeed. The sorts of native-born Americans and immigrants that were moving into the Upper Midwest during the early-mid 19th Century often had a strong belief in the importance of education, usually at the start in the context of religion, and often including women. So many educational institutions were founded even in what were still just relatively modest population areas at the time, and many of those became important LACs eventually.
But the Upper Midwest story is complicated by the fact it was really the birthplace of the American form of the āmodernā university. Globally, the modern university movement really started in Continental Europe, and in the early 19th Century it was spreading into the UK as well. In the US, it was taken up in Michigan and then other nearby states. Eventually these became the model for the land grant movement that created modern universities in many states, and indeed inspired a lot of private universities funded by wealthy industrialists (so Michigan was a model for Cornell, a land grant university, which was a model for Stanford, funded by an industrialist of the same name).
So what became Upper Midwest LACs faced relatively early and vigorous competition from the sorts of modern universities that became the core of the old Big 10 (once including Chicago!) and such. This is somewhat distinct from the Northeast where private colleges remained more dominant among the socioeconomic elite. And although some morphed themselves into modern universities eventually (this is basically the story of most of the Ivies except the much younger Cornell, the only one founded as a modern university), others stayed LACs (and this is a story of many of the higher-ranked NESCACs).
One of my favorite Upper Midwest LAC stories to illustrate all this is Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo dates all the way back to 1833, when Michigan was still a Territory and Western Michigan was still very frontierish in many ways. It was originally founded by Baptists as an āInstituteā, and began actual instruction in 1836. My understanding is it was co-ed, with a Female Division, from the start.
But Michigan became a state in 1837, as it was entering into a rapid expansion/development phase. And the University of Michigan opened a competing Kalamazoo Branch in 1838. And in 1840 (following a local economic downturn), what was then known as the Literary Institute merged with the Kalamazoo Branch.
But the Baptists were not happy, and they started working back toward independence from the state. In 1855, the once-again independent Institute finally received a state charter and became the Kalamazoo College. And then it had a good run without direct competition from the state until 1903, when a teacher college was opened, that eventually became Western Michigan University in 1957.
I find it interesting to wonder what role colleges like Kalamazoo might have eventually taken on if they had not faced such early competition from the stateās own developing modern university system. Maybe it would even have morphed into Kalamazoo University at some point.
In any event, I think all this helps explain the often somewhat different trajectories of Upper Midwest and Northeast LACs, including the Northeast LACs that eventually morphed into universities. But I also agree that in terms of actually delivering on the core educational values of LACs, they have continued to do quite well. Even if they do not have quite the same prominence among socioeconomic elites.
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Great post, and great example of Kalamazoo.
No question that the Big-10 universities - the midwest equivalent in terms of prestige and quality to the private universities of the NE - became the numerically dominant institutions of that region.
But I think thereās something else going on - the reputational hegemony of the NE SLACās didnāt happen in the 1800s, or even the 1900s (up until the 90s, maybe?). It is a much more contemporary phenomenon. One of the most striking things about the LIFE excerpt shared here from 61 was its inclusion of so many excellent Midwestern LACs - Oberlin, Carleton, Knox, Beloit, Antioch, Denison, Kenyon. A similar list made today of 61 representative colleges would certainly not include all of those, esp Antioch.
I donāt believe it was a drop in quality that caused Oberlin, Grinnell, etc., to drop down the rankings in the past thirty years. Was it endowments and their add-on impacts?
Maybe thatās the key? Midwestern LACs were perhaps always more middle-class institutions, the NE LACLs were historically more finishing schools for the elites of the East Coast (I know, oversimplification)?
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Catching up on all these posts. Completely agree on the apples to oranges comparisons - military academies are completely different from most of the other colleges ranked in āliberal arts.ā I have a friend with a son at the Naval Academy, and it just seems like it is nothing at all like a NESCAC, for example. Why arenāt military academies ranked separately? Iām scratching my head as to why Haverford, Bates, Colby not in the top 20 SLACs for US News (and yet they often are for Niche, Forbes, etc.). Seems a bit unfair but maybe Iām just not understanding these groupings.
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I think a case like Antiochās is somewhat institution specific, but I definitely think there have been more systematic changes over the last few decades. Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with what is sometimes called the nationalization trend in colleges.
Even as of the 1980s, say, and often into the 1990s as well, most colleges, even very good ones, got most of their applicants from their state or perhaps region. Really only a few colleges even remotely resembled the ānationalā colleges of today in terms of their draw outside their region, and even they usually had higher percentages from their own state/region back then than they do now.
Since roughly 2000, however, there has been an observed rapid nationalization trend where more and more kids are applying and enrolling outside their state, and often region. This ongoing trend helps explain why lots of the more ānationalā colleges have experienced large application increases even since 2010, when the domestic pool of college-bound students plateaued. And the other big factor is more and more highly qualified International applicants, including more with US qualifications like APs or SAT/ACTs.
This has affected colleges all over, but the effect has not been exactly even. There are certain regions, and sometimes specific cities, which are demonstrably most popular outside of their region, both domestically and Internationally. So, Boston, for example, is arguably the most desired location for higher education students in the world. California too. And then also the Northeast more generally. And so on. Again, some of this is domestic, but some is also International.
And of course this sometimes feeds on itself. Some kids really just want to be in Boston, California, or whatever, which of course is fine. But some kids also want their college admissions to be āprestigiousā, to prove to their peers or parents or so on that they are exceptionally meritorious kids. So that drives more applications to schools seen that way, which further drives up their reported selectivity, which can further increase the perception admission to those colleges proves something about the merits of the kid, and so on.
OK, so I think this is a lot of what is driving the changes you are identifying since the 1960s. Nationalization has affected all of these schools, but in something like NESCAC territory, or Claremont, it has done the most to increase their popularity.
Again, that is sometimes for reasons that are perfectly understandableāif you want a great LAC with its own ski slope, why not Middlebury?
But also sometimes it is maybe more about kids using college admissions as a signal of personal merit. And actually, I get the sense a lot of these colleges are maybe not so interested in continually getting more and more applications like that, and indeed are in some sense trying to consciously filter out the applicants who just see them as generically prestigious. But then that becomes another rejected applicant, and the acceptance rate gets even lower, and ironically it can actually contribute to the college becoming even more of a target for such kids.
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They donāt know where else to put them and the national university crowd would, as another poster suggested, likely have a meltdown over it.
Their focus is exclusively on educating undergraduates, so there is at least one very important variable suggesting theyāre in the right group.
In another sense, the three dominant military academies are more ānationalā than any other school in the US. Theyāre purely federal. Three of Grantās classmates at West Point went on to become generals in the Confederate Army.
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I know this will never happen, but it would really be better in my view if US News just adopted a different label. Even if they just dropped the āLiberal Artsā part. Like, I am OK if they want to define Universities as institutions that also have robust grad programs, and Colleges as institutions which almost exclusively focus on undergrad programs, so just call them National Colleges. As you point out, the service academies for sure are national colleges!
And confusingly, they actually call their Regional Colleges list just Regional Colleges! No āLiberal Artsā. And they donāt call the National Universities āNational Liberal Arts Universitiesā.
So it seems obvious to me they should just conform the National Liberal Arts Colleges label and make it National Colleges instead.
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Grinnell was #11 a year or two ago, so I donāt think itās part of a 30 year trend so much as itās one of those LACs thatās subject to some weird bounce (much like Northeastern peers like Vassar or Haverford or Middlebury). Itās still in the top 20 (and, incidentally, I think Grinnellās location really does work against it more than somewhere like Carleton. I can make an argument for the benefits of a cool college town in Minnesota with easy access to the Twin Cities as an alternative to a NESCAC a lot easier than I can for a small city in Iowa that feels much more isolated and rural and has had its share of recent issues between locals and college kids). Oberlin is interesting; itās really had a dramatic fall just over the past 5 or 6 years (something like 20 slots, I believe); Iām not sure if itās all cultural forces at work and some specific incidents of bad press, financial struggles, orā¦what. ETA: and Iām not talking just rankings-wiseā¦Iāve had three kids apply to Oberlin over the past few years, and the way theyāre needing to use merit aid, etc to keep applications up and acceptance rates down seems markedly different to me now than my oldest applied.
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Youāve posted a list of schools that comprise quite a range in terms of many factors (beyond PhD production) that go into establishing the pecking order. As it pertains to Carlton (always in the T15, and often T10) and Grinnell, Iām not sure the reputational gap is as wide as you (and others) suggest, at least among people with some some clue about the kinds of schools weāre discussing. And I donāt think there are a ton of people out there touting Trinity or Ithaca or St. Lawrence as ostensibly better or more prestigious than Macalester or Oberlin. Similarly, I donāt think people think that Wheaton is a better school than Puget Sound, even though the former is in MA, and I donāt know anybody that does either. Most people would think of those schools as peers, and if anything Puget Sound might get the nod despite its location in Tacoma, WA.
It also kind of undercuts the real work that [some of] the schools in the northeast are doing and have done to make themselves better to overestimate the role of a regional bias in explaining why theyāre so popular. There are many other factors, too numerous to list here, that go into it.
I get it, though. Whitman is a school that a lot of people really donāt know much about precisely because itās in the southeast corner of Washington state, aka as the middle of nowhere. Criminally underrated and under-ranked. The west is dominated by big schools. Itās what people know and understand. Even the Claremonts suffer from a degree of anonymity out here because of that reality. So, I know thereās something to this. But there are a bunch of other small private colleges out here that I would refrain from listing as schools that suffer by comparison to the New Englands largely because of geography.
Executive summary: the highly ranked schools in the northeast are highly ranked largely on their merit, not where they are. Thatās my view at least.
ETA: there are many schools in the NE that are not highly ranked (or regarded). If geography is the thing, then it would seem those schools would benefit, and it does not appear that they do.
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Agree, it wonāt happen, and thatās because US News has won the war on brand. Even changing the nomenclature of the categories would be tinkering with the brand and invite a reset. Theyāre too smart for that.
But I agree with your idea.
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Gotta love:
āHamilton: womenās colleges in area sources of social life.ā
Yes, the key role of the womenās colleges to provide the men attending the other colleges with social entertainment.
āGrinnell: Sometimes incompatible with the sophisticated Easterner.ā
Apropos of the discussion upthread about the New England/Northeast Advantage.
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Those are good but Rice: āGood for engineering if you can tolerate Texans for 10 months a yearā
That is just special. 
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Oberlin has had some financial difficulties. Maybe thats the issue.
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Anyone pay for the data? Wondering what the peer assessment scores are.
I think the bad press about the Gibson Bakery controversy, which dragged out forever, was a bad look and did some real PR harm to the school along with the financial hit of close to $37 million in damages and legal fees.
It is a fine school and Iād have been proud for any of my kids to attend.
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Yeah, thatās the bad press I was referencing. I think rightly or wrongly itās getting more pigeonholed as being very niche and only a cultural fit for a very particular kind of kid. Which it sort of IS, but I donāt know that itās really that different from a whole bunch of other LACs. I think any of my kids could have been happy there (it was, in fact, my music kidās number one, but he applied to the con and was waitlisted) (oh, and my husband graduated from Oberlin back in the day!)
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I canāt be the only one picturing those 1960 HS guidance counselors being on their third lunch-martini as they are providing quotes to LIFE . . . .
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And then a subset of that very particular kind of kid might not want to be in Ohio. Oberlin would have been a great target for my LGBTQ+ Wes kid, but he didnāt apply to any schools in states with anti-LGBTQ+ laws. So Mac, in friendly Minnesota, filled that target niche.
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