<p>What do you think when colleges tout that they have “37 Fulbright Scholars” or “15 Rhodes Scholars” or “10 Nobel Prizes,” etc., etc. etc."</p>
<p>Are they just a reflection of those individual students and professors, or do they show that they have the resources and the opportunities for those prestigious awards? Or that they have an impressive community of thinkers there, more so than other colleges? Or are those statistics not that important to you?</p>
<p>Going along with that last question, wouldn’t it make more sense to pay attention to statistics relating to the collective rather than individual people, such as endowment, job placement rate, etc.?</p>
<p>When Harvard and Stanford brag about the number of award-winning students and faculty they have, I think that Harvard and Stanford are magnets for top students and top faculty–people who would have had a darn good chance of winning a Fulbright or a MacArthur or whatever, no matter what university they were part of.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I have a kid who attends a university that clearly does not draw the students who go to Stanford and Harvard, but which does get high numbers of seniors who win fellowships. I think that this university puts significant resources into identifying talented students, and then grooming and polishing them so that they will be competitive for Fulbrights, Borens, etc.</p>
<p>@Sikorsky: How do you know that that university “puts significant resources into identifying talented students, and then grooming and polishing them so that they will be competitive for Fulbrights, Borens, etc.” from its website?</p>
<p>I care a lot about stats that show the commitment of a college’s students to a) learning for learning’s sake and b) making the world a better place. Endowments largely reflect the influence of graduates who have achieved financial success (so, those who have gone into high-paying fields like banking). I haven’t paid too much attention to job placement rates because I have full confidence in my kids’ abilities to find work in their fields when the time comes.</p>
<p>From its web site, I guess I don’t. I could notice, however, that a university that, unlike Stanford and Harvard, does not usually attract the very top students has a pretty high number of fellowship winners. In the case of my kid’s university, I base my conclusion on accounts from academic advisors and advisors in the university’s honors program. I suppose, if I were looking again, I might look for a favorable mismatch between the apparent star power of the incoming freshmen and the number of seniors who win prestigious fellowships.</p>