<p>As I have posted elsewhere, since 2000 the schools that have averaged at least one Rhodes winner a year are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UChicago, Princeton, West Point, Duke, and the Naval Academy.</p>
<p>If you adjust for school size, it also changes how the winners stack up.</p>
<p>
No, it means that these schools are in less competitive regions of the country. Everything must be looked at in context of course.</p>
<p>
Things have changed dramatically in the past quarter century and especially the last decade with regards to who’s winning the Rhodes Fellowship and from where they hail. Schools like Chicago, UNC and Duke are averaging about 1 Rhodes Scholar a year now.</p>
<p>
Of course it doesn’t determine overall institutional strength but it shows which schools are able to provide their brightest undergraduates with the most support and resources to allow them to realize their potential.</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear that if you were offered a full-ride merit scholarship to Michigan, UCLA and UNC, then UNC would be the best choice since the faculty bends over backwards there to ensure that their scholarship students are given the research opportunities/interview prep/mentoring to put forth the strongest graduate/professional/fellowship applications.</p>
<p>Schools like Penn and Michigan definitely care about their representation in these top fellowship articles otherwise the Michigan Daily and The Daily Pennsylvanian wouldn’t keep writing articles bemoaning their institution’s poor performance in this area.</p>
<p>[The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian :: No Penn students receive Rhodes Scholarship](<a href=“http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2011/11/no_penn_students_recieve_rhodes_scholarship]The”>No Penn students receive Rhodes Scholarship | The Daily Pennsylvanian)</p>
<p>Were extremely disappointed. Penn put forward several stellar candidates, Aaron Olson, assistant director for communications at the Center of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, wrote in an email.</p>
<p>He added that at Penn, CURF staff and other faculty and staff around campus put dozens of hours of work into each candidate we put forward, including advising, mock interviews and the like.</p>
<p>Olson insisted that CURF is doing all it can to help students qualify for the scholarship, explaining that we have been and continue to work with Penn faculty, staff, students, and alumni to improve our ability to identify, recruit, and put forward the best possible candidates to all the major fellowships programs, including the Rhodes.**</p>
<p>Guess all that effort at Penn isn’t paying off…</p>
<p>[The</a> real reason you didn’t win a Rhodes scholarship - The Michigan Daily](<a href=“The real reason you didn't win a Rhodes scholarship”>The real reason you didn't win a Rhodes scholarship)</p>
<p>‘’'Furthermore, Monts said the University does not an internal recruitment mechanism like that of Yale or Harvard. Many students, especially underclassmen, aren’t close enough to their professors to get noticed.‘’</p>
<p>“Many times we don’t really discover the genius of students until they are nominated by faculty,” Monts said. “In a way, our students are on their own the first two years.”</p>
<p>At Michigan, students apparently don’t have enough access to faculty to get noticed since their classes are so large according to Lester Monts. That’s a much bigger problem IMHO than the amount of Rhodes Scholars that schools like Michigan produce. If students can’t secure top-notch recommendations from faculty, then their candidacy to top graduate and professional programs will be greatly diminished.</p>
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<p>And the Nobel Prize IS a telling statistic? C’mon Alexandre, you’re the one who just got through putting up four threads on which schools are producing Nobel winners. A lot more Americans win Rhodes scholarships every year than win Nobel prizes. If it’s okay to draw bogus conclusions about schools based on Nobels, it should be equally okay to do the same with Rhodes.</p>
<p>
Nah, Duke has 3 international Rhodes winners so its American count remains at 40.</p>
<p>UNC actually has 42 American Rhodes winners and the U.S. Air Force Academy has 44 so I’ve fixed this list to reflect that.</p>
<p>American Rhodes Winners by Undergraduate Institution 1905-2012</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard College: 335</li>
</ol>
<p>–gap–</p>
<ol>
<li>Yale: 222</li>
<li>Princeton: 199</li>
</ol>
<p>–gap–</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford: 91</li>
<li>U.S. Military Academy (West Point): 87</li>
</ol>
<p>–gap–</p>
<ol>
<li>Dartmouth College: 61
–gap–</li>
<li>Brown: 50</li>
<li>University of Chicago: 49</li>
<li>University of Virginia: 47</li>
<li>U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy: 44</li>
<li>University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: 42</li>
<li>MIT: 41</li>
<li>Duke: 40</li>
<li>University of Washington: 37</li>
<li>Williams College: 34</li>
</ol>
<p>*–gap-- indicates a difference of 10 or more Rhodes Scholars</p>
<p>coureur, I clearly stated in my thread that its purpose was to show how Nobel PRize production was not an indicator of academic quality. Duke and WUSTL have produced none, Brown, Northwestern, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt have produced one each, Stanford two and Princeton 3. Clearly, the point of those numbers is to prove how quoting Nobel production is not a good indicator of academic quality.</p>
<p>^^If you consider Nobel production to be so irrelevant then why make four threads about it? Why even spend the time and effort researching how many each school won in the first place? Your actions speak louder than your words. And your actions suggest that you consider Nobel production to be a very important point.</p>
<p>Alexandre, regarding your statement no university besides HPS has averaged 0.5 Rhodes per year, the Air Force Academy has only had 52 graduating classes so far giving an average well obove 0.5</p>
<p>Coureur, I did not start four separate threads on Nobel prize winners, but given the fact that I decided to list the names of the winners for accuracy (if you notice, very few posters had much to add to the list because it was complete), I had to break down my thread into four parts.</p>
<p>I wrote the following at the introduction of my threads:</p>
<p>"Most of the results were expected, although I was surprised at how few prize winners had graduated from several elite universities (especially Brown, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Northwestern, Princeton and Stanford). </p>
<p>The conclusion, I think most will agree after seeing the numbers, is that one cannot rely on the production of Nobel Prize winners as an indicator of quality of undergraduate education because only 7 universities have produced more than 5."</p>
<p>^But I recall you said “you were impressed with XYZ (college)…”. I think you were kinda giving mixed signal. If it got no relation, why were you impressed? It’s like getting impressed by someone earning lots of money because he won a lottery (pure luck).</p>
<p>Colleges attended have nothing to do with Nobel prize. Nobel winners did the work long after they graduated from colleges, hence the colleges couldn’t possibly be involved in any way.</p>