<p>Why is Mudd only ranked #18 by US news among all liberal art colleges? It seems to me that it has the best students in the country? </p>
<p>Confused…Anyone has an answer?</p>
<p>If the ranking factor in quality in many areas of the liberal arts, Mudd presumably suffers. Mudd is very liberal arts focused compared to other mathscieng schools, but compared to other top LACs, it’s obviously not nearly as much so.</p>
<p>The US rankings are based on a number of factors, including graduation rates, peer reviews, guidance counselors reviews, alumni giving, and on and on and on. Selectivity is only one piece of the rating. This is why all these ratings must be taken with a really really big grain of salt. To pick a school, you need to go behind and beyond the ratings. All that the #18 rating means, is that using the data points selected by US News & World Report and the methodology it used to weigh the data points, 17 LACs got a higher combined score. It really says nothing about which school is “better.” And the same is true for the 17 schools with a lower score. If a different set of data points with different weighting to the data points were used, the rankings could be completely different.</p>
<p>Among the factors that hurt Harvey Mudd in the USNWR Liberal Arts College Rankings:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Faculty Resources Rank is #65.
------a) Its # of classes below 20 students of 58.8% is lower than many of the better LAC’s.
------b) Its # of classes at 50 or more students of 7% is higher than many of the better LAC’s.</p></li>
<li><p>Although its 6-year graduation rate of 91% is excellent, it is still 2 percentage points below that of what is expected of 93%.</p></li>
<li><p>Its alumni giving rate of 34% is only ranked #56.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>================</p>
<p>Faculty Resources has a 20% weight in the overall rankings and is defined as such:</p>
<p>Faculty compensation 35%<br>
Percent faculty with top terminal degree in their field 15%<br>
Percent faculty that is full time 5%<br>
Student/faculty ratio 5%<br>
Class size, 1-19 students 30%<br>
Class size, 50+ students 10%</p>
<p>By the way, these are similar reasons why Caltech and MIT have fallen from the #4-5 ranking range in the USNWR Major Research Universities to the latest tied for #7</p>
<p>Nice breakdown, onecircuit. I think it really demonstrates the difficulty of finding objective, meaningful criteria to rank colleges.
And this is a perfect example. Harvey Mudd College, established 1955. When you have more alums below retirement age than above, it’s got to be hard to compete with the longer-term LACs on alumni giving.</p>
<p>Rankings are just an insane thing. They smash what a bunch of people say they like in an attempt called averaging. </p>
<p>When several of those factors may be fully irrelevant to you and one or two may be deal-makers or breakers.</p>
<p>Example- who cares about a few percentage points of difference in grad rate intrinsically? Maybe what matters is the specifics of what prevents someone from graduating and whether that applies to you.</p>
<p>You definitely have to take rankings with a grain of salt. It certainly should rank higher than many of the LACs that are higher up on the list. In addition to some of the factors arleady listed, another factor that lower’s Mudd’s rank is the percentage of students acepted. It is fairly high for such a top school because the applicants are very self selecting and it doesn’t get the number of applicant’s that schools like MIT get (although the numbers are increasing and the percentage accepted significantly decresing). This does not mean it is easier to get into. If you look at stats like average SAT/ACT scores and grades, it is clear just how hard it is to get in (average SAT scores are up there with ANY top school, including Stanford, MIT, etc.). I can’t belive some of the kids we know who didn’t get accepted in the last two years. However, because Mudd is not as well known and don’t get as large of number of students applying, the actual percentage accepted is higher than a number of schools of comparable quality. </p>
<p>Mudd is really working on becoming more known (some refer to it as “the best you’ve never heard of” ), but it’s already known where it counts (with employers in the field and grad school), and I don’t think you can get a better math/science/engineering education anywhere.</p>