<p>"Small wonder, then, that Wellesley dominates these schools in the “faculty resources” "</p>
<p>I just checked and this statement is not supported by the data in the previous editions of UsNews. Small wonder? Not at all!</p>
<p>Perhaps a more interesting question is, why is Middlebury ranked so high, tied with Wellesley for #4? </p>
<p>Midd’s SAT scores are virtually indistinguishable from Wellesley’s: Midd 1288-1470, Wellesley 1280-1470. </p>
<p>Midd’s endowment is just a little over half the size of Wellesley’s, measured either in raw dollars (Wellesley $1.307 billion, Middlebury $783 million) or in endowment-per-student (Wellesley $558K, Midd $315K). Midd’s PA score is also lower (Wellesley 4.5, Midd 4.3), as is its HS Counselor score (Wellesley 4.6, Midd 4.4). Midd has a higher s/f ratio (Wellesley 8:1 v. Midd 9:1) and, not surprising given the disparity in endowments, Midd has a lower faculty resources rank (Wellesley 9, Midd 13)</p>
<p>Yet somehow the two schools come out tied. How can that be?</p>
<p>Curiously, Midd comes out ahead “financial resources rank” (Midd 3, Wellesley 5), despite having a much smaller endowment. Hard to see in principle how Midd can spend more money per student when it HAS less money per student, but how spending per student gets counted is one of those non-transparent aspects of the US News ranking that can powerfully influence where a school stacks up in the pecking order. Is it because rather than charging separately for tuition and room & board Midd charges a single “comprehensive fee” and is thus able to roll more of its costs into “educational expenses”? (I don’t know; just askin’, but on its face it’s downright strange). </p>
<p>Midd also comes out ahead in selectivity rank (Midd 8, Wellesley 14)—presumably because Midd has a lower admit rate, but in principle it’s hard to see why that should matter the least bit if at the end of the day the two schools are getting the same students, which is what the SAT scores would indicate. Then there’s the matter of the SAT scores themselves. Anomalously, Midd reports its 25th percentile SAT as 1288, just a tad higher than Wellesley’s 1280. But what’s a 1288 on the SAT? There’s no such score. Every other school reports its 25th/75th percentile SATs in multiples of 10, because that’s how actual SAT scores go—nobody gets a 1288, they either get a 1280 or a 1290. Now presumably if EXACTLY 75% of entering freshmen scored 1290 or higher, and EXACTLY 25% scored 1280 or lower, then Midd might argue it’s justified in choosing any number between 1280 and 1290 as its 25th percentile score—and why not choose a high one? But no one else does it that way. Smacks of data manipulation to me, and it apparently works because it allows them to edge out Wellesley in SAT scores with actual scores that aren’t meaningfully different. </p>
<p>Midd also edges out Wellesley in another dubious US News category, alumni giving rank (Midd 2, Wellesley 16). The one legitimate area where Midd edges out Wellesley is graduation and retention rank (Midd 6, Wellesley 11). So with some sleight-of-hand, good scores in some dubious categories, and one or two legitimate advantages, Midd manages to eke out a tie with Wellesley, a much richer school that is somewhat more highly regarded by its peers and HS counselors alike.</p>
<p>Bottom line, though, these schools are very close on almost any measure, except that Wellesley has a much larger endowment. Those insistent on bashing Wellesley on this thread and insisting it’s just living on an inflated PA score should take a long, hard look at Middlebury. It’s hard to see how you could say with a straight face that by the numbers Middlebury’s the better school. If Midd belongs that high in the rankings, then so, too, does Wellesley. If Wellesley doesn’t belong that high in the rankings, then neither does Midd. And frankly, I’d just have to question why you would single out a women’s school to take a rhetorical pounding, when by the numbers Middlebury is, if anything, an easier target.</p>
<p>Oh, and by the way, for those who care about such things (US News is apparently not one of them), Wellesley is also by far the more diverse school, at 0.22% Native American/Alaskan, 22.74% Asian, 6.29% African-American, 9.17% Hispanic, and 11.31% International v. Middlebury’s 0.2% Native American/Alaskan, 5.68% Asian, 2.32% African-American, 6.16% Hispanic, and 10.47% International. So Wellesley’s getting just as strong students AND doing a better job of promoting diversity in its student body.</p>
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<p>I’m impressed with Pomona’s wealth. I had no idea they had that much money. They’re really on a different plane from the other Claremont colleges, which are not particularly well endowed in comparison with other top LACs.</p>
<p>Am I “contradicting myself”? I don’t know. Just crunchin’ numbers. I’ve always said I think Pomona’s a great school, and just yesterday I said both that I’d give it a higher PA score, and that US News rates it about equal with Wellesley if you look at its raw rating score and not the ordinal ranking which exaggerates trivial differences. I don’t think I’ve said anything inconsistent, but you tell me. </p>
<p>I will say that I never realized until yesterday the degree to which the U.S. News formula is just a measure of a school’s wealth. Both “faculty resources” and “financial resources” are basically just measures of spending; together they add up to 30% of the US News ranking, or now TWICE as much as PA which is far more often discussed on CC.</p>
<p>I agree that the correlation between endowment and US News ranking isn’t perfect, because many schools outperform their endowments, and some underperform their endowments. On the other hand, if you combine the “faculty resources” and “financial resources” categories, there’s a very strong correlation between a school’s standing on that index and its overall US News ranking. And it only stands to reason that schools with large endowments per student are going to find it easier to spend more money. That some schools do well in “faculty resources” and “financial resources” without huge endowments is impressive. I’d like to know more about how they do it.</p>
<p>Bck, I suggested to check several years of ranking because I remember that a school you listed as being dominated by Wellesley in faculty resources has in fact been ranked 2nd and 5th in that category in recent years. </p>
<p>The contradiction is evident when you try to correlate the endowment of Pomona and Wellesley to the same faculty resources index. The much richer Pomona is ranked much lower in your numbers. As I suggested, those numbers are fluid and vary from year to year. </p>
<p>Lastly, I think it is unfortunate to look too closely at Midd’s numbers, since the school seems to consider the CDS as an exercise in creative accounting. They have played with the selectivity index and have failed to account for their admission rates correctly. Morse has simply looked the other way. Of course, unless they changed their asinine policies, wellesley does not even release their CDS.</p>
<p>Trivia-Wellesley doesn’t participate in the PA review and hasn’t for roughly 15 years.</p>
<p>Xiggi - just google Wellesley common data set - it comes right up.</p>
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<p>LOL. I notice Bowdoin, Wesleyan, and CMC have suddenly dropped out of the discussion.</p>
<p>Well, in the first place, these aren’t MY numbers. I’m just going by the numbers US News uses, and trying to explain why, using US News’ formula, Wellesley comes out ahead of schools like Pomona and others. Admittedly, Pomona’s a more puzzling case because of its wealth. In the case of Wesleyan and CMC the funding disparities are clear, and strongly in Wellesley’s favor. That’s also true for Bowdoin, albeit by a smaller margin. It would be interesting to see these figures over the course of several years, but I don’t have easy access to that data, or the means to manipulate it. I think it’s improbable that “faculty resources” wouldn’t affect a school’s US News ranking, however, given that US News says it makes up 20% of the total ranking----considerably more than PA, which you seem to obsess about.</p>
<p>Just looking over US News’ figures, it looks like Pomona got dinged pretty badly in “faculty resources” the last go-round, coming it at #25 among LACs, v. #9 for Wellesley—not a poor school by any means, but admittedly not as fabulously wealthy as Pomona. How could it happen that a school with so much money made such a poor showing in “faculty resources”?</p>
<p>There are 5 components to “faculty resources.” Faculty compensation accounts for a large chunk, 35% of the total. We don’t know much about this, but we do know that according to the AAUP survey average faculty salaries are higher at Wellesley than at Pomona. We don’t know what kind of cost-of-living factor US News uses to adjust those raw figures. The San Gabriel Valley isn’t cheap, but it could be that faculty salaries between these schools even out once cost-of-living is accounted for. Or not. But it could be partly that Pomona was hurt in this category. Easy remedy: give the faculty a raise, and Pomona’s US News ranking will go up.</p>
<p>Next, percent of faculty with top terminal degree in their field accounts for 15%. I could see how this might shift a bit over time, but Pomona’s figure is very high at 98%, actually slightly higher than Wellesley’s 96%. </p>
<p>S/f ratio accounts for 5%. Here, too, Pomona has a slight edge, at 7:1 v. 8:1 for Wellesley. </p>
<p>Class size 1-19 students accounts for 40%, the largest chunk of all. Here Pomona gets hurt badly relative to other top LACs. Its 66.5% figure sounds pretty good to me (though US News labels it “medium”); but it’s not as good as Wellesley’s 67.7% In fact, Pomona’s figure is 17th out of the top 25 LACs. This just clobbers them. </p>
<p>Last, class size 50+ students is worth 10%. Pomona is at 2%, which again doesn’t sound so bad, but US News rates it as “medium.” Wellesley is at 1%.</p>
<p>Result: “faculty resources” score is Wellesley 9, Pomona 25. And remember, that’s 20% of the total US News ranking. I submit that, more than anything, is why Pomona ranks below Wellesley in the current US News ranking.</p>
<p>Just look at where Pomona stacks up on the various components of the overall US News ranking:</p>
<p>Faculty resources (20%): Pomona #25
Graduation & retention (20%): Pomona #3
PA (15%): Pomona 4.2, #9
Selectivity (admit rate, SATs, class rank)(15%): Pomona #1
Financial resources (10%): Pomona #6
Graduation rate performance (7.5%): Pomona +4, #2
HS counselor rating (7.5%): Pomona 4.5, #4
Alumni giving (5%): Pomona #11 </p>
<p>Now I can’t speak for past years because I don’t have the data, and in any event some of these categories were weighted differently or didn’t even exist. But for the 2011 ranking, now that PA has been downgraded by 40%, you tell me: which of these figures most hurt Pomona in its effort to vault past Middlebury and Wellesley into the #4 spot (or higher) among LACs: PA which accounts for 15% of the total, where Pomona ranked #9, or Faculty Resources which accounts for 20%, where Pomona ranked #25? I think the answer to that is pretty self-evident.</p>
<p>It’s NOT all about PA.</p>
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<p>Thank you, PG! This is a nice change. I stopped looking for an open release of the CDS after years of finding it password-protected. </p>
<p>Again, thanls!</p>
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<p>BCK, I tend to avoid discussions about this school is better than this school like the plague. For this reason, I preferred to keep my comments more general nature. I don’t believe that it would be very helpful to make lengthy comparison, but I would be happy to point out or discuss why relying on one year of USNews is misleading. </p>
<p>Regarding the MY numbers, would it be helpful for me to rephrase it as … regarding the USNews numbers you used in your examples…?</p>
<p>Back to the issue at stake, looking at one year represents the same error a financial would do were he or she to look at the balance sheet of one year to perform a ratio analysis. This is why I suggested to reconsider your position by looking at porior years, and this because I KNOW that your conclusions are … not supoprted by prior years. I tried to point this out as tactfully as I could. Perhaps I could have been more precise or direct, by, as an example, sharing that CMC has been ranked much higher than Wellesley in the facutlty resources category, and that this seems to have a trivial impact. </p>
<p>For the 7 or 8 years, I have looked at the annual releases of the USNews to try to understand the impact of subscores to the final rankings … just as you do in this thread. After a while, however, it becomes pretty clear that it is hard if not impossible to reconcile the existing data and the changes in the rankings. However, one can identify “strange” behaviors as schools seem to benefit from a LOWER selectivity by underreporting lower test scores and benefit from generous scores in the expected graduation rates index! To keep it simple, I know that you won’t find the strong correlations that one needs to express a strong opinion as you did, let alone draw the conclusions you made. </p>
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<p>With all due respect, BCK. you should look at previous years and pay closer attention to the last decade. For starters, Pomona has been ranked ahead of Middlebury for years and very close or at the same level as Wellesley. </p>
<p>While I can understand that you have no access to historical data, I do believe that you should consider that the data that you have not seen might not support conclusions that are based on a single year.</p>
<p>Inasmuch as I cannot provide you with detailed links at this time (I am on vacation 4,000 miles away from home) here is a link to data that is a few years old (2008 data) </p>
<p>[Wellesley</a> College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Wellesley-College.html]Wellesley”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Wellesley-College.html)
[Pomona</a> College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Pomona-College.html]Pomona”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Pomona-College.html)
[Claremont</a> McKenna College Rankings, SAT/ACT Scores, Housing, Athletics](<a href=“http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Claremont-McKenna-College.html]Claremont”>http://www.greexplorer.com/Top-Universities/Claremont-McKenna-College.html)</p>
<p>A quick look at the faculty resources reported in the above links and at the … endowment numbers you reported earlier to establish the rich and not-so-rich, might make your conclusions, well, less evident. </p>
<p>PS Please allow me to also repeat that, in the end, none of this “technical” discussion bears much importance. Despite the annual changes (or lack of changes) in the rankings, the schools remain enormously stable year after year. Should potential applicants be impressed when a school “vaults” to a shared 4th spot and be concerned when it might “tumble” to the 8th spot. Is it truly important to compare schools that do get a lot of ink (such as Pomona or Wellesley or even Smith) with "quieter schools such as Carleton or … Haverford? </p>
<p>In the end, the subtle differences we tend to debate are trivial as the differences between a 4th rank and a 13th rank are trivial.</p>
<p>And here I just thought it was that all these folks had still-terrifying memories of all of the spookily-brilliant Wellesley grads that they had encountered at some point in their lives.</p>
<p>For a long time, as a public university grad, I was in awe of folks from elite colleges. Then I met my first Wellesley College grad. Her reaction was…
“Huh? Wellesley? We’re just girls who couldn’t get in to Radcliffe!”
The old saying was “Barnard to bed, Wellesley to wed, and Radcliffe girls you take to the library.”
Smart, yes. Spookily brilliant not so often.
And certainly less often now that women have full access to the Ivy League.</p>
<p>I don’t think Wellesley’s reputation comes necessarily from their admissions criteria. I think it’s a lot more about what the school does for the students, and where those students end up once they’re through with college. </p>
<p>Obviously an all women’s college is not going to attract as many of the “most eligible” high school seniors because 50% of the population is automatically out, and there are a lot of little girls who are opposed to going to an all girl’s school. </p>
<p>One thing I did notice while at Wellesley, is that first year, there are a lot of students that I personally should not have been there (being the snooty kid that I was). They were not nearly as academically qualified as I thought they should have been in the sciences. Fast forward 3 years, and wow, things were so different. By Junior year, not only was everyone caught up, they were thriving. It was exceedingly rare to be in a class where I would have cringed to be randomly assigned to a group for a project. It’s not like in a lot of other schools where there are a few very bright students in the class, and a bunch of mediocre ones, and a few big duds. I was so amazed at how well they leveled the playing field for students with weak backgrounds (most often because they were not as privileged growing up as I was). And I was especially amazed at how they achieved that without dumbing down the curriculum for those who excelled from the start. It really allows for students to learn what true collaboration is. </p>
<p>The alumni network is amazing, and just the pride in the school and how protective the students, faculty, and alums are of their “space” is also very distinctive at Wellesley. </p>
<p>So I guess my point really is that you really can’t judge a school by its admissions number, because that’s not what’s important… and furthermore, someone who’s that concerned about a difference of a few places in a stupid subjective ranking system is not looking at schools for the merits that really matter.</p>
<p>^^ THANK YOU!! I have been reading at this thread wondering how can people largely base the school’s qualities and creditability on numbers alone (honestly, the pretentiousness was making me sick). If you’re jealous that the school you liked, like Pomona or Bowdoin, got their hands beat by a girl’s school, then just forget it 
(hah, but then again, it’s just rankings. They shouldn’t let their pride be hurt from a SMALL difference in numbers that, in the end, don’t change how you are shaped by your college experience. So many people who enter with SATs of 2200s+ are certainly not guaranteed to graduate with higher intelligence than 2100s.) The fact of the matter is, you have to look at this in an open-minded, objective perspective, rather than a narrow-minded, subjective one.</p>
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<p>AlisonN, the question posed was “Why is Wellesley ranked so high?” and such question triggers answers that have to be based on numbers, and to a smaller degree on reputation. </p>
<p>None of this addressed the school’s qualities and “creditability.” There are plenty of wonderful schools that do not seem to be rewarded by the USNews methodology, and others who continue to benefit from flaws in the collection of the data and from geographical cronysm.</p>