WSJ's Best US Colleges 2026 [Based Mostly on Students' Financial Success]

[AustenNut]

@tsbna44

UMW Is 55 for diversity. CNU 11. CNU is 68% white per CDS is 59% different but not hugely what drives that figure ? Race? Religion ? Gender ? Perceived wealth ? JMU is 75% white and Scored a 5.

The diversity measure, as described by WSJ, is upthread and I will partially requote here:

@AustenNut

Diversity (33%): Diversity in terms of ethnicity, inclusion of students with lower family incomes, and inclusion of students with disabilities

So it appears as though it’s not just the presence of various ethnicities, but whether people feel as though the campuses are inclusive of diverse populations (including lower socioeconomic status and students with disabilities. It seems to be a bit like the Princeton Review list of which schools have lots of race interaction or class interaction and which schools have little race interaction or class interaction. It doesn’t do much good if there’s a diverse student body but they don’t hang out with each other much.

So, with that said, fireworks for whoever can guess which Georgia school got a 100 or which Louisiana school got a 95 on the diversity metric.

@tamagotchi

It is interesting that “Student Experience” doesn’t include any academic components at all. Seems to me that academics are a large part of a student’s experience at a college. Is there some other category that rates things like teaching quality, teacher accessibility, classroom experience, etc?

There is! It’s not as easy to find (it’s not its own separate category with a searchable tab, like Student Experience is), but under the overall ranking section in the methodology it mentions the learning environment (quoted below). So if I pull down the more info section for each ranked school (which is what I had to do to get the component scores for student experience), I can get the scores for these different learning environment components.

And the fact that the learning environment only accounts for 20% of a school’s score in the Best Colleges ranking goes to show one of the issues that I have with the methodology!

Learning environment (20%):

• Learning opportunities (5%): The quality and frequency of learning opportunities at the college, based on our student survey. This includes questions about interactions with faculty, feedback and the overall quality of teaching.

• Preparation for career (5%): The quality and frequency of opportunities for students to prepare for their future careers, based on our student survey. This includes questions about networking opportunities, career advice and support, and applied learning.

• Learning facilities (5%): Student satisfaction with the college’s learning-related facilities, based on our student survey. This includes questions about library facilities, internet reliability, and classrooms and teaching facilities.

• Recommendation score (5%): The extent to which students would recommend their college, based on our student survey. This includes questions about whether students would recommend the college to a friend, whether students would choose the same college again if they could start over, and satisfaction with the value for money their college provides.

@cinnamon1212

Would point out that Washington and Lee has the highest score in either state. And this is consistent with what I know about the school and its culture.

I think it depends on the metric you’re looking at. For the data I shared, I included the scores, not the ranks. So the bigger the number, the better the performance, and the lower the number, the worse the performance.

W&L does have the highest score for campus & facilities (81) from either of the two states, and it has the second highest score for community & social life (83, compared to Hampden-Sydney’s 86). Its score of 2 for diversity is the second lowest, however, behind St. Francis’ score of 1.

@michaelcollege

@jym626

Didn’t someone upthread already determine that the WSJ list is AI generated? So why dig into these numbers at all?

i assumed that was a joke becasue it is not true.

My interpretation, too.

@jym626

And look ! You too could have registered with statista to participate on the WSJ rankings!! Participate in the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse College Rankings | Statista

(well, the colleges are supposed to distribute the survey questions to students and recent alums. So there we go with the methodology issues again….)

On that page that you linked, it also says this:

Q: How do you verify that the students/ alumni are eligible to participate?

A: To validate survey responses, undergraduate students and recent alumni will be asked at the end of the survey to enter their official school email address. They will then be emailed a four-digit verification code that they will be required to enter in the survey to submit their responses.

In case an undergraduate student or recent alumni does not have access to their university email, participants will be asked to share the year they graduated and their LinkedIn profile.

So, even though I might be able to fill out a survey, if I put a bogus AustenNut@CollegeName.edu email address, I would be unable to verify with the 4-digit verification code. And if I had LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have any alma mater but my own listed for the alternative verification method.