GMLR Ranking Version 1.0

Rankings

Ah, and here it is. At least as of now – this changes regularly – this is the ranking of schools according to my personal preferences. So this actually isn’t exactly an ordering of my favorite schools. Instead, it’s a ranking composed of the categories I personally deem most important to the type of education and cultural/academic environment of which I want to be a part. Methodology at the bottom.

1. Swarthmore College
2. Pomona College
3. Reed College
4. University of Chicago
5. Brown University
6. Grinnell College
7. Haverford College
8. Stanford University
9. Rice University
10. Macalester College
11. Carleton College
12. Princeton University
13. Wellesley College
14. Yale University
15. Wesleyan University
16. Columbia University
17. Amherst College
18. Vassar College
19. Harvard University
20. Harvey Mudd College
21. Dartmouth College
22. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
23. Bryn Mawr College
24. Barnard College
25. Smith College
26. Oberlin College
27. Bowdoin College
28. St. John’s College in Maryland
29. Whitman College
30. Hampshire College
31. Occidental College
32. Brandeis University
33. Davidson College
34. Middlebury College
35. Mount Holyoke College
36. Williams College
37. Washington University in St. Louis
38. University of California at Berkeley
39. Northwestern University
40. Kenyon College
41. College of William and Mary
42. Duke University
43. Cornell University
44. Beloit College
45. California Institute of Technology
46. Knox College
47. University of Virginia at Charlottesville
48. Claremont McKenna College
49. Georgetown University
50. Carnegie Mellon University
51. Kalamazoo College
52. Johns Hopkins University
53. University of Pennsylvania
54. Agnes Scott College
55. Bard College
56. Sarah Lawrence College
57. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
58. Bates College
59. Hamilton College
60. St. Olaf College
61. Scripps College
62. Colby College
63. Colorado College
64. Earlham College
65. Vanderbilt University
66. Colgate University
67. Lawrence University
68. College of Wooster
69. Trinity University
70. Tufts University
71. University of Notre Dame
72. Hendrix College
73. Austin College
74. New College of Florida
75. Emory University

First, I’ll attempt to explain my preferences. I love learning for the sake of learning, as opposed to a practical, career-oriented environment. Of deep importance to me are close interaction with professors; an ambitious, happy, and progressive student body; and a discussion-based classroom environment. I have a strong distaste for suburbs, and love close proximity to both rural settings and urban centers, both ideally accessible without a car. Finally, as an athlete and huge college sports fan, I would love to be at a campus where there is a very active student body, and major conference Division 1 sports is a big perk for me.

To approximate these preferences, I created two separate ranks, a Culture Rank and Academic Rank, which I weighted equally. The Culture Rank includes many components, including numerous diversely weighted categories from the top 20 lists in the Princeton Review’s Best 377 Colleges and specific categories from Unigo.com’s student ratings for each school. Minimal weight is assigned to each individual category, but in sum the Princeton Review ranks are 1/3 of the score and the Unigo ratings are 1/3 of the score. I also created a separate culture/nature/sports access rank that is my own subjective creation. I assigned each school a culture score based on non-automobile access to dynamic urban centers, a nature score based on easy access to rural, especially scenic areas (I like water and mountains), and a sports score based on the conference affiliation of a school and the quality of their basketball and football teams. This score carries the remaining 1/3 of the weight for my Culture Rank.

Here are the top 25 Culture schools:

1. Swarthmore College
2. Reed College
3. Pomona College
4. Claremont McKenna College
5. Brown University
6. Carleton College
7. Macalester College
8. University of Chicago
9. Whitman College
10. Grinnell College
11. Rice University
12. Stanford University
13. Haverford College
14. Columbia University
15. Smith College
16. Georgetown University
17. Davidson College
18. Barnard College
19. Wellesley College
20. Wesleyan University
21. Dartmouth College
22. University of North Carlina at Chapel Hill
23. Vassar College
24. Washington University in St. Louis
25. Vanderbilt University

The Academic Rank is much simpler. It’s equally between two parts: the 2003 Wall Street Journal Feeder School ranking and the 2006 Baccalaureate Origins of PhDs ranking, produced through data collected by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS). The WSJ rank carries 1/4 of the rating and the PhD rank carries 3/4. This was a simple choice I made because I enjoy theoretical learning – the kind that redefines disciplines – more than I do advanced preprofessional learning. Since I do respect the latter though, it carries a great deal of weight (1/8 of the total score). Following are the top 25:

1. Swarthmore College
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. California Institute of Technology
4. Harvard University
5. Princeton University
6. Yale University
7. University of Chicago
8. Bryn Mawr College
9. Pomona College
10. Williams College
11. Reed College
12. Haverford College
13. Grinnell College
14. Amherst College
15. Stanford University
16. Rice University
17. Brown University
18. Wellesley College
19. Wesleyan University
20. Harvey Mudd College
21. Macalester College
22. Carleton College
23. Johns Hopkins University
24. Duke University
25. Cornell University

There are many obvious and huge flaws to this ranking, the most obvious of which is the clear fact that my alma mater, Northwestern, is not in the top 25 of either Culture or Academic Ranking and falls in at number 39 overall. While these numbers suggest to me that perhaps I would have been happier at another school, they also suggest that I reweight my proxies. I loved (that is, love) Northwestern and in many ways am happy to argue that it is the best school in the US. In fact, Northwestern was a clear number 1 in my self-designed culture/nature/sports portion. However, weaker scores in the areas I weighted most (professor accessibility and PhD production, most notably), dropped it significantly. Being realistic, though anything in the top 50 or more is an incredible match for me.

A second obvious weakness is that I’m confident I wouldn’t want to attend Reed. I have the utmost respect for Reed and hold it as one of the three smartest colleges in the US (with UChicago and Swarthmore), but Reed’s extreme lack of sports interest is a major turn off for me. Even though Reed lost major points in that particular category, it still emerged in the Culture Rank as the #2 school. This indicates two things: 1) the classroom dynamic, intellectual environment, progressive student body, and professor accessibility are incredible matches for me, and 2) I should add contingencies into my rankings. If I were to do it all over all, I’d eagerly apply to Northwestern (and I would definitively not apply to 39 schools) and reluctantly pass on Reed.

As a whole, though, this is a subjective ranking where I’ve chosen the variables following my preferences, and learned a lot in the process. No matter how I look at it, Swarthmore is my clear top school. If only I were 17 years old again…