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…
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