Forbes college ranking:
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Williams College
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Stanford
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Swarthmore
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Princeton
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MIT
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Yale
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Harvard
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Pomona (the F?)
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US Military College
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Amherst
Small liberal arts college in NE > CFA > MBA.
what’s this? liberal arts rankings??
no one goes to liberal arts with the dream of being a BSD in finance
still hacksaw.
Why do you go to small liberal arts college?
I know several people who did this route (liberal arts colleges with a business school). But of course, probably not the most efficient route.
Williams college is a huge recruiting ground for Wall Street, not Swarthmore or Amherst though.
Williams is awesome, small stupid body, highly selective and liberal art education for the most part produces more well-rounded individuals.
How disappointing, I thought this thread was going to be about the methodology of applying the hacksaw
I’m sure everyone here calling these liberal art schools hacksaw graduated from princeton or harvard, right?
As a graduate of a small selective liberal arts college, I laugh openly at all the grads from large hacksaw universities who had hacksaw majors like accounting, finance and very-applied-real-world-stuff-you-know, attended hacksaw lectures of 200+ students where some post-doc who only cared about his research grant application crammed useless material in their heads, and were made to believe that they are learning some very applied $hit that prepares them for a real job where in reality 99.9% of everything you use in your day-to-day job is work experience acquired post-graduation. Undergraduate education at a large research-oriented university = the rustiest hacksaw left to oxidize in a wet and acidic environment to the point of near complete corrosion.
No one (other than maybe itera) is saying that there is anything wrong with studying liberal arts. In fact, even if you study a technical subject at any but the most vocational of universities, you will in fact emerge with a “liberal arts degree”.
I don’t know what the other people here are saying. However, the reason that I posted this is because I found the ranking of these specific schools to be surprising. Maybe this is actually the best way to rank the schools, but if I had just spontaneously asked “what do you think is the best US college”, I don’t know how many people here would have said Williams.
If you spontaneously asked strangers that question, the answer you would get is probably reflective mostly of the name recognition of the school, which to a large extent is tied to the size of the alumni network. Even the most selective or highly ranked liberal arts colleges suffer from poor name recognition outside of some geographical region near the school where most alumni tend to be. Pomona (the F?) has a strong brand recognition in SoCal and is a very sellective school, but probably nobody out east knows of it. Supposedly these rankings take into account some more *objective* factors other than name recognition though…
Ouch.
It’s certainly a good thing that I went to an elite university, and not one of the these that Mobius talks about.
All kidding aside though–I won’t pretend that a lot of the junk you learn in undergrad is canned and mostly useless. I took a lot lof accounting classes and looking back, they were nothing more than CPA exam prep.
However, it puts you in a good position to actually get a job and learn and make a living. As a CPA (regardless of college choice), I’m certainly more employable and profitable than if I were a unemployed and unemployable philosopher freelance poet.
Case in point–a petroleum engineer from the UT-Permian Basin is worth $90k per year, the day that he graduates. In five years, he’s probably worth twice that. Whether he learns his craft in school or on the job, you can’t tell me that he’d be better off going to a hipster liberal arts school majoring in liberal arts.
Then it should be enlightening for readers that I posted this list, since it illustrates how a ranking methodology can challenge their brand-based perceptions.
To your other point, if we to really explore this issue, I would say that name recognition actually is important (perhaps it is the most important factor) and should be a vital component of any college ranking. As for selectivity, while a school like Pomona is certainly selective, we would be deluded to think that it is anywhere as selective as the large universities on that list.
Despite this, like I said before, maybe Forbes is correct in ranking the schools like this, since there are many other factors to consider. There is insufficient data to prove this either way.
Name recognition is very important of course, but somehow you have to be able to adjust for the fact that everybody knows, for example, OSU cause they follow college football, and a few outside of SoCal have heard of Pomona, a Division III school with enrollment under 2,000.
Deep Springs or hacksaw.
C’mon Mobius, that’s a pretty outrageous claim. Maybe 50%, not 99.9%.
Better way to frame name recognition–will a potential employer know of, and be impressed by, it?
Interesting that selectivity is mentioned a few times in this tread, as Forbes specifically points out that selectivity is not a factor in their rankings.
I’ll be honest when it comes to rankings of undergrad college I don’t know anything. I never cared at the time so I know that there are good ones but a lot of these small schools are all the same to me. I know some people who have gone to Hamilton, Bucknell, Bentley, Skidmore and I judge those schools based on those people who went there, not judge those people based on their school’s ranking. I had never heard of Williams before this list unless that is “Williams & Mary.” A college like Columbia will pretty much always be above these smaller schools to the majority of people (who aren’t ranking slaves).
US News tries to measure name recognition through “peer ranking”. That is, they try to measure name recognition by polling people who care mostly about academic reputation. Forbes might or might not do something like this - their methodology was opaque to me. US News’ approach is not perfect, since we care about the opinions of people other than career academics, but I suppose it is better than just asking random people. My main criticisms of US News involve their use of giving rates and graduation rates, but let’s not get into that.