If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the point that proves the premise:
But we sort of pretend the rankings are new. They aren't. The popularity of them is new. The rankings have been around for a while.
Consider:
This was written in 1911 by Kendric Charles Babcock, who wanted to look at those universities that sent or might send students to the master's degree. It was a single, easy-to-understand rating criterion. It's available here in different formats archive.org/details/classi…
I don't know about college attainment in 1911, but in 1940, about 3% of adults had a college degree, so master's degree attainment must have been something very special in 1911. See also HS Grads. highereddatastories.com/2019/08/change…
The methodology was strictly qualitative. He or his designees traveled to selected institutions to conduct interviews. Six of them were Ivy League (if the Ivy League even existed then I don't care and I don't want to know so don't @ me)
Class I.
Class II.
Class III
Class IV
Here is the page of the Ms for instance
There are others. My favorites are from 1957 in the Chicago Daily Tribune, written by Chesly Manly, whose name is evocative of someone who might know this stuff in 1957. The top school for men?
Also rans? Wesleyan, Union, Kenyon, Amherst, and Hamilton. Here is the full article in pdf dropbox.com/s/e5gc7tfdztjx…
Women's rankings:
Radcliffe, Pembroke, Goucher, Wellesley, and Vassar were also mentioned. That article is here dropbox.com/s/u33mgicx9led…
Co-ed?
Lawrence, Carleton, Swarthmore, also got mentions.
Thread: It seems I'm spending more time telling people why I'm not too interested in the Dartmouth decision than it would take to just put it here. So here goes. I hope this is the last I'll say about it.
First, I've long said that if a college finds value in the SAT, they would be foolish not to use it. I just ask that they do the research, which Dartmouth did. And the lowest-scoring students at Dartmouth end up with a GPA of 3.1 or something like that. Horrible.
I am--frankly--a little suspicious of analysis that shows the SAT is better than HS GPA, because you know damn well if College Board or ACT could make that claim, they'd have done so long ago. They've never even whispered it.
This is the result of the DOJ investigating the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, which would have allowed this if the student had not withdrawn, but would have forbidden it if the student had notified the offering school that they had deposited elsewhere.
The DOJ treated college just like any other consumer purchase: Suppose car dealers agreed the Subaru dealer could not call you while you were on the way to the Ford dealer to buy the car you had agreed to buy, and offer you a better deal?
Thread: When someone tells you about the big drop in high school graduates, remember 2014. Because by 2037, we'll be back to numbers like we saw in 2014.
What's really compelling is the mix: America will be more diverse, and because different ethnic groups have different college participation rates, that's the big thing going on behind the numbers.
And, of course, New England has known this for a long time.
I've never received so many emails about my writing in CHE as I have for the most recent one about "The Number."
But here's a little insight into that.
Sunday morning, I logged in and checked our Tuition Deposits for Fall first-year students.
By Sunday evening (12 hours later) that number had gone up by 3.7%.
By this morning, it had gone up another 3.2% over that.
Expressed another way, 6.5% of all deposits we currently have came in during the last 24 hours. And we still have a day to go...the day that is traditionally the biggest, or at least one of the biggest.
The Daily Caller (ugh) has memos from the Florida DOE suggesting they were influencing @CollegeBoard on the AP African-American Studies curriculum as early as January 2022, and at the very minimum, July 2022.
So, to everyone who somehow believed that College Board made its own, independent decisions about the framework/curriculum and wrapped it all up in December, 2022, before DeSantis went public: Read this.
I normally wouldn't trust Daily Caller, but this serves their right wing agenda well; it's believable, and, I suspect, even they wouldn't publish a fabricated memo from the Florida DOE.
In order to win the nomination in 2024, DeSantis is going to have to do two things Trump did: