Sources for the College Lists

ecae‘s procedure for compiling consensus lists of “outstanding” and “noteworthy” colleges is similar to the procedure ecae director Karl Bunday used more than a decade ago to make a list of “selective and good colleges” for his personal website. Karl obtained most of the current college guidebooks, looked at what colleges are listed in each book, and then recorded for each college which books list it. Although editors of college guidebooks surely have not come up with any foolproof way of deciding which colleges to include and which to exclude from their books, this procedure ensures mention of the colleges that are most often mentioned to college guidebook editors as colleges readers want to know about. There are exhaustive college guidebooks, notably the ecae college lists all select a subset of colleges to discuss in detail in a convenient format. If you think a particular college you know about should be listed, please write a letter to the guidebook editors, magazine editors, or nonprofit organization committees who compiled the lists I consulted. Most lists of colleges expand over time, and if you write a clearly written, carefully evidenced letter, then it’s possible that your letter will persuade the compilers of each list to take a second look at the college you advocate for. Then write to ecae with your suggestion of a noteworthy or outstanding college. Karl Bunday took care to consult guidebooks that have gone through multiple editions, having already received push-back from readers who are fans of one or another college. Reasons that a particular college is included in a particular guidebook are perhaps debatable, but the consensus of the guidebooks selects out a list of colleges that are indisputably colleges with a national, and possibly worldwide, reputation.

ecae‘s sources are those mentioned below, listed in decreasing order of number of colleges included:

1) 440 Great Colleges for Top Students 2009 by Peterson’s (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Thomson Peterson’s, © 2008, twenty-eighth ed.)

This is the most inclusive college guidebook consulted when compiling the ecae lists. The editors say, “We make only one assumption in this guide. This is that the most influential factor in determining your experience on campus is the other students you will find there. In selecting colleges for inclusion in this book, we measure the competitiveness of the admission environment at colleges.” This is the least useful of the books mentioned here, in Karl Bunday’s opinion.

2) The national chapter list of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the national college honorary society founded in 1776.

This list has some interesting omissions, for example the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and includes a total of 272 different colleges, some not listed in any other source. Considering the chapter list of Tau Beta Pi, a national engineering honor society, added other colleges to consider. Some colleges that don’t have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, including Caltech, were added to ecae‘s working list from the Tau Beta Pi list. There are 111 colleges in the United States that have chapters of both national honorary societies, and just about all of those appear on ecae‘s consensus list of “outstanding” colleges. During compilation, Karl Bunday noted for each college in the ecae working list whether it had a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, of Tau Beta Pi, or of both (111 colleges out of 392).

3) You Are Here 2008 Edition: A Guide to Over 380 Colleges and Unlimited Paths to Your Future by Kaplan, Inc. (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2007).

This book includes an expanded version of the college list in the Newsweek-Kaplan special college guide issue. The editors say, “we’ve highlighted 25 cutting-edge schools that are tied to one or more of the hottest career categories. Additionally, at the back of the book, we have cataloged data on 358 more of the most interesting undergraduate institutions across the country.” This publication’s 383 listed colleges added several unique entries to ecae‘s initial working list. Most of the content of this book is information about careers, including very interesting interviews with working adults in a large variety of different occupations, so this is a great supplement to the other books listed in this post.

4) The Best 368 Colleges, 2009 Edition by Princeton Review (New York, NY: Princeton Review Inc., © 2008)

You can see this list on the Web:

http://www.princetonreview.com/rankingsbest.aspx

This list has expanded considerably since 286 colleges were included in the second edition more than a decade ago. The editors say, “The initial list was built through consultation with a variety of expert sources, including 50 independent educational consultants from across the nation. From that point, new institutions have been added annually; a few have been dropped. A careful review of the guide will reveal a wide representation of colleges, with regard to geography and enrollment size.” This source has good information about what colleges are “overlap” colleges (colleges applied to by applicants to each college) for most colleges listed.

5)
The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, 2009: Students on Campus Tell You What You Really Want to Know, 35th Edition compiled and edited by the staff of the Yale Daily News (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2008)

This guidebook has improved the most since Karl Bunday compiled a college list for his personal website several years ago, and is a welcome addition to the literature. The editors say, “From more than 2,900 four-year institutions nationwide, we cover only 323 colleges. We examine a number of criteria in deciding which colleges to select, but our first priority is always the quality of the academics offered by the institution. Another key factor in our decisions is the desire to offer a diversity of options.” The write-ups about each college in this book are quite interesting, and I think this is a useful book for students choosing a college on the basis of campus culture.

6) Fiske Guide to Colleges: 2009 by Edward B. Fiske (Napierville, IL: Sourcesbooks, 2008, twenty-fifth ed.)

The former journalist who compiles this guidebook says, “The selection was done with several broad principles in mind, beginning with academic quality. Depending on how you define the term, there are about 175 ‘selective’ colleges and universities in the nation, and by and large these constitute the best institutions academically. . . . In addition, an effort was made to achieve geographic diversity and a balance of public and private schools.” There is some good information about each of the 304 featured colleges in this book. It has less of an overconcentration on colleges in the northeast than most other books of this kind.

7) The Washington Monthly college rankings 2007

The Washington Monthly rankings rank all Carnegie Foundation for Teaching national universities or national liberal arts colleges in two separate ranked lists, based on rather interesting value-added criteria. I included universities that scored at least 35 and colleges that scored at least 40 on my initial working list, for a total of 230 colleges, thereby adding several unique entries.

8 )
Choosing the Right College: 2008-2009: The Whole Truth about America’s Top Schools by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, © 2007. 6th ed.)

This book is the second-most-selective of the lists I consulted, including 152 colleges, but includes some unique entries matching the point of view of the editors (most of which didn’t make it onto either of the ecae consensus lists).

9) Rugg’s Recommendations on the Colleges Twenty-Fifth Edition by Frederick E. Rugg (Fallbrook, CA: Rugg’s Recommendations, 2007).

This is the only one of the consensus sources published west of the Rocky Mountains and one of only two not published in the northeast. Rugg’s guidebook includes information about 1075 different colleges. He gets much of his information about colleges from a network of high school counselors around the country. For each major subject featured in his guidebook, he lists colleges that are “most selective” for students desiring that major, and I noted any college that was listed twice or more among the top ten major subjects in the United States (with history, mathematics, and economics added for good measure) as a “selective” college by Rugg’s criteria, for a total of 146 colleges that I considered for my list. It is designed for high school counselors telling students in roughly the top half of their high school classes what colleges have good programs in what majors, to a first approximation.

Some colleges are plainly underrepresented in some of the sources. Some of the sources were very good about including specialty art schools, schools of music, national service academies, or polytechnic colleges, but others excluded those entirely. One very new college, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, will surely be included in more sources in later editions after it has had time to build up its already good reputation. Because not all of my sources were as inclusive as the most inclusive, ecae used a principle of seven mentions out of a possible nine to make the initial cut for inclusion in the list of “outstanding” colleges. Colleges with somewhat fewer mentions got onto the “noteworthy” colleges list, and because some sources excluded some types of colleges, it took fewer mentions (but never less than three) to get onto the “noteworthy” list if the college was a specialty art school, school of music, national service academy, or polytechnic college.

Selectivity Ratings

Three asterisks are put next to each college listed as “most competitive” in the comprehensive 2009 Barrons Profiles of American Colleges 28th Edition, as those may be the colleges that are hardest to get into (and which, consequently, may perhaps provide a large percentage of smart classmates). Most colleges in this Barron’s category is also mentioned in Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges Fifth Edition by the College Division staff of Barron’s Educational Series, Inc. (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 2007, 5th ed.), which gives very detailed descriptions of those colleges. Colleges in the Barron’s “highly competitive+” category get two asterisks, and colleges in the “highly competitive” category (including the University of Minnesota Twin Cities) get one.

Somewhere among the 116 colleges in the outstanding colleges list, most highly competitive high school students should be able to find a match college (as to admission probabilities) and even a few safety colleges that offer good programs and a congenial campus environment. In the noteworthy colleges list, some colleges are listed without an asterisk, and those generally belong to the Barron’s “very competitive” admission rating category, for which many strong high school students will have decent odds of admission. Any ambitious student should at least be able to find “match” colleges on the “noteworthy” list. One bonus of ecae‘s consensus selection procedure is that, by its nature, all the listed colleges have lots of third-party published descriptions, so you can compare colleges through your own reading as you build your application list.

Filed under: College Planning Resources by Karl Bunday
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