The University shares the tenth spot with Davidson College on this year’s U.S. News and World Report ranking of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation. It is a jump from last year’s list, when the University dropped from nine to twelve.
“While the U.S. News ranking is nice and everyone likes to be a ‘Top 10,’ we don’t see this as any kind of definitive ranking and we do not craft our policies to elevate ourselves in U.S. News and World Report’s eyes,” said Director of Media Relations David Pesci. “Our job is to provide the finest educational experience for our students as we can.”
Since 1983, the magazine has evaluated colleges and universities based on 15 criteria, including freshman retention rates, student/faculty ratios, SAT scores and alumni giving. According to its latest edition, U.S. News and World Report sends surveys to all colleges that focus on undergraduate education and give out at least half their degrees in the liberal arts. This year, 94 percent of schools polled returned the data. Missing statistics were supplemented by a variety of sources, including the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Studies.
The three-rank drop in last year’s rankings was believed to be due to lost ground in the “faculty resources” category, which slipped to 54th, from 34th the year prior to that. In this year’s report, faculty resources are ranked 40th.
The “faculty resources” criterion encompasses various factors, including faculty salary, the proportion of full-time faculty, and the number of professors with the highest degree in their respective fields. The magazine does not release data on faculty earnings.
The “faculty resources” category is also closely tied to the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students. The percentage included on last year’s list was 62 percent, down from 67 percent the year before. On this year’s ranking, the proportion of classes with less than 20 students is stated as 66 percent.
According to Pesci, the University has been working to balance small class size with students’ ability to gain entrance to courses of interest.
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Nancy Meislahn said the school’s improved status was not the result of strategic maneuvering, but rather the manifestation of the administration’s continued hard work.
“We work every day to improve the quality of the Wesleyan experience for students, inside the classroom and out,” Meislahn said. “We keep an eye on the ratings and how U.S. News computes them, but that is not the motivation for being the best at what we do.”
Another significant improvement was the percentage of alumni who donate money to the school. On average, 51 percent of graduates give back, thus raising the University’s “alumni giving rank” from 17 to 13.
Wesleyan was ranked third among liberal arts institutions in another recent college ranking list released by the Washington Monthly magazine. The list, the publication’s second, aims to change the standards of the college ranking game by concentrating on the research, community service, and social mobility encouraged by schools.
“As we said last year, imagine if college—he many thousands of the—ried to boost their scores on The Washington Monthly College Rankings,” the magazine wrote. “They’d enroll more low-income students and try to make sure they graduated. They’d encourage their students to join the military or the Peace Corps. And they’d produce more scientists and engineers. In short, our country would grow more democratic, equitable, and prosperous.”
Still, the U.S. News and World Report ranking remains the nation’s most influential and reported-on listing, even though the publication emphasizes that the rankings should be used only as a supplementary tool for high school students during their college search.
“I was choosing between Wesleyan and my state school and I decided to come here because attending a small, nationally-ranked school will open so many doors for me in the long run,” said Jessica Brownfield ’10.
Other students had different feelings on the importance of the list.
“I didn’t pay much attention to the rankings,” said Sherry Sylbertz ’10. “To me, college should be about the experience, not statistics.”
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