Truly, I look forward each month for my FT. Yet, I must protest the latest issue in that you've completely ignored a very fine Christian University system: The Concordia University System associated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod provides great Christian foundations and excellent academics for thousands of students in all areas of the USA. Great poem on prodigal son, though.

Based on FT's own explanation of its survey methodology, it's clear that this latest college guide is of little to no use. It starts with unrigorous polling, and from there things only get worse.

FT's claim to be an intellectually serious magazine has been badly damaged by this shoddy piece of work.

Already received the issue in the mail (and I haven't even finished the October one!). Just a short and rather unserious comment about the October WWAI section (at least I think it's Oct): Love the Kremlin guy! I mean, he's a pencil pusher, so I don't actually have any love for him, but I do like how he pops up in a few different stories you mention. How very inclusive! :) I can just picture his nicotine saturated hands, slightly bent over, and yet perfectly organized, doing his "duty." You know, you could create a series: next month, the Kremlin guy begins to think that he might have a soul, or he's betrayed by a comrade in the same department. Or not. Obviously, I am getting way too much carried away by this whole thing. Very entertaining, though.

@MB: As opposed to the purported usefulness of other college guides, whose methodologies are demonstrably superior in an empirical sense? I doubt it. The bottom line is-as the FT guide points out: if you are a motivated student, you can get a perfectly good education at nearly any university. If you are an unmotivated student, you won't get a good education anywhere, no matter how "good" the institution is supposed to be. The main point of the whole FT college guide exercise was to illuminate which colleges actually have a definable mission or niche (on the argument that the "multiversity" is a bad idea), and to illustrate which ones on the list do and do not have this feature.

The rest of the college guides exist so that after the rankings come out, university presidents can make speeches about how unique their university's education that looks exactly like everyone else's, is. Good students don't need a guide at all. Average students probably have an equal chance at being inspired to step it up, or being allowed to stay average, and nearly any college, and bad students only need college guides if thye start tracking the best places for grade inflation.

My two cents.

Not tom be parochial but Loyola Univ. of Chicago is the largest Catholic univ. in the country(or one of the largest) and not a mention? A good survey but Chicago, a very Catholic metro area would have appreciated a look at Loyola and DePaul. The passing swipe at DePaul was accurate but incomplete. I am a Loyola alumnus(AB 1969 and MA, 1973) and would appreciate some info as to how they are doing.It was a very explicitly Catholic school in my day and I received a challenging and valuable education. Go Ramblers!

I received my copy as well. No doubt Wheaton will be gratified to discover it's the best college or university in the US (even though—or because?—it fired someone for converting to Catholicism), and Franciscan University to discover that it's #10 in the nation, just below the U. of Chicago and Duke. But even these places will be scratching their heads.

Note to Rev. Loewe: at least one Concordia University (in Wisconsin as I recall) got a mention, but did FT realize there are at least half a dozen Concordias in various states?

No notice taken of MIT either, but the longest description goes to Notre Dame as FT settles some scores with the philosophy department and administration, both "in decline"; yet ND nevertheless is the 16th best college/university in the nation? Very quirky.

I think this is an excellent and very well-presented resource. And I don't just say that because I went to Wheaton. :)

@arty
You say: "The main point of the whole FT college guide exercise was to illuminate which colleges actually have a definable mission or niche (on the argument that the "multiversity" is a bad idea), and to illustrate which ones on the list do and do not have this feature."

If this were what FT's college guide actually did, you might be right about its value. But instead it purports to tell us about the religious climate, academic quality, and social climate of a significant number of schools. And here are the main methods: (1) internet polling--which is extremely unreliable; (2) checking other college guides, news reports, etc.--no comment necessary; (3) asking friends of FT--who obviously can't know all these schools well, or even many of them.

If it were the April 1 issue, I'd understand, but apart from that, I don't. It's not possible to judge, e.g., the social climate of a school by laughably unscientific polling, reading college guides, and asking people who don't have a LOT of insider knowledge. It's ridiculous to think otherwise.

If FT is purporting to rate colleges, shouldn't it at least show that it has enough knowledge to pass a freshman-year college course on social science research?

Though I attended its in-state state-owned rival, the University of Utah, it is gratifying to see Brigham Young University ranked #5 in your survey. Let me reassure your readers that BYU DOES accept students (and faculty!) who are not Mormon, so long as the student is willing to live the standards of moral behavior expected of all students and has an endorsement from his or her pastor or rabbi or other congregational leader. And it has been ranked as one of the best bargains in higher education as well.

My one quibble would be with your faint praise of BYU's academic achivements as "undistinguished faculty tries hard." Because the LDS Church has capped enrollment, even while Mormon Church membership has quadrupled in the last 40 years, the average GPA and SAT or ACT scores of entering freshmen, who come from all over the US and many foreign nations, have gotten higher and higher. BYU has developed a number of nationally ranked programs, including its business school and law school. It is one of the top schools in spinning off technology into new companies. Its programs in the visual and performing arts are outstanding. Its BA grads rank 7th nationally in earning PhDs in the sciences. And it has the highest proportion of students who are fluent in foreign languages, due to living for two years in those nations as volunteer missionaries, and that puts an international emphasis in its MBA program (judged one of the best in the nation in terms of return on a student's investment). The BYU Management Society and J. Reuben Clark Law Society provide professional networking on a national and international basis.

The high percentage of students who are returned missionaries, and thus more mature than the average college junior or senior, is one reason so many students are married and are serious about their studies. The Mormon policy of unpaid, volunteer church leadership means that students are embedded in their church congregations; involvement is not easily avoided. Every major building on campus is turned into a meetinghouse on Sundays, accommodating hundreds of small congregations that actively involve each student and his or her family in teaching and leadership roles. Those congregations are one opportunity for a student to meet her future spouse. Encouraging the establishment of new Mormon families is one conscious objective of the BYU experience.

The mandatory basic courses in study of the scriptures are taught by professors from all disciplines, including the sciences, bringing insights from many professions into discussions of religious matters. Because Mormons have no career clergy, no BAs are awarded in Theology or Religion, but MA and PhD programs in ancient languages and history are active. BYU faculty are involved in international research in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the recovery of texts from the Herculaneum Papyri, research in the Vatican Library, the translation (for the first time) of major Arabic-language works into English, and operating a branch campus in Jerusalem.

BYU fully deserves to be ranked among the top 5 universities for those students who seek an education that respects their faith and which engages the relationship between that faith and all other aspects of learning.

MG,

As arty says, you seem to have an extremely exalted idea of what a college guide is supposed to do. I don't know why you would expect it to be rigorously scientific, especially when trying to describe something as amorphous as the religious climate of a college.

A college guide is just meant to give a little snapshot of each school. I much prefer the entertainingly-written format of this First Things guide to some sort of heavily-quantified, statistically rigorous system.

And by the same token, I don't think any students are picking their school based purely on a guide like this. It's just meant to give a general impression, and direct them toward potentially good fits.

It sure would be nice if there were a massive research and polling organization that wanted to produce the sort of thing you're after, but there isn't one that I'm aware of. And even if there were, I don't know that I'd be especially interested in reading through its findings.

I guess my basic point was that even if we had such a rigorous guide, as Ethan C was thinking about, that it wouldn't actually tell us much that we want to know, since student success has a lot less to do with the school than it does with the students.

Maybe colleges need a "guide to students" instead...

Maybe no one's reading this thread anymore, but here goes.

I'm not saying that we need a massive and ponderous poll. I'm saying that we need something reliable, and that what FT has done isn't reliable.

You put up an internet poll, and students respond. Are these students representative of the student body of the college in question, or unrepresentative? Are they insightful and attentive, or just people who like answering polls? You don't know, so you don't know whether their view of their college is reliable or not. E.g., they say there's a lot of drinking, or that there isn't, but are they actually in a position to judge? Fact is, YOU DON'T KNOW.

What's worse, perhaps poll respondents are unreliable, but the way in which they are unreliable varies from school to school. E.g., at one school the students have a lot of spirit, so they exaggerate their school's merits; at another, the students are more subdued, and they exaggerate their school's defects. Again, you just don't know, so the data isn't just unreliable, it's unreliable in unpredictable ways.

Again: perhaps School A and School B have roughly equal academic standards, but School A has bright students and School B has not-so-bright students; the students from School A will say the standards aren't high ("too easy"), and the students from School B will say the standards are high ("this is challenging!").

As for asking the comments of the Friends of First Things, well, I'm skeptical--and I'm an academic person myself. It's not easy to really know what's going on at your own institution, let alone ten or twenty others!

I agree that what FT has done is "entertainingly written." If what you want is entertainment, then fine. But parents want guidance, and guidance needs to be based on reliable information. Again, I'm not saying we need a huge ponderous tome. But polls can be very misleading, and so can asking your friends. To cut through all this requires a lot of serious intellectual work. FT hasn't given us this.

Will the scores of the rest of the schools not listed in the magazine be made available online?

We have a 16-yr old (high school sophomore) who is thinking about college (ok, --I-- am thinking about college – I should not claim to know what any 16-yr old thinks), and so I have more than a passing interest in so-called "college rankings." If I learned anything in my formal education, it was to draw from many sources; the FT college guide then serves to be just ONE-of-MANY sources of information I will rely on. More specifically, the value of any such guide for me is to raise questions that I would not raise in a vacuum – not to be the end-all-and-be-all source of definitive answers. Frankly, looking back at who the commencement speaker was this past spring, I was disappointed to see Notre Dame listed at all

Again: perhaps School A and School B have roughly equal academic standards, but School A has bright students and School B has not-so-bright students; the students from School A will say the standards aren't high ("too easy"), and the students from School B will say the standards are high ("this is challenging!"). It sure would be nice if there were a massive research and polling organization that wanted to produce the sort of thing you're after, but there isn't one that I'm aware of. And even if there were, I don't know that I'd be especially interested in reading through its findings.