Education

New Ranking System: Swarthmore, Amherst Top The 50 Best Liberal Arts Colleges


Swarthmore College has been rated the best liberal arts college in the U.S. by Academic Influence, a new college rankings method that uses artificial intelligence technology to search massive data bases and measure the impact of work by individuals who’ve been affiliated with colleges and universities throughout the world.

Last Monday, Academic Influence released its first-ever ranking of American liberal arts colleges – those four-year institutions that are relatively small in size, focus on bachelor’s level education, emphasize direct engagement with professors, provide an enriched residential experience, and insist on broad grounding in the liberal arts along with focused study in a major.

In brief, here’s how Academic Influence’s methodology works. It begins with the premise that the people affiliated with a school determine its quality. To measure that quality for undergraduates, a trademarked measure termed “Concentrated Influenceis computed.

Using machine-learning technology developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Academic Influence searches open-source data in two massive sources – Wikipedia and CrossRef – for papers, chapters, books, and citations to individuals worldwide. Collectively, these databases contain billions of continuously updated data points about millions of individuals’ achievements.

Then, the Concentrated Influence score of a given institution is calculated by combining all the “mentions” of the individuals who’ve been associated with that institution as faculty, administrators or alums. That score is then divided by the school’s total number of undergraduates. Adjusting for size this way gives small and mid-sized schools an equal chance of competing with larger colleges. A small school with proportionately more influential faculty than a large school, whose absolute influence may be bigger, will nonetheless score higher using Concentrated Influence rankings.

In order to control for other confounding factors, the searched data are restricted to the past ten years, and the names of famous politicians, artists, performers, etc. are suppressed, solving the problem that they otherwise would exert an inordinate influence on a school’s ranking. (So for example, Wellesley College won’t get a big bounce from its alum, Hillary Clinton.) Individuals’ influence is tracked constantly in real time, and influence scores are updated quarterly.

Academic Influence began with about 1,000 U.S. liberal arts colleges meeting three criteria:

  • All were non-profit institutions.
  • They were all fully accredited.
  • Total enrollment was at least 1,000 students.

It then rank-ordered the schools, based on their Concentrated Influence scores. Here’s its full list of the 50 best liberal arts colleges. The top 20 in order were:

  1. Swarthmore College
  2. Amherst College
  3. Sarah Lawrence College.
  4. Reed College
  5. Barnard College
  6. Wesleyan University
  7. Vassar College
  8. Hampshire College
  9. Wellesley College
  10. Williams College
  11. Cooper Union
  12. Pomona College
  13. Oberlin College
  14. Bryn Mawr College
  15. Bard College
  16. Haverford College
  17. Smith College
  18. Claremont McKenna College
  19. Morehouse College
  20. Kenyon College

How does this list compare to other college rankings, like the best liberal arts schools as judged by U.S. News and World Report’s? Eleven of the top 20 colleges from Academic Influence were also on the U.S. News’ top 20 National Liberal Arts Colleges; 15 were ranked in the top 40 by U.S. News. So…considerable overlap, but clearly not redundant.

All ranking systems focus on some variables to the exclusion of others. For example, in the case of Academic Influence, one could object that Concentrated Influence scores cut too narrow a slice to be a comprehensive measure of a college’s overall quality.

To supplement the influence measure, a “student desirability” score is also reported for each school. Desirability measures the degree to which students attend one school in preference to another. Thus, for students cross-admitted to two or more schools, desirability reflects which school they attended more often. Think of it as a measure of how students “vote with their feet.” It serves as a proxy for a bundle of factors – e.g., cost, location, facilities, amenities, specializations – that students consider when deciding to attend one school over other competitors to which they were admitted.

In addition to its unique methodology, the core Academic Influence team is distinctive because it’s comprised of about half a dozen university faculty and data scientists who began to assemble in 2016. It’s headed up by Jed Macosko, PhD, who serves as president.

Macosko graduated with a B.S. from MIT and earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently is professor of physics at Wake Forest University. Others on the team or its advisory board have advanced degrees in computer science, engineering, mathematics and history.

The group launched their website in August, 2020, making Academic Influence the new kid on the college rankings block. In addition to liberal arts colleges, it provides rankings for the world’s most influential universities, think tanks, and individuals working in two dozen academic fields. Academic Influence’s modest operating budget is funded by an anonymous donor who wanted to pioneer a more objective system for rating colleges.

It also features interviews with influential academics, and starting next month, a series on influential university presidents. One university president Macosko recently interviewed, Dr. Santa Ono of the University of British Columbia (which is on two Academic Influence’s lists that include non-U.S. schools) had the following insights about ranking colleges:

“Although I have long been a critic of college rankings, I know that they are influential and provide an important service for prospective students who require more information during their college search. Current rankings suffer from over reliance on self-reported or out-dated information, subjective metrics such as reputational surveys and input vs output data. The rankings place considerable weight on selectivity (input data) rather than the impact the institution has had on students and faculty (output data).”

“I find Academic Influence’s methodology to be innovative and refreshing as it uses a big data, machine-learning approach to rank universities based upon the influence/impact of its faculty and graduates. This moves away from a major flaw of existing rankings: reliance on self-reported, outdated or reputational data and toward impartial/openly available information.”

I interviewed Jed Macosko this week to learn more about the original rationale for this new approach. He told me, “Many of us were tired of hearing how one school ‘gamed’ the ranking system to top its competitors. We figured there should be a ranking system that no university could manipulate through incomplete or questionable reporting. We knew the enormous size of some databases makes it impractical to doctor them to one’s advantage. Wikipedia and Crossref fit the bill, so we based our influence rankings on them.”

He went on to explain that he hoped Academic Influence would provide students and families something that’s missing from other ranking systems: “Students and their parents have grown to expect the same schools at the top of nearly every list. Ranking schools by our desirability score includes these same names because that’s where students choose to go. But our influence rankings, and Concentrated Influence™ in particular, give prospective college students a new, more accurate window into each school’s quality. We know this new window will help students make a more informed decision about where they apply – and especially where they ultimately attend. Choosing a college is a life-altering decision, and we want to give people all the tools they need to make the right choice.”



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