<rlier this week, stateuniversity.com released a “100 percent objective” ranking of colleges throughout the nation. At first, Macalester College had the highest ranking of all schools in the state of Minnesota, coming in at number 79 out of 2,000. On Wednesday, however, the website quietly changed its rankings to include Carleton at number 15.
Bill Richards, stateunversity.com’s spokesman, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Carleton had been initially left off the list because the school had provided “insufficient data.” Since the list was first released, Richards says that Carleton “has since been in touch with us and has provided up-to-date statistics that enabled us to rank them – very highly, in fact.”
Paul Thiboutot, Dean of Admissions, said that he and other members of the Carleton community were curious and confused when they first read the list in the Star-Tribune on Tuesday morning and saw that Carleton was not included.
“Some people started checking with the organizers of the ranking,” Thiboutot said, “and they told us that Carleton was not included because the college had not provided necessary information that, by the way, was available on our website.”
With the addition of Carleton to the list, Macalester slipped down to number 80 on the list. Other notable Minnesota schools include St. Olaf College at number 98, aand the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities at number 194.
Schools in the top 10 include Stanford at number 1, followed by MIT, West Point, Princeton, Cornell, Cal Tech, Amherst, Rice, Williams, and Brown.
Stateuniversity.com’s rankings were determined by “a school’s ACT/SAT scores, its student retention, faculty salary, and student/faculty ratio.” These factors assigned a school a rating from 0 to 100; Carleton’s rating was a 98.1.