Princeton Review

The Princeton Review released its college rankings list August 1 and CMC took top spots in flattering categories, including Happiest Students (#2), Best Quality of Life ( #4), Best Career Services (#7) and School Runs Like Butter (#7).  The full lists are available here.

The Princeton Review book, which profiles the best 300+ colleges in its yearly publication, is a trusted staple for helicopter parents, prospective students, and college administrators.   But the unscientific methods used to create the venerated lists suggest our adoration may be misplaced.

The rankings are calculated by current student surveys.  Here’s Princeton Review’s official word on methodology:

“Most questions offer an answer choice on a five-point scale: students fill in one of five boxes on a grid with headers varying by topic (e.g. a range from “Excellent” to “Awful”). All of our 62 ranking lists tallies are based on students’ answers to one or more of these questions with a five-point answer scale. Some questions on the survey are open-ended and offer students the opportunity to answer with narrative responses.

Once the surveys have been completed and the responses stored in our database, we tally the results. Our methodology and the math by which we calculate our ranking results are quite simple. Each college is given a score (similar to a GPA) for its students’ answers to each multiple-choice question. These scores enable us to compare student opinion from college to college. They are the sole factors that determine which schools make it onto our 62 ranking lists.”

Of course, a rank near the bottom or the top of the pack has some truth to it.  Yes, our professors are accessible, perhaps too accessible when they wander through North Quad on a Thursday night.  But we’re #5 in “Lots of Beer” and UC Santa Barbara is #20?  Is our standing meant to imply that there is more beer consumed per capita at CMC than Santa Barbara? Anyone who believes that, to speak proverbially, clearly has had too much to drink.  That’s up from #13 since last year, but our alcohol policy has only become more restrictive.

CMC, at #8, outranked Scripps in the “Dorms Like Palaces” category.  If the category was “A Dorm is Like a Palace,” then perhaps CMC’s Claremont Hall could give Scripps’ GJW a run for its money.  But no one would doubt CMC’s founding fathers had utility, not luxury, in mind when designing North and Mid Quads.  Save a few hinges, the dorms could have been tipped on their sides and hosed down after a keg tap gone wrong.  Compare this to Scripps, where the sheer number of clinging vines may be enough to qualify it for a feature piece in Martha Stewart Living. The dorms also boast stained glass windows, coincidentally the window material favored by those who live in… palaces.

Forbes

CMC ranks between Harvard and Yale in the Forbes ranking.

The new Forbes Magazine college rankings were released on August 11 and soon became linked and liked all over Facebook.   The Forbes rankings system is its infancy–it’s only three years old–and the magazine is admittedly still working out flaws in methodology, which may explain dramatic year-to-year changes.  CMC moved from #27 in the “Best Colleges” list to #9 in the span of one year, placing it between Harvard (#8) and Yale (#10).

The rankings here are compiled from a combination of student opinions, including 17.5% from RateMyProfessors.com, and objective data, including alumni salaries from Payscale.com.

But the factors included range in legitimacy. Under “Postgraduate Success” is the outright absurd measure of listing of alumni in Who’s Who in America, featured only ten years earlier in the same magazine as “The Hall of Lame” for containing “a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves.”  This makes up 10% of a college’s score.

Since last year, they’ve dropped faculty awards altogether from consideration.  Previously, faculty awards made up 8.33% of the rankings.  They’ve included new variables to measure alumni success and default rates on loans.

U.S. News & World Report

The only rankings to get a school-wide email shout-out from President Gann, the U.S. News Rankings released yesterday are the gold standard in college rankings.  They’re also the most methodologically rigorous, incorporating objective measurements as well as subjective evaluations by students, peer institutions, and high school counselors.

The much-anticipated rankings varied only slightly from last year, despite changes in methodology that diminished the influence of ratings by peer institutions’ college presidents that attempted to quantify the reputation of the school.  In 2010, Claremont McKenna was ranked #11 on the list of best liberal arts colleges, a position shared with Vassar College.  In 2011, CMC retained its spot at #11 but has edged ahead of Vassar.   Pomona College, #6 last year, also remains at #6, suggesting to consumers that the methodological changes were not as dramatic as expected.

In 2011 the magazine placed more weight on graduation rates, increasing the measure’s weight from 5 percent to 7.5 percent of the final score.  High school counselors are now given a say and college officials’ opinions will receive less weight to accommodate them.

High honors or cheap sales?

“Top” liberal arts colleges formalized their objections to college rankings by circulating a petition in September 2007 agreeing not to use rankings in promotional material. Notable signatories included the presidents of Amherst, Carleton, Haverford, Wellesley and Pomona Colleges.

In a wide-ranging interview conducted last year by Forum Editor-in-Chief Michael Wilner, Pomona President David Oxtoby discussed his position on college rankings. Although he does think rankings in general have helped all liberal colleges by placing them among larger, well known schools including Ivies and public universities, he wished colleges and prospective students would place less faith in them.

“They have absurd claims to being scientific, which is really frustrating,” Oxtoby said. “On the other hand, the idea of protesting is a waste of time.  So I did not agree to the boycott. I think the reputational rankings are probably more valid that the rest of the survey components.”

He added, “I think we’re under-ranked. We should be higher.  In different ways, the other [Claremont] colleges may be under-ranked as well.”

President Gann had a different approach to the boycott, which she articulated in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.  Gann claimed that CMC only makes “very limited use” of rankings in promotional material, and that her objection to the boycott was the fundamental fissure it would create with the college’s core philosophy.   “Claremont McKenna College is very committed to free markets and individual choice,” she was quoted, “For-profit publications and rankings are what they are in our free-market economy.”

Staff Writer Sara Birkenthal and Editor-in-Chief Michael Wilner contributed to this article.

Inspired by a photo and a boring, blank cinder block wall, sophomore Rebecca Salzman had the clever idea to liven up fellow sophomore Diggory Rycroft’s Claremont double using the simple tool of chalk. This mural adds a real personal touch to his living space and is a great conversation starter. Unlike paint, Diggory will be able to wash this artwork down at the end of the year (how sad though).

Music lover? Blank wall? Sale at Rhino Records? Just purchase some fun records from the $1 bin and liven up your wall. Here sophomore Brendan McDonald demonstrates such an idea with Elton John, the Temptations, and yes, the Sound of Music.

Senior Courtney Dern has turned this wall into something truly special. Paint color aside (by living off campus, she has the good fortune to paint her walls), she purchased an assortment of small frames from vintage stores. Then, by incorporating her favorite images and art, her wall collage adds a homey feel to her room. Courtney doesn’t have one common theme, but reports: “I guess I’m just into making mundane 2D objects more extraordinary.”

Speaking of not being able to paint, a quick way to add color to your room is to adhere inexpensive fabric to your walls. Junior Aviana Gracial bought this roll of thin yellow cloth at a fabric outlet in LA. The block of color gives a fresh splash of sunniness to this Green room.

Apartments RA Aleksis Psychas had the awesome idea to decorate his family room by organizing a community art mural. Pairing the event with a senior class brunch after 6:01, he stretched out a length of poster paper and set out paint.  Anyone could add their special phrase, image, home state, or whatever came to their mind. The resulting mural is the perfect way to add interest to the upper part of the apartment’s vaulted ceiling.

Imitating a similar idea from fellow senior Kristin Dessie, Sandy Russell is able to exhibit her study abroad memories by graphically linking them to a map of Europe. What a clever way to visually record one’s travels!

The off-campus home of seniors Courtney Dern, Madison Gonzalez, Aisha Shaikh, and Hazel Joyce is known for its fun themed parties. By writing certain words in twinkle lights on the wall, the girls can set a unique mood for their visitors. The wall is your palette!

Send any dorm design ideas to Gloria Chang (gchang10@cmc.edu) or Cameron Hanson (chanson10@cmc.edu)! We’d love to come tour your rooms!

At first, the inconvenience was limited to water faucets that barely dispense water at the Athenaeum, Collins, or Claremont Hall. Equipped with motion sensors or touchpads,  these faucets do not dispense enough water to wash their hands for the medically approved 15-20 seconds. This was an annoyance during the school year, but with the much publicized H1N1 virus, it is a public health threat. (I doubt the lost productivity of sickness of students and faculty was factored into the cost-savings.) Unfortunately, this is just one of the many ways in which “sustainability” ruins life on campus.

Contrary to what many of its supporters — among whom I include some members of the Board of Trustees — claim, I find little evidence that its version of sustainability actually saves costs. The most egregious instance of this occurred last year. In the name of sustainability, the school spent between $3100-$3900 each on four solar-powered trash cans. Was this a sustainable purchase? Now that the trashcans have been put in the shade, as if to add insult to injury, they can’t even power their own operation. (Humorously, a representative of Big Belly Solar informs me that the photovoltaic cells used to compact cans will be be a “revenue” stream – which means that it would take 70,000 cans to pay for just one machine, at $3500. I hope we don’t drink that much.)

Along those lines, do the many empty parking spots that remain unused in our parking lots serve our community as well as allowing some freshmen, somewhere to have access to their own vehicles? But Dean Huang, in an email to me, admitted that part of the reason freshmen were banned from having cars on campus was “environmental” and to wait until the college’s master plan was released. Now that it has been, we see that the stated mission of “sustainability” may even harm the environment. In a school with limited funds, why build parking lots that you aren’t going to operate at capacity?

Last Friday night at around 3 AM, I counted twenty empty spots in the South quad lot. Why didn’t the college try to strike some kind of deal with Scripps College, which has a mostly vacant parking lot just a block from our campus? Surely Scrippsies benefit from the parties we throw and would benefit from the money that freshman CMCers would-be drivers would provide. Scripps endowment fell between a quarter and a third last year. Are we really to believe that they wouldn’t sell parking spots?  Even worse, these allegedly “sustainable” policies have unintended and harmful consequences. By curtailing freshmen driving, the colleges make drinking that much more attractive. You don’t need to be an econ. major to understand that the college has changed the price of a night on the town. Instead of driving into LA with fellow freshmen for a night on the town, it’s much easier to buy some booze from a willing upperclassmen and wind up making some poor decisions.

Decisions — there’s that word again. Part of being out on your own and away from your parents is newfound freedom and responsibility. For the most part, you can choose what classes to take, when to eat, whom to sleep with, what clubs to join, and who you want to be. In fact, the college seems to promote more libertine policies — multiple days for free sexual disease testings, free condoms, and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on alcohol. But part of those choices is whether or not you want to live a supposedly sustainable lifestyle. You’re supposed to be able to choose. From compelling students to install poorly illuminating light bulbs that make it difficult to read and do homework to now monitoring what its students eat, however, the college is overstepping its bounds.

Because a few students have wasted food, the Claremont colleges have decided that we are not responsible enough to decide what to eat. But if the colleges were really insistent that Claremont students waste food, why not allow them to self-police, as other colleges have done? The school could even set targets for the students to reduce their waste, if it were so inclined. Instead, they have undemocratically decided that Claremont students — among whom are some of the smartest students in America — must be treated as animals, incapable of choosing the portions and amount of their own food. As children we learn what to put into our bodies, but as college students, we apparently have lost that most elementary of lessons. While the college used to sell itself on the conversations students had over dinner and on the lessons they learned from each other in the dining room, one wonders how wise a policy it is that makes community that much less enjoyable. Never you mind the fact that eating disorders are apparently a real problem from young women — or so, at least, we are told at freshman orientation.

Worse yet, now that the college has done away with trays, it has simply makes life harder for the already overworked dining hall staff, whose pay has been frozen and whose hours have been artificially elongated by the extra cleaning they must do. The food that once fell onto trays now falls on the floor, on the table, and on chairs and must be washed. According to some of the dining hall women I interviewed at three of the dining halls, they spend an average additional 30 minutes each day cleaning the floors.

Pitzer and Claremont McKenna College have now offered a “reusable” container. The Claremont Portside and the Forum reported that the containers will be purchased by our Dean of Students, Dean Huang, for an untold sum of money. Now it appears as if Collins will be providing these containers gratis to each student on a meal plan. But this raises more questions than it answers: If the school — or Collins– is going to go to the effort of buying a whole bunch of takeout containers, why can’t they spare $1.75 for each student to have their own tray, weigh the remaining food refuse, and then charge the students who waste the food more? Remember, the supposedly environmentally friendly containers at the other colleges cost between $3 and $6. This cast doubts on the supposed savings that trayless dining is supposed to bring. Anyone who has worked as a dishwasher knows that it is a lot easier to wash a flat tray than a weirdly shaped takeout container. So not only will the college have to pay the initial costs of purchasing these containers, the perpetual costs of their cleaning will have to be sustained as well. How sustainable.

But “sustainability” was never really about the environment, after all. It’s about signaling. Gann signals to the Board of Trustees that she’s reducing costs and to the campus what values she thinks we ought to be promoting.

And the rest of the campus signals its apathy by going on its merry way.

The update, which was covered in detail by Rodner’s email announcement, is just the first step of a process that will bring Claremont Mckenna College up-to-date with existing web technology.  “By comparison to where Web 2.0 technology is, we are far behind the curve,” says Rodner, but he stresses that the school will be able to expand its image and capitalize on the future re-design.  The result will be not only a site that supports CMC’s core image, but also a Web 2.0 element allowing student-generated content to be more easily reached by a larger community.

The sweeping success of social-networking sites has generated a host of new ways in which colleges can interact with their own and prospective students.  Some institutions, like Maine’s Colby College, are switching the focus of their admissions advertising away from costly paper and brochure campaigns and instead placing the emphasis on electronic photo albums, podcasts featuring interviews with students and faculty, and a student newspaper that recently switched to an all-electronic format.  Other schools, such as Northeastern University, are working to put prospective students in direct contact with admissions officials, with Dean of Admissions Ronné Patrick Turner developing a blog that has received consistent traffic since its debut.

While the design and planning process for the new CMC website has yet to begin, Rodner says that student involvement and participation will be key.  “We want to establish a framework that is efficient and capable of serving our community’s needs.  Part of this will be search engine optimization and layout improvements, but part of this will also be more content: forums, opinions, blogs, and sharepoints coming from within the school.”  Additionally, changes to the website will profile some of the school’s newest selling points– the Robert Day School, Claremont Hall, and the upcoming completion of the Kravis Center.

The development of a new web portal is an essential tool in recruiting new students.  “One of our main challenges is name recognition,” says Rodner, “making sure we are visible in as many areas as our peers are visible.  Schools that are east coast-based have some advantages, with the density and exposure they get.  They have many more alumni than we do.”  By taking advantage of new technology, CMC is able to reach students who typically wouldn’t hear about the school, building upon attention garnered from national rankings such as US News and World Report and The Princeton Review.

While it won’t likely be until next semester that the new website is up and running, CMC students should be on the lookout for further announcements detailing changes to the web infrastructure.  If Rodner’s vision of a user-friendly interface combined with an increased net presence for the school comes to fruition, CMC could very well be making waves in cyberspace before 2010 is out.

“The ‘Environmental Crusaders’ name wasn’t effectively portraying our mission,” Munro explained.  Indeed, the Crusaders have frequently been at the forefront of some of the more controversial environmental efforts on campus.  For Earth Day in 2008, the Crusaders constructed a pyramid of trash demonstrating the amount of food waste produced at Collins Dining Hall in a single day.  More recently, blogger Charles Johnson generated controversy when the Crusaders took a school-funded trip to Washington, DC for the Powershift 2009 conference.   “I believe that this new name is representative of a new direction we are taking the club, helping to make Claremont McKenna a more sustainable college.”

The last several years have seen Claremont Mckenna College take a number of steps to conserve waste and reduce the environmental footprint of the school.  The opening of Claremont Hall, the school’s first LEED Silver certified building, was hailed as a breakthrough for the college.  Additionally, CMC (as part of a consortium move), eliminated trays from dining halls for the 2009-2010 school year.  Club Vice President Ashley Scott says the change was not directly linked to her group.

“The administration made the call on their own.  I think that some people don’t realize that this is a beneficial move for our campus,” said Scott, a junior who has been involved with the group since her freshmen year.  “Students are being asked to trade a little inconvenience for a policy that saves the school money.  It’s a matter of environmental economics, not something that’s purely ideological.”

SPEAR plans to push several campaigns for environmental activism on campus.  Among these, Munro points to Take Back the Tap, a national effort to reduce bottled-water usage as an important effort for CMC students. Drinking bottled water comes at a high cost both in terms of trash produced and money spent he says and there are opportunities for students to both save money and reduce waste.

Starting this month, SPEAR hopes to involve itself in the school’s long-term conservation goals.  “The Administration is forming an ad-hoc committee that will include students to revisit some of the conservation policy the school is involved in,” said Munro. This includes goals to make CMC a carbon-reduced or even carbon-neutral institution, provided there are opportunities to do so.  Also on the docket is continued support by President Pamela Gann of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which she signed in 2007.

So far, both Munro and Scott see their club’s re-branding as a success.  Although the group may still serve as a lightning rod for environmental issues on campus, the new incarnation of the club is working towards a more moderate and professional image.  With a larger-than-usual turnout for the club’s first official meeting, the group will continue to partake in discourse at CMC and on the 5C campus, lest we forget global warming has the potential to affect even the very beer we drink.

Claremont Hall, the future of CMC

When Claremont Hall was designed, our administration supposedly put thought into the “social life potential” of the new dorm.  Dean of Students’ office told ASCMC the new dorm’s design would foster an environment conducive to parties.   As of yet, ASCMC hasn’t hosted a party in or around Claremont Hall.

Alas, Claremont Hall has gained a reputation as the “morgue” or the next Stark Hall (the second newest dorm), the only “substance-free” dorm on campus.  Some have said there’s a pattern emerging– the newer the dorm, the newer the student body, the quieter CMC gets.  Maybe it’s a good thing; I don’t know.

Stay tuned for the Party Inform.