September 30, 2007

Oxy Immobile in the Rankings


Okay, first a note: I've been really busy over the last couple of days, and I've been sitting on this update and the one I will make later today for a few days now, meaning they're not at timely as they could be. Please excuse that fact, because I believe that both contain relevant/interesting information that people may or may not have heard about. In other words, I'm posting them anyway.

Now, to the post:

The U.S. News and World Report has come out with its latest rankings, and Oxy is ranked number 36 among the liberal arts colleges. This is exactly the same as last year's ranking, something that Oxy is very proud of. But, it begs the question: why isn't Oxy improving in the rankings? We keep hearing about how Oxy's star is rising, and how its reputation and prestige keeps on growing and growing. This year, they had far more applicants accept than they expected, a testament to Oxy's allure (and also why the first-years are in such a housing crunch right now). Why don't the college ranking reflect this then? I can think of a couple of explanations:

1. Oxy's momentum is dying out. Maybe Oxy has reached the heights of its status and prestige, at last for now. All upward trends have to level out at some point.

2. The status, distinction, and allue of all the liberal arts schools is rising, and so while Oxy's prestige is increasing, it is not doing so any faster than its peer institutions. In other words, all the liberal arts schools are going up, and Oxy's rise is only equal to that of the other schools.

3. U.S. News and World Report doesn't know what the hell they're doing.

What do you think? (I just want to point out that you can leave comments on blog posts, without even needing to sign up or be a blogger member.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm going to assume you meant to put your comments page in Spanish - or else blogger.com is extremely multi-cultural. :) Anyways, yes. I think that your second point is right - getting a liberal arts education is becoming more popular, so small liberal arts schools like Oxy are all rising, which means Oxy's ranking isn't going to skyrocket anytime soon. It could be that our rise in rank has lost momentum (I don't know what we ranked in years past), but while Oxy is a good school, we really don't have much else going for us other than being a small liberal arts college in the middle of Los Angeles, so we unless there's suddenly a mass trend of high school students wanting to major in, say, DWA, then I don't think we're going to see our ranking rise significantly anytime soon. Anywho, just my two cents.
-Caroline

OxyBlog said...

Hmm, when I add comments on my computer (both logged in and not), everything is in English. I don't know why it shows up as Spanish on your computer. There's no setting for changing the language or anything. I'll have to try this with someone else's computer to see which language it is in for them.

But I like your points. As far as how Oxy has ranked in years past, I believe that we have risen in rankings for the last several years (though I haven't actually seen the stats in a while), so the fact that Oxy ranking didn't rise this year is significant.