In the News

Who's guiding the guides?--The school year has barely started, but already a torrent of national college guides and rankings is flooding newsstands. On September 5, U.S. News issued its annual national rankings of top colleges and universities. Mount Holyoke was listed among the best liberal arts colleges, ranking, as last year, at nineteen. The rankings, criticized in some quarters as adopting a too-facile approach to evaluating the relative merits of colleges, are based on a variety of factors, including academic reputation, selectivity and student quality, faculty resources, and alumnae satisfaction. A glance at the top twenty-five national liberal arts colleges reveals that our sister institutions are also doing well. Wellesley (four), Smith (twelve), Bryn Mawr (ten), and Barnard (twenty-three), all join MHC in the top forty. In the Valley, Amherst ranks number two.

At virtually the same time, Time and Newsweek have also issued guides to prospective students and parents about finding the right college. Philosophically different in approach from U.S. News, these two guides presume that best college decisions should be based on individual needs and preferences.

In Time's The Best College for You guide--compiled in league with the Princeton Review--Mount Holyoke does quite nicely. In fact, the lead photo in the book is of MHC's campus. We are also included on two prominent lists: beautiful campuses and "happy campers." According to Time, MHC students have ranked themselves as "ecstatically happy."

There's less action for Mount Holyoke in the Newsweek/Kaplan How to Get into College. This guide is primarily concerned with helping students devise strategies for getting into and paying for college. Unfortunately, there is no mention of the school Mary Lyon founded in a listing of seven notable single-sex schools (three of which were all-male schools).