Last year, the College tied with Swarthmore College for the number-two position, while this year Amherst pulled ahead of Swarthmore, which ranked third.
Appearing annually, these rankings employ a number of different criteria, the most important of which are peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources and student selectivity. In these categories, Amherst leads or ties Williams except for faculty resources, where Williams was ranked third and Amherst fifth.
Other factors included in the rankings are alumni giving, financial resources and graduation rate performance. The College trailed Williams in the latter two categories but had better results for the former. The College lagged most significantly in terms of financial resources, where it ranked only eighth, compared to Williams' third and Swarthmore's first.
The U.S. News and World Report does not consider any resources that are available to Amherst students through the Five College Consortium.
"I think we have a major advantage over Williams in the resources of the Five-College system as a supplement to course offerings, extracurricular activities and just about everything else that could possibly be limited at a small school," said Hilary Palevsky '07.
Patrick Savage '07 agreed. "Amherst far surpasses [Williams] because of the Five-College system and the opportunities that accompany it," he said.
Despite remaining in the number-two position, the College has improved in some areas. Now, 71 percent of classes have fewer than 20 students, whereas last year only 67 percent of classes could claim such small numbers. Additionally, the percentage of classes with greater than 50 students has dropped two percentage points and stands at four percent this year.
Amherst is ranked first in the graduation and retention rank category and has higher SAT/ACT scores from the 25th-75th percentiles than both Williams and Swarthmore. The top three schools all have a student-faculty ratio of 8:1.
The College's position in this year's ranking did not seem to bother some students. "It doesn't really matter what we are ranked by U.S. News and World Report," said Melissa Sidman '06. "Both schools are great academic institutions and both have some programs that are stronger than others, but I don't think you can generalize and say one college is definitively better than the other." Sidman also pointed out that Amherst is higher than Williams in other rankings where schools are evaluated in terms of their social responsibility, which she feels is more important.
Along these lines, U.S. News and World Report has made an approximate rank of the top liberal arts schools' ability to achieve economic diversity in their student bodies by examining the proportion of Pell Grants a school distributes. Pell Grants are typically given to students whose family income is less than $40,000, and while not a perfect indicator, the number of Pell Grants awarded is a rough estimation of the number of lower income students at a school. Amherst falls sixth on this list, as it awards 15 percent of its students these grants. Smith College leads all colleges with 27 percent of its students receiving Pell Grants. Swarthmore weighs in at 15th, as only 12 percent of its students receive Pell Grants, and Williams lags at 18th, with only 11 percent of its students receiving this type of grant.
According to Director of Financial Aid Joe Case, these numbers, while quite good, do not accurately reflect the number of students from lower income backgrounds attending the College. "There are students who are quite needy and who do not receive Pell Grants," explained Case. "Sometimes we use our own money instead of Pell Grants."
In a ranking of liberal arts colleges' diversity, Amherst was ranked 12th, with a diversity index of 0.49 out of a total possible 1.0. Amherst fell between Swarthmore, which ranked 10th with a diversity index number of 0.52, and Williams, which ranked 18th with an index number of 0.47.
Many students are also unsure of the pertinence and usefulness of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. "I'm not very convinced of the ability of U.S. News and World Report to properly judge the environments in the hundreds of colleges they rank," commented Roshni Rathi '08.
Joshua Stanton '08 affirmed that Amherst is an excellent college no matter what its ranking, and while he does not dismiss the rankings entirely, he looks at them quite skeptically. "I feel that Amherst is providing a first-rate education and a really nice environment for its students and that, while rankings do matter somewhat, they should not be overemphasized," he said.
However, Eddie Ramos '08 is not so sure. "As much as I'd like to say I don't give much credence to these kinds of things, many take the U.S. News and World Report ranking too seriously to completely discredit it," he said. "If Amherst were ranked fifth or 10th instead of second, maybe that would mean something." Nevertheless, Ramos hoped people consider the bigger picture. "I don't think that a difference between one and two should actually make someone decide where to go to college," he said.