Only One Oregon College Ranked

Once again, Oregon has placed just one institution of higher learning in the top 50 on the Wall Street Journal’s top feeder schools ranking. The Journal simply takes the number of students the colleges or universities actually send on to graduate school divided by the schools’ class sizes to obtain their rankings. Nothing subjective. Only objective data. And remember, to go to graduate school you have to graduate from college. Few do that at Portland State, for example.

So how did Oregon do? As the title of this article indicated — not too well. No university or college in the state even appeared on the list of the top 50 except one. The Journal also compiles a list each year of the top 30 state schools based on the same criteria. No school from Oregon made that list. Not one.

So who is the mystery school that made the list at number 50 out of 50? Congratulations go to Reed College, now in the same company as Case Western Reserve, Harvard, Yale, Duke, Columbia, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Vassar, and the United States Military Academy at West Point.

If you interview a bunch of college types and try to compile what little they actually know about other schools, you get the US News best schools. If you use actual hard data you get the Journal’s results, and only one small Oregon private College is to be found from the entire state.