Quality of Life -- Ranking and Data

Quality of Life is sort of a hodgepodge category intended to capture how much students want to go to a particular school, how much they want to stay there, and how good the school is at keeping them there once they are in.  It also measures the relative prestige of the school in terms of wealth, as well as the job opportunities available to students once they graduate by the number of companies recruiting on campus (both in terms of absolute numbers and per student).  Relative acreage per campus was also taken into account, although there wasn't room to include that data below.  The categories are:

        RR        Retention Rate is the percentage of freshman coming back for sophomore year

       GR         Graduation Rate in four years

       Yield    The percentage of applicants attending out of the pool who were accepted

       E             Endowment of the school, in millions

       E/S        Endowment per student (counting undergrads and graduate students)

       CR         Companies recruiting on campus

Schools

RR

GR

Yield

E

E/S

CR

Rank

Princeton Univ.

98%

92%

73%

$8,359

$1,231,075

300

1

Williams College

97%

92%

48%

$1,207

$592,829

100

2

Amherst College

97%

85%

43%

$890

$545,677

51

3

Stanford Univ.

98%

77%

69%

$8,249

$450,839

500

4

Duke Univ.

97%

87%

44%

$3,131

$276,688

200

5

Univ. of Notre Dame

98%

88%

58%

$2,829

$250,111

351

6

Davidson College

96%

87%

40%

$318

$190,078

229

7

Wellesley College

96%

87%

44%

$1,135

$494,769

124

8

Pomona College

99%

84%

39%

$1,099

$703,585

165

9

Swarthmore

96%

86%

40%

$949

$641,650

49

10

Dartmouth College

96%

87%

51%

$2,414

$442,287

300

11

Harvard Univ.

97%

86%

79%

$17,950

$1,056,069

373

12

Haverford College

95%

86%

37%

$311

$273,286

172

13

Yale Univ.

98%

88%

65%

$10,700

$858,748

300

14

Washington & Lee

94%

85%

46%

$438

$205,827

66

15

Bowdoin College

95%

83%

41%

$433

$267,119

325

16

Cal. Tech.

96%

72%

45%

$1,365

$663,265

130

17

MIT

98%

82%

57%

$6,134

$605,050

950

18

Rice Univ.

96%

75%

42%

$3,243

$677,743

272

19

Carleton College

95%

82%

35%

$543

$281,056

49

19

Middlebury College

96%

82%

41%

$627

$276,211

50

21

Brown Univ.

97%

83%

59%

$1,436

$192,700

400

22

Cornell Univ.

96%

82%

49%

$3,151

$162,255

830

23

Univ. of Virginia

97%

83%

54%

$1,708

$73,799

450

24

Univ. of Penn.

97%

86%

62%

$3,381

$166,593

626

25

Vassar College

94%

81%

36%

$616

$249,191

14

26

Bucknell Univ.

94%

84%

31%

$428

$120,360

256

27

U.S. Naval Acad.

95%

85%

83%

$0

$0

0

28

U.S. Air Force Acad.

88%

80%

79%

$0

$0

0

29

Mount Holyoke

91%

76%

38%

$388

$197,255

50

30

Kenyon College

91%

80%

30%

$127

$81,515

65

31

Bates College

94%

82%

37%

$173

$97,906

70

32

Columbia Univ.

98%