🤓 Issue #45: 2022 College Rankings
🤓 Issue #45: 2022 College Rankings
Princeton Review's Best Value College Rankings, Jennifer Doudna's brilliance, and a revamped Storyboard
💬 Welcome to issue #45 of Between the Lines
Another year and another list of Princeton Review’s Best Value College Rankings. We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these rankings – they’re imperfect and can certainly create misaligned incentives for colleges. But, we love reading the publication because we always do well – go figure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This year, Princeton picked their top 209 best value colleges — based on academics, costs, return on investments, financial aid, debt, graduation rates, alumni career, salary data, and other metrics. Claremont dominated the awards and rankings, yet again.
~ Josh & Miles
📊 6th Street Stats: 2022 Best Value College Rankings
Authors: Josh Tatum & Miles Bird
This year, Princeton picked their top 209 best value colleges. PSA — all five of the undergraduate colleges in Claremont made the list: Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps. Not only were all five of the Claremont Colleges selected as top colleges in the overall rankings, but they also led the charge in a variety of special categories.
Top 50 Best Value Colleges (Private Schools)
These colleges received the highest Return-on-Investment (ROI) rating based on a combination of Academic Ratings, Financial Aid Ratings, and College Costs. Harvey Mudd led the Claremont charge coming in at #6 overall for Princeton’s Best Value Colleges. Claremont McKenna followed close behind at #10 and Pomona at #12.
Top 20 Best Value Colleges for Students With No Demonstrated Need (Private Schools)
These colleges received the highest ROI ratings without need-based financial aid information factored in. Here Harvey Mudd took the #3 overall spot and Claremont McKenna took #8.
Top 20 Best Schools for Internships & Career Placement (Private Schools)
These colleges received their rankings based on students’ ratings of accessibility of internship placements, their career services, and median starting alumni salary data. Harvey Mudd was #15 in this category for internships and #2 for career placement while Claremont McKenna was #7 for career placement.
Top 20 Best Schools for Financial Aid (Private Schools)
These schools had the highest Financial Aid ratings. Pomona came in at #3 overall as one of the best private colleges for students seeking financial aid.
Top 20 Best Schools for Making an Impact (Private Schools)
These rankings were based on student survey and response data covering community service opportunities, student government, sustainability efforts, and on-campus engagement. Congrats to Pitzer for taking over the #1 overall spot!
The Claremont Consortium stood out yet again. In fact, the only category where there wasn’t a Claremont College in the top 10, was the Best Alumni Networks category….. And this is where we’ll disagree because we know the truth. 🤫
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Jennifer Doudna
Pomona and Harvard alumnus, scientist, serial biotech founder, and 2020 Nobel Prize winner, Jennifer Doudna, was just recognized as one of the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma. Not only is she a nationally recognized biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics, but she has also helped found five different biotech companies (Caribou Biosciences, Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, Scribe Therapeutics, and Mammoth Biosciences). The recent Pomona graduating class was lucky enough to hear her give their commencement address just last weekend!
An individual’s influence is normally difficult to define, but in the case of Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., that intangible concept is easily made tangible, using only two words: Nobel Prize.
The award came in 2020, when she and research partner Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D., received the year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-developing CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing technology—work that previously landed the duo on "Time" magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015 and has earned them a handful of other awards and honors throughout the last decade.
For Doudna, perhaps the most profound and far-reaching impact of the Nobel Prize—aside from the creation of a way to edit sickness right out of the genome, of course—is what it means for the future of scientific research and the young people who choose to pursue that path.
“I heard from a lot of students after that announcement who were inspired by the prize and what it represents in terms of the recognition of science,” Doudna said in an interview. She noted that young women seem to have been particularly inspired by the achievement, especially because her and Charpentier’s win represented the first time the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to an all-female team.
“There’s been an unfortunate degradation of respect for science over the last couple of decades,” she explained, pointing in part to scientists’ own failures in explaining their work, its significance and how taxpayer funding keeps it afloat. “But when there is an opportunity to celebrate science and where students, especially, can see that there’s an appreciation for work that’s been done over a period of time, that really is very meaningful,” she said. “I’m hopeful that these kinds of stories about science will start to turn the tide, and that we’ll see more of an embracing of science and scientists and, of course, more younger people wanting to go into the field.”
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Our Revamped Storyboard
In an effort to continue to scale our StoryBoard and help provide more internships and full-time opportunities for the Claremont talent ecosystem, we’re excited to announce our collaboration with CMC’s Randall Lewis Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (RLCIE) on our job’s board. RLCIE has merged a jobs board it had previously built on Airtable with the StoryBoard, and we will have a dedicated student team scaling the jobs board as a resource for students and alumni. Between both of our jobs boards, we made connections that led to ~30 internship and full-time positions since September. It’s also a very fun full-circle moment for Miles, who helped lead a team of students, faculty, and administrators to found the RLCIE 10 years ago!
Make sure to check out the 5,000+ open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, make sure to create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1300+ remote-jobs, 100+ internships, or 50+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention Claremonsters!
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or if you are an employer and are looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Stephanie Simon is a Scripps alumnus and the Head of Admissions for Y Combinator. She reviews roughly 20,000 startup applications a year and YC typically has a 1-2% acceptance rate. She shares what she looks for in successful applications below.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Congrats to HMC Board of Trustee Member Allan Leinwand on his recent board seat with Compass. Allan is the current CTO for Shopify and is frequently called the ‘engineering visionary’ who also worked at Slack, Zynga, and Cisco Systems. Compass is a real estate technology company with a powerful end-to-end platform that supports the entire buying and selling workflow
Check out some of the exciting work that Maddie Hall (CMC) and Living Carbon have been up to with a 100 Acre Partnership in Downtown LA and a PA mine land site.
We could all get better at supercharging our delegation skills. Sam Corcos (CMC), the Co-Founder of Levels, shares some of his advice with First Round on how he works with executive assistants to delegate 400+ tasks a month.
Congrats to CMC alumnus Maxine Baghdadi on joining Sidebench (founded by Claremont alumnus Kevin Yamazaki) as an Associate Product Manager. Claremont talent joining Claremont-founded startups..… it doesn’t get any better. This is also one of many hires that have happened thanks to this BTL community and our Storyboard! 🥳
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
💻 MaxLinear Plots Taiwan Takeover….. US chip company MaxLinear, co-founded by Raymond Montemayor (HMC), arranged an acquisition of NAND flash controller manufacturer Silicon Motion Technology for nearly $4B in a cash-and-stock deal that will create one of the largest fabless semiconductor suppliers in the world. MaxLinear says the deal will almost double its TAM opportunity to $15B and open opportunities in new enterprise and consumer markets.
🧠 The Brightest Minds In Digital Therapeutics….. MoodSpark, co-founded by Pitzer, CGU, and TechStars alumnus Eliot Arnold, is a digital companion that uses AI to identify and disrupt feelings of sadness, loneliness, and depression among elderly Veterans. The company acquired assets previously held by Dthera Sciences — an early leader of the digital therapeutics space, known for its innovative quality of life therapies. As the company rolls its newly acquired IP into its existing growth strategies, Eliot says they intend to use Dthera’s technology to reach aging U.S. veterans. The U.S. currently has the largest generation of warfighters approaching or at retirement age.
🚗 TrueCar Top Company Awards….. TrueCar, co-founded by Jim Nguyen (CMC), is the most accessible, most efficient, and transparent online destination for buying and selling new and used vehicles. The company was recently nominated as one of the most customer-centric companies of 2022 by Forbes. This honor complements the recognition TrueCar received earlier this year from DrivingSales, receiving a top dealer satisfaction ranking in New Car Leads and Used Car Leads. Co-founder Jim Nguyen has also recently co-founded Autonomy - a radically new way to get an electric vehicle.
💻 How AI Is Helping State & Local Agencies….. State and local agencies have increasing opportunities to interface with residents in a modern, digital world. From online government services to interacting with residents on social media, the touchpoints are ever-increasing — as is the need to gather data, document, and analyze resident interactions and outcomes with AI and sentiment analysis. Government Technology chats with Quinn Chasan (CMC), Google Cloud’s head of customer analytics for the public sector, about how adopting AI has become easier than many in the public sector realize — and how it’s already helping them.
Feedback? We love to hear it. Hit us with an email. 👊🏼