🤓 Issue #58: Forbes' Top Liberal Arts Colleges
Claremont crushes Forbes and DegreeChoices' rankings based on student economic returns
💬 Welcome to issue #58 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. If you ever need a bit of inspiration about moving past your failures, look no further than Adam Neumann, who just secured a16z’s largest investment ever at a billion dollar valuation for his new, pre-product real estate company. We’ll just keep tracking software opportunities and multiples over here at BTL…
In other news, contact Product Space below if you or your company are looking for some student help with PM work or UX design.
~ Josh & Miles
📢 👥 Community Voices: Top Liberal Arts College
Author: Michael T. Nietzel — Forbes
The West Coast’s best-kept secret is taking its moment in the spotlight. Last week, Forbes shared an analysis that shows what everybody reading this likely already knew — Claremont is home to the most elite liberal arts colleges. 🤷
According to DegreeChoices’ research and ranking system, CMC finished as the #1 liberal arts college, followed by HMC at #2 and PO at #6. These rankings are based on students' economic returns from attending their respective colleges. Financial returns aren’t the only way colleges and education should be measured, but it’s still lovely to see Claremont staying on top. ;)
Using public data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), DegreeChoices researchers ranked more than 2,000 undergraduate institutions based on the mathematical combination of two outcomes.
The first is payback - a measure of how long it takes students to recoup their educational investment after attending a given school. The second is earningsplus, a calculation of how much more or less students from a particular college earn when compared to the weighted average of students from all colleges in that state.
To arrive at what is called an institution’s economic score, the factor on which DegreeChoices ranked schools, the school’s payback is divided by the percentage advantage/disadvantage of its earningsplus factor.
Just remember: schools that earn more than 100% of the state average will see an economic score lower than their payback rate. And in this ranking system, the lower the economic score the better.
Here are the top 20 liberal arts colleges, ordered by their economic score. In addition, each listing displays admission rate, graduation rate, net cost, payback, average earnings, and earningsplus.
Claremont McKenna College .87
Harvey Mudd College .92
Washington and Lee University .94
Davidson College 1.15
Virginia Military Institute 1.16
Pomona College 1.18
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Product Space
Product Space is a 5C club dedicated to product management, UX design, and the study of technology as a holistic field. Their student fellows go through a year-long training program in which they build practical, real-world skills relevant to the tech industry. By the end of the program, the students are capable of market research, conducting customer interviews, product wireframing and prototyping, data analysis, and product marketing.
We’re currently looking for Claremont-led and founded companies to partner with and are in search of consortium alumni who want to work with current students to solve their company's problems. To learn more or reach out, check out our website.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Abasi Ene-Obong
Claremont graduate Abasi Ene-Obong is the CEO and founder of 54gene, a health technology company advancing the state of healthcare through large-scale discovery and translational research, advanced molecular diagnostics, and clinical programs for the benefit of Africans and the global population. Last fall, Abasi and the team raised a $25M Series B to bolster their efforts to bridge the divide in the global genomics market.
TIME interviewed Ene-Obong in Paris this past June to discuss how 54gene intends to grow its business, make money, and the process of winning over investors—and the health problems at stake.
Born and raised in the Nigerian port city of Calabar, Abasi Ene-Obong remembers the exact moment that changed his life’s direction. Sitting in an introductory genetics class at medical school, in 2003, he heard the professor say that African genetic samples comprised less than 3% of health data bases in the world, creating a stunning vacuum in its ability to detect diseases and develop effective treatments for hundreds of millions of people.
Ene-Obong ditched his plan to become a doctor, and instead left for London, and later Los Angeles, to study genetics, finally earning a Master’s degree in business focusing on the bioscience industry, at the Keck Graduate School in California, and a Ph.D. in cancer biology at the University of London.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Alex Johnson is a Claremont alumnus and the co-founder/CTO of Plotly – a data visualization company focused on taking hardcore data science out of the lab and into the commercial world. As a company with roots in the open-source community, Plotly introduced web-based data visualization to Python. Today, the company offers Dash Enterprise, which provides the best software tools and platform to enable every enterprise worldwide to build and scale data applications quickly and easily.
Having raised a total of more than $18M in venture funds, Plotly's libraries are used by millions worldwide and embedded into mission-critical applications across Fortune 500 companies. They’re looking for more talented Claremont individuals to join their remote team:
Talent Engines, co-founded by Claremont alumnus Michael Connolly, is a recruiting platform that provides an end-to-end lateral recruiting solution for the professional services industry with their first offering – LawCareer. He founded Talent Engines to assist sophisticated law firms and their well-educated talent to be better matched and developed for them to reach their professional goals with the help of their proprietary AI technology.
A fun fact about Michael is that he served as the Academic Affairs Advisor during his junior year and established the Claremont Lacrosse Club back in his days at Pomona College. Now, he’s looking for two amazing Claremont fall interns to assist in developing more AI-based queries and help with content marketing for LawCareer. To apply, email Michael directly.
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top listen 🔥
Asher Weiss, Claremont alumnus and co-founder of Tixologi, recently joined Neustreet X to chat about how NFTs and Web3 can change the ticketing industry. Tixologi is a blockchain-based ticketing software that puts event producers, venues, and teams in control of their ticketing.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Business Insider recently featured Claremont alumnus Julia Stiglitz and her newly founded company CoRise as one of the 23 most promising edtech startups in 2022. CoRise partners with industry leaders to transform the way professionals and companies build technical, high-demand skills at scale
The World Economic Forum highlighted some of the biotechnology innovations that Living Carbon, founded by Claremont alumnus Maddie Hall, is building to improve the quality and durability of nature-based solutions!
Victor Penev, Claremont alumnus and CEO/Founder of Edamam, shares Edamam’s mission at a recent StartUp Health Transformer showcase. Edamam sits at the intersection of food, data, and health. They organize and structure the world’s food knowledge to help businesses build a future where people can heal with food.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🏆 Building Winning Company Culture….. Geoff Smart is a Claremont alumnus and the Founder/Chairman of ghSmart, which helps Fortune 500 CEOs & boards, billionaire founders, and heads of state hire, develop, and lead talented teams. He shares in Psychology Today how psychological tools like ego management, radical empathy, and avoiding diffusion of responsibility are the key to building a winning company culture.
🚀 Why Do You Invest?….. Claremont alumnus David Meister is the co-founder and CBO of Sydecar — a frictionless deal execution platform for venture investors. At Sydecar, they have a front-row seat to venture deals happening every day, and David identifies and dives into three primary reasons why he gets excited about investing in startups: returns, accomplishments, and impact.
🏠 The Remote Work Manifesto….. This quick read by a fellow Claremont alumnus divulges the secret of the underground movement of remote workers who maximize their productivity while minimizing their hours clocked. It divulges a work-from-home time management method that the author honed over the last half-decade of working remotely. The key? Return to an elementary schedule.
🍷Next Era Of Ecommerce For Wineries….. DRINKS, the leader in e-commerce alcohol co-founded by Claremont alumnus Zac Brandenberg, recently partnered with e-commerce infrastructure company Shopify. Wineries and retailers in the United States will now have real-time tax and compliance fully embedded within a native Shopify checkout experience. According to Zac, “the days of substandard technology stifling DTC growth for our industry are over.”
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