Bates is included in a new Wall Street Journal ranking of 50 colleges and universities that send the most students to "elite" graduate schools.

In the Sept. 26 story "Want to Go to Harvard Law?" Bates placed 40th among the top 50 "feeder schools" for select graduate programs in medicine, business and law. Topping the list of feeder schools were Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities.

To create its list, The Journal looked at the ratio between a college's total number of 2003 graduates and the number attending 15 select graduate school programs. Bates had 417 graduates in May 2003, and eight alumni now attend what The Journal deems the top graduate programs.

For its cohort of "elite" graduate programs, The Journal included medical schools at Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Francisco and Yale; business programs at Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Harvard, MIT’s Sloan School and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School; and law programs at Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and Yale.

As college rankings become more numerous, so does the argument — put forth by academics as well as media outlets, most recently The Atlantic Monthly — to take a more nuanced look at these rankings.

For example, in her letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen suggests that The Journal's ranking only "taps into Americans' anxiety about selecting the 'right' college."

Hansen adds: "While it is gratifying for my institution to appear on a ‘top 50’ list, I couldn't help thinking that the article gives short shrift to the real strength of American higher education — its richness and diversity — and to the real strength of small liberal arts colleges.

"As a college president, faculty member and a parent, I worry about the effects of another ranking that pays more attention to marketing strategies than to the substance and quality of the learning experience. The latter are admittedly hard to quantify, but as Aristotle observed, 'it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just as far as the nature of the subject admits.' 

"The nature of a college education ought to consist not in doing 'what looks good on med-school applications,' but in nurturing the skills of precise thinking, rigorous discipline and intense compassion that make good doctors and good human beings."

The November 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly particularly questioned the value of any ranking that tries to list schools by their admissions selectivity. In his essay "The Selectivity Illusion," author Don Peck concludes that upon close examination, the "neat hierarchy" of these rankings quickly falls apart. "[A selectivity rating] seems to provide clarity," he writes. "But the clarity is an illusion. There may be good reasons for an individual student to prefer Harvard, the fifth school on the list, to Colgate, the 50th. But the fact that Harvard (on average) is harder to get into should not be predominant among them.

Bates, by the way, placed 46th on The Atlantic's own list of the most selective schools.