Talk:Davidson College
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This entry had some real puffery:
"entertains a flawless reputation regionally, nationally, and internationally." "particular brand of liberal arts education that is hardly matched"
which I removed. It appeared to have been written by two people as the first paragraph claimed the school had 1600 students and later that there were 2000 students. The Davidson website says 1600 so I used that number. This article could still be improved.
-- Carax
Portions of this presentation are clearly overkill...
Davidson is certainly a very fine regional liberal arts college, but let's keep some perspective here... The college is strong academically, however, its departments offer little that can be considered as truly extraordinary, compared to the clearly elite liberal arts institutions. For example, it does not have programs that compare to the outstanding social science and history departments of a Williams or Amherst, or the superb natural science divisions that Wesleyan is so well known, or the globally recognized English literature offerings of Wellesley College. Davidson is also far behind in contributions to scientific research; well back of Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Williams and a fair number of other peer institutions.
In addition, the U.S. News rankings are terribly flawed and are best utilized as a VERY general reference guide. Davidson should not be using these imperfect listings as something that is "written in stone". The move now is to calculate "hierarchy" by combining the key elements of the two major ranking systems (U.S.News and Washington Monthly), but even this excercise will hardly produce a fully accurate and fair picture. Using the most important components of the two ranking methodologies currently yields a top liberal arts five of Wellesley, Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan and Swarthmore (not necessarily in that order). Six through ten would be Bowdoin, Haverford, Pomona, Carleton and Middlebury.
Anthropologique 13:05, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure how your discussion Anthropologique relates to the article - there are no claims in the article that US News is the only ranking system available simply that Davidson is considered extremely strong based on this method that is the most commonly used (I note, by the way, that you don't provide a reference for your mentioned ranking system) - so I'm not sure that this comment belongs in the discussion section for this article.
Nevertheless, I think you're misguided in your point that Davidson doesn't have extraordinary departments. Davidson's PreMed program is easily considered one of (if not the) best liberal arts PreMed programs in the country. I believe it's Political Science department also would rank near the top.
-- Jeff
As regards the natural sciences, you should research the LAC National Science Foundation (NSF) grant statistics as well as those of the National Institute of Health (NIH). In the most recent NSF tables, Davidson, even though ranked in the top ten, is well behind Wesleyan (ranked first, by far) and also substantially below the other "Little Three" colleges (Amherst, Williams), as well as Mount Holyoke, Swarthmore, Smith, Carleton and Wellesley. Somewhat surprising, the only LAC that receives funding from the NIH is Wesleyan, reflecting its historical strength in biological research and PreMed programs. Davidson hardly has anything to be ashamed of, however, in any number of areas there are a few "faster guns."
Anthropologique 15:25, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Correction: Davidson is not among the top ten in NSF funding. However, it ranks 16th in scientific papers published by faculty.
I checked the scientific papers information and Wesleyan is first with Mount Holyoke a very distant second. Doesn't look like Wesleyan has any serious LAC competition in the natural and life sciences.
London Hawk 19:44, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Projected on-campus enrollment for Spring '06 is 1699, with ~100 enrolled students abroad in both Davidson-sponsored and other programs. The college is currently working to bring this number down due to housing considerations. The website says that Davidson is a college for 1600 students.
-- A Davidson Student
I'd like to see an expansion of the conferences that Davidson sports are actually in, since there are quite a few in obscure conferences, like the PFL, and strangely, the NorPac for field hockey. (Yes, the Northern Pacific Conference.) Does anyone know enough of them to add them? Also, folks, please sign contributions on talk pages with four tildes (~). --SQFreak 07:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Many of the users contributing to this page are simple trying to spin Davidson in the most positive light possible. I have removed certain parts of the page for NPOV reasons.
Elephant11 02:32, 27 March 2006 (UTC)Elephant11
Changing the claim that Davidson has the smallest enrollment of any Division I school to any Division I football school; Centenary's enrollment is smaller. JFMorse 14:28, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
