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On Sept. 7, The Wall Street Journal published it's annual ranking of the top 500 colleges and universities in the United States. According to the United Nations, America has 6,000 institutions of higher learning. The official count of the U.S. Dept. of Education of the number of colleges and universities is 5,916.
Sadly this number is decreasing each year. This year Marietta College ranked 304th. Any way you do the math, this puts Marietta College within the top 6% of U.S. colleges and universities. Marietta College has been in the low 300s for the past several years. Two years ago it was in the top 3%. This is an amazing achievement given that many, if not most, of the schools in the top 500 either receive tens of millions of dollars each year in public funds or are private schools supported by endowments in the 100s of millions of dollars.
Marietta has neither of these advantages. It has a relatively low enrollment. Probably less than 1,500 students. MC didn't land in the top echelon of American academia by happenstance. This is the direct result of hard work by all of its employees. We want to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank all of the support staff, including maintenance, culinary, house keeping, and associated services, the faculty and it's staff, the administration and it's staff, and the members of the Board of Directors on a job well done.
It is also interesting to note that this year the WSJ added two new areas of inquiry. This year, for the first time, they measured how the colleges and universities improved their students chances of graduating on time and how much they improved the salaries their students would earn after graduation. These two factors caused many of last year's top 100 to move farther down or off the list.
But MC held its own and ended up in the same place. Thank you for bringing this honor to our community and keep up the good work.