Concerning Commonwealth Colleges
I live in Massachusetts, went to graduate school here, and teach entrepreneurship part-time at Harvard Business School. So, with my backyard in mind, I take a close look in this blog at the college scene in the Commonwealth.
This blog is a redaction of a research report that I published a few weeks ago with Yazmin Guzman (a colleague at College101) and Michael Itzkowitz (a Senior Fellow at Third Way, a DC think-tank). You can find the full report here.
The table below characterizes the 85 main colleges in Massachusetts. These colleges enroll 325K undergraduates and account for 98% of the Commonwealth’s college population. Their student bodies range in size from 350 to 24,000 students.
Our state is home to an unusual concentration of nationally ranked private colleges that are named regularly by US News & World Report and other rankings-crazed publications as top-100 universities. We have 16 of these nationally noted colleges in Massachusetts. Think MIT, Williams, Boston College, Tufts, Harvard, and so on.
In this analysis, I treat separately and generally ignore these colleges. While they comprise about a quarter of college students in the Commonwealth, they enroll few in-state students and matter little to typical college-going students and families in the Commonwealth.
