Originally Posted by Anonymous
It is very hard to listen to all the odd obsessions and chest pounding on these threads when it comes to choosing schools and putting other people’s choices down. Playing NCAA Women’s lacrosse is a balance of competition and academics, find your daughter’s balance.

The first list is the 2021 Final Coaches Poll Ranking. If Lacrosse is the most important thing to your daughter, stay high on the list, seems pretty simple. This is the list made by the coaches of all the teams, probably the best indicator you will find. Most of these teams are common to the top 20, there are a couple missing that sometimes you see in the top 20. There is movement every year, this is how they stacked up last year.

The second list is a 2021 Composite Academic Ranking list (TOP 20, some have no W Lax teams). If Academics is the most important thing to your daughter, stay high on the list, seems pretty simple. This list is a composed from many sources. There are many, many organizations that rank the academics, so depending on what list you look at (Forbes, US News, Fortune, CNBC, Niche etc…) you will find a different ranking. Very standard is the top 7 of the following list, stay at the top of any and all those lists. Again it is a composite ranking, it takes all the most popular lists, compiles all those results into one final list for 2021 (This list is much more stable that the lax rankings year to year).

The point to this post is stop trying to put other peoples college choices down because they don't align with your own, find your own balance.

2021 IWLCA Division I Coaches Poll – June 1, 2021

1 Boston College
2 Syracuse
3 North Carolina
4 Northwestern
5 Stony Brook
6 Notre Dame
7 Florida
8 Duke
9 Loyola Maryland
10 Maryland
11 Virginia
12 James Madison
13 Denver
14 Rutgers
15 Drexel
16 Stanford
17 Johns Hopkins
18 Jacksonville
19 Temple
20 Massachusetts

2021 Top Academic Colleges Composite Ranking
#1 Stanford University
#2 Harvard University
#3 California Institute of Technology - Caltech
#4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
#5 University of California, Berkeley
#6 Yale University
#7 Princeton University
#8 University of Chicago
#9 Johns Hopkins University
#10 University of Pennsylvania
#11 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
#12 Columbia University
#13 Cornell University
#14 Duke University
#15 University of Michigan
#16 Northwestern University
#17 New York University
#18 Carnegie Mellon University
#19 University of Washington
#20 University of California, San Diego

Lol, I don't know where you got your academic rankings, but this is the gold standard that came out yesterday. Way off from your rankings.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities