If you ask 100 Amherst students which other school is our biggest rival, I’d bet 95 would say it was Williams. Maybe 3 would decide that our geographical proximity to and name similarity with UMass-Amherst place them as the campus nemesis. 2 would say it’s Wesleyan - hey, we do play Homecoming against them every other year. And 1 poor sap would point to sophomoric threads on the Jolt to decide that Hampshire is, in fact, our biggest rival.

Which is why I’m completely dumbfounded as I stare at Newsweek’s latest exercise in stupidity. According to the geniuses at “News-Weak” (I just came up with that), our biggest rival (and one of the 12 top college rivalries in the country) is…wait for it…Pomona College in sunny California.

Now, I have absolutely nothing against Pomona College. I’ve heard it’s an excellent school with highly impressive students, small classes, a commitment to diversity and social justice, and weather that I would sell my left kidney for. But let’s be real here: Pomona and Amherst are not rivals.

What is the basis for this article’s comparison? Let’s break it down:

1. Both are selective, coed, and elite liberal arts colleges with smart students, good professors, and trees.

The tree-filled campuses, 2,884 miles apart, sit at or near the top of nearly everyone’s list of liberal-arts gems. They attract the smartest students, the best teaching professors and the envy of the vast majority of their applicants who didn’t get in.

OK - but guess who else has these? How about Williams, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Bowdoin….

2. Amherst has the 5-College Consortium and Pomona has the other Claremont Colleges.

At each school, students may take courses at any of the other nearby four colleges. Students regularly eat at each other’s dining halls and attend their social events. The Claremont Colleges are right next door to each other, while Smith and Mount Holyoke are a bike or shuttle-bus ride from the others in the Massachusetts cluster. The combination of small-college atmosphere and big-college choices has been a winning strategy for both schools.

We could certainly take exception with the equivalences - there is none for UMass on their side, Harvey Mudd or Claremont McKenna on our side, etc. But there’s no question that the two systems have similarities and it’s undoubtedly a valid point. Even the “Scooby-Doo” urban legend has been applied to both consortia. Still, I wouldn’t extract a big rivalry out of the fact that we both have agreements with other schools in our respective geographical regions.

3. Enrollment and class makeup statistics are similar.

About 100 students in 2008 were admitted to both Amherst and Pomona, a competition likely to continue. Amherst changed all of its student loans to grants in July 2007 and Pomona did the same five months later. Each has small classes, with student-faculty ratios of about 8 to 1. Both are going after what Amherst spokeswoman Carolina Hanna calls “the same high-achieving, academically promising applicants regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Once again, these statistics are not unique to Amherst and Pomona. I’d wager my right kidney that there is a bigger overlap with Williams. But let’s take a closer look. The “100 students” seems like a lot. But when we consider that Amherst’s yield is about 40%, or 32% excluding Early Decision, that number stops seeming quite so impressive. I can’t find Pomona’s stats, but we could reasonably assume that they’re about the same. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of those 100 students ended up at Amherst or Pomona, so I won’t attempt to guess. But I’m sure that a good number decided on neither school. Furthermore, I’d bet there are a fair amount of students that got into both and decided to go to one, but made their final decision between that school and a different one. For example, Johnny gets into Pomona, Amherst, and Stanford, but makes his final decision between Pomona and Stanford. Maybe Betsy gets into Pomona, Amherst, and Williams, but narrows her decision to Amherst and Williams.

The point is, none of the article’s main points or statistics actually point to a special relationship between Amherst and Pomona. On the other hand, we have centuries of academic and athletic competition with Williams. News-Weak gets it just plain wrong.

UPDATE: Some joker over at Claremont-McKenna also has beef with the article. This guy is way off, however. Listen to this:

they ignore the documented fact that Claremont McKenna-Pomona have the closest rivalry in the country

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt by assuming that by “closest,” he is referring to their geographical locations. Otherwise, I’m not sure how he could twist what is essentially opinion into “fact.” But apparently Newsweek’s “evenhandedness” is:

an indictment of the skewed, left-wing nature of most private colleges who fattened with federal dollars, seek to hear their own echo chambers instead of tackling worthy ideas and ideals.

Say what? But I suppose his whining about Newsweek’s omission of CMC can be justified by his own enrollment decision. Guess what, buddy? Nobody cares.