🥇 Issue #128: WSJ Ranks The Claremont Colleges As The Top Liberal Arts Schools
The 5Cs took the top spots in the recent college rankings from The Wall Street Journal for the best liberal arts schools in the Western U.S.
💬 Welcome to issue #128 of StoryHouse Review
Good morning & happy Thursday. If you’ve been following StoryHouse or the StoryHouse Review for a while, you’ve likely heard us talk about the value and importance of liberal arts education for startup founders and entrepreneurs.
“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” - Steve Jobs
This week, we’re celebrating yet another win for the top liberal arts colleges in the world. CMC was recently named the top liberal arts school in the Western U.S. by WSJ, with Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Scripps, and Pitzer following closely in the top eight. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Claremont McKenna Ranked The Top Liberal Arts School in the Western U.S.
It’s another win for the Claremont Colleges! In the recent Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2025 Best Colleges in the U.S. rankings, Claremont McKenna was ranked as the top liberal arts school in the Western U.S. Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Scripps, and Pitzer were also ranked among the top eight.
Claremont McKenna Is the Top Liberal-Arts School in the Western U.S.
Claremont McKenna College is the top liberal-arts school in the Western U.S., followed by Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, in the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2025 Best Colleges in the U.S. ranking.
Our ranking measures how well each college sets graduates up for financial success. We look at how much a school improves students’ chances of graduating and their future earnings, balancing these outcomes with feedback from students on college life. We don’t measure reputation, nor the college’s own finances.
Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd are also among the top 10 private schools in our ranking of the West’s top public and private colleges. And they are the top two small colleges in the region in our ranking of Western colleges by size.
Scripps College, fourth among Western liberal-arts colleges, is also No. 1 nationwide for overall campus experience. Harvey Mudd is second on that list, Pomona is seventh and Claremont McKenna is 10th.
Check out the full list of top liberal arts colleges from WSJ. 👇
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Tandem, Speakeasy, & Parakeet Health
Claremont alum Brendan Suh (CMC ‘19) is the co-founder of Tandem, a marketplace that helps companies share office space. Tandem started in SF and NYC earlier this year, and they just recently launched on Y Combinator. Their online marketplace uses AI to make the office leasing process less tedious. Whereas a typical office search takes 3-6 months, Tandem’s platform gets it done in less than two weeks. Tandem has helped match nearly 100 companies and has seen double-digit month-over-month growth. They are currently hiring for a BizOps role in SF.
San Francisco Biz Ops - This person will be responsible for getting more office space onboarded onto Tandem’s platform and for ensuring all SF customer tours are executed smoothly. This role will report directly to one of Tandem’s Founders. The ideal candidate is a self-starter with a strong track record in high-touch, customer-facing operations teams.
Sagar Batchu (HMC ‘15) is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy – an API DevEx platform that instantly creates SDKs that make API integration easy for your users. Their platform takes the heavy lifting out of providing a great API experience by integrating directly into your GitOps and propagating changes. Speakeasy is leveraging platform engineering, code gen, and LLMs to provide a platform that unburdens teams who are creating, maintaining, and constantly evolving their APIs. Speakeasy recently completed its $15M Series A round led by FPV Ventures, with participation from GV and Quiet Capital. They’re hiring for several open roles on their growing team.
Product Engineer (Remote/SF): especially with experience in platform engineering, developer tools, developer productivity, or infrastructure products.
Solutions Architect (Remote/SF): responsible for ensuring key accounts have an amazing post-sales experience with Speakeasy
Claremont alum Jung Park (HMC ‘89) is the CEO and co-founder of Parakeet Health, an AI voice answering service for healthcare practices that automates repetitive phone tasks like appointment scheduling, billing, and general inquiries. Parakeet’s founding team includes seasoned healthcare industry veterans (One Medical IPO, Doximity IPO, Epocrates IPO) and skilled technology leaders (Microsoft, Twitter, Rippling, PrimerAI). They are backed by top-tier VCs, including StoryHouse, Canvas Ventures, and CoFound Partners. Parakeet is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join their growing team.
Senior Software Engineer (On-site/SF): especially with proven experience designing and implementing scalable, robust backend systems.
Customer Success Manager (On-site/SF): experience in healthcare or a strong understanding of healthcare operations is highly beneficial.
Check out the other ~2,000 open jobs at 280+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 300+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 500+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention StoryHouse Review. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🤝 Claremont Introductions: John Dewald & Full Belly Brasil
Full Belly Brasil is a 501c3 organization committed to helping solve world hunger and combat climate change. Their president and co-founder, John Dewald (CMC '17), first went to Brazil on a Fulbright grant and decided to start Full Belly during the heart of the pandemic when food insecurity spiked, putting Brazil back on the UN's World Hunger Map. Full Belly uses food recovery to provide food to families in need while also decreasing food waste and reducing carbon and methane emissions.
To date, Full Belly has delivered 500,000 meals, reduced carbon emissions by 11.5 million lbs., and cut methane emissions by over 30,500 lbs. They have also cleaned 5,000 lbs. of trash from beaches, planted 70,000 trees, and installed 20 water purification systems. With each year, their impact grows as they work toward their mission of providing one million meals. Learn more about their work below. 👇
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top listen 🎧
Serial Claremont entrepreneur and investor Shahram Seyedin-Noor (PO ‘96) joined Neil Devani on the Money Moves podcast to share his journey from Harvard-trained lawyer to biotech entrepreneur and venture capitalist. After Pomona, Shahram earned his JD from Harvard and began his career at Wilson Sonsini and Cooley before transitioning to investment banking roles at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. He later entered the startup world, co-founding several startups, and he now leads Civilization Ventures as its founder and managing partner, driving advancements in healthtech and biology.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Claremont alum and Harvard MD Dr. Sharon Hausman-Cohen (PO) was recently on The Dr. Hyman Show to share her insights on addressing cognitive decline, autism, and other chronic diseases with genomic testing. Sharon is the co-founder and Medical Director of IntellxxDNA, which provides licensed healthcare professionals with accurate, accessible, and actionable genomic intelligence to support cutting-edge clinical decision-making.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Claremont grad Ben Brown (HMC ‘03) is the co-founder and President of Skip Technology, a grid-scale battery startup that is building long-duration batteries that use hydrogen bromine to produce power instead of the more common lithium-ion chemistry. The company’s smaller batteries can power operations like food trucks, while ten shipping container-sized units can energize a large data center. Skip Technology recently raised $5M in funding, led by Puyallup Tribal Enterprises, which also participated in a previous round.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🍴 Would you eat dried microbes?.... As climate change pushes weather conditions to new extremes, Claremont alum Jennifer Holmgren (HMC ‘81) announced that LanzaTech is expanding its efforts by joining a growing group of businesses producing microbe-based food as an alternative to plant and animal products. The company has identified a new microbe and is currently developing prototype products with Mattson, a company that specializes in food development. Jennifer is the CEO of LanzaTech, a carbon recycling company known for transforming waste carbon into sustainable raw materials for everyday products.
🤖Teaching AI to Catch Its Own Mistakes….. Setting up a well-instrumented eval-layer for LLMs can feel like solving a puzzle where you need evaluations before launch but may not yet know what to measure. In his latest blog, Claremont grad Sahil Sinha (CMC ‘20) offers insights on how creating evaluators from datasets, instead of guessing evaluation criteria, can help teams establish a strong foundation for their evaluation process. Sahil is the co-founder of lytix ai, a YC-backed startup focused on helping developers build applications powered by LLMs.
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