Education: Meritorious Macalester

St. Paul's Macalester College is a Presbyterian-linked liberal arts school with 1,700 students, mostly from Minnesota. It has some pleasant distinctions: a 22-member bagpipe band in Macalester clan kilts, a 40-acre campus along swank Summit Avenue, where Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up. But none of this explains the school's greatest claim to fame. In number of National Merit Scholars, a status symbol among U.S. colleges, little Macalester is year after year among the top ten campuses in the nation.

Last week, as the National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced a record 1,050 winners, Macalester did it again. No fewer than 20...