So for the month of April, I’m excited to introduce an event that helps students with their decisions and pit top colleges against each other in a lighthearted challenge. We’re calling it the School Favorites Showdown and it’s loosely based on basketballtournaments you might have heard of.
Where would you go if you had a choice between Texas A&M and Northwestern? What factors separate Penn State and the University of Washington? Does Duke have an edge over USC or the other way around? Come to discuss the match-up of the day and pick your favorite.
Here’s how it works:
We’ve selected the 32 most active school categories on College Confidential. Then we paired off those schools into 16 match-ups. So the most active category (Texas A&M) goes up against #32 (Northwestern).
For the next 16 days, we’ll post a new thread highlighting two paired schools.
Please help students considering one (or both!) schools in those threads.
At any time you can vote on schools by using the favorite or by updating your status. (For more information, please see: How to share your admissions results.)
On April 21, when all 16 pairs have been discussed, we’ll add up all the updated status and favorites for each school and announce a which will move on to the round of 16.
Then we’ll repeat the process until we have one school standing. (This will be mid-May, so most students will have already made their decision. It should still be fun, though!)
Frequently Asked Questions
How will winners be selected?
At the end of each round, we’ll add up all the status updates and favorites that have come in for each school. If you applied and got your decision, please enter that decision. If you didn’t apply, vote for your favorite by using the icon on the school:
Do I need to vote again in the second round?
Nope! We’ll carry votes forward from one round to the next. If you want to add a favorite to a school you hadn’t voted for last time, you may, of course. But once you’ve voted for a school, that vote (whether a status update or favorite) carries through to the end of the tournament.
How do I vote if I already entered my status?
You can update your status. If you have only favorited a school in the past, you can update your acceptance status.
With due respect, this seems a bit gimmicky. Isn’t the beauty of CC that we get to take a student-centered approach to helping individuals figure out what fits best for them? There are already more than enough sources of generalized “which school is better” conventional wisdom.
I guess it will be interesting to see whether these “results” ever differ from what USNews has already told us.
Well, I don’t think they have Texas A&M at the top of their list.
It would be a mistake to think of the result as having anything to do with which school is best. Instead we’re looking to have a bit of fun with semi-random comparisons between schools. And yes, it is gimmicky.
But I dispute that this isn’t student-centered. The “winner” of each match-up is the school that has the most status updates and favorites. We anticipate most of these votes will come from students and their parents. A few will come from people in the community who have a connection to a school. It’s more or less a popularity contest.
I’m hoping the discussions will be of interest to students too. Hypothetically, how would a student decide between Texas A&M and Northwestern? They have obvious climate and other location-specific differences. But what about academics? Or social life? Or cost? Sports? Even something as simple as the layout of the dorms could be a deciding factor for some students.
In summary, this contest is primarily intended to be lighthearted fun and if it produces something valuable along the way, so much the better.
This is just for fun because march madness just ended… And I’m pretty sure it’s based off the activity of the schools on CC because the Texas A&M threads are massive (Gig 'Em!). It’s based off voting for your school lol it’s not meant to be a ranking for what college is better.
I think it would great to have another 32 with most active SLACs. Give the smaller guys a chance to shine in a way that would be searchable and different from what already exists on the site. Guess it could be considered the NIT?
I agree! For the moment, we are trying an experiment to see how this format works. Using the schools that are already getting a lot of activity helps us evaluate. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to shine some light on other schools too!
One thing I was thinking was to share some stats on school that aren’t in the 32 we picked at the end of each round. The most favorites SLACs would be an interesting list, I bet.
It probably feels like a popularity contest because it is.
I’m not sure what you don’t like about them, but since I’m not a fan either, I can guess:
They tend to be uninteresting because we usually know what’s popular without having the vote.
They tend to be superficial.
They tend to result in a one-size-fits-all outcome.
If you take School Favorites Showdown 2023 seriously, it has all of these problems (and more!).
So why are we doing it? Well, there are a few reasons. One that I’ve mentioned a few times is I think there could be interesting discussions about these hypothetical match-ups. That hasn’t happened (yet?) but I’m not discouraged. Why? Because I have a few other reasons for doing this:
There’s always a large drop-off in CC participation after March because students think of us as the place to find out about regular decision announcements. We’d like to find ways to sustain interest throughout the college selection process because we think the forums are a great resource year-round.
At a previous job we had an annual event around winter break. Due to the nature of that community, people stopped using the site during the winter. That’s not a problem in itself, but it cause an unnaturally inactive vibe for the month of December. This sort of ritual fosters community health and is a source of “solemn frivolity”, to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche. I figured we could do something similar for our low season.
On less philosophical ground, we want to encourage people to enter their admission status and favorite schools. We’re working on making that part of the site more useful for students who are already stressed out by finishing high school and applying to colleges. I don’t want to go into to much detail before we know what’s in the works, but I’d love to offer students individualized information for the schools they are interested in. The Regular Decision calendar helped thousands of people track those announcements, so it’s something we might be able to build on.
Ultimately this is an experiment. It’s relatively easy to try out and we can make adjustments as we go. I’m hoping we can find a way to make this is a fun event people can look forward to each year. But if we can’t, that’s ok too. We’ll try something else.
I’m not sure which view you are looking at. I don’t think we are doing anything particularly unusual with these threads. (I also resent the spam label, but I’ll let it pass.)
In any case, you can unpin them for yourself at the bottom of the thread:
@DigitalDad, that view is temporary, as I just created the threads (that’s why you see them appear in the Latest Posts listing). They are not pinned globally. Each thread is just pinned in the dedicated school forum.
or by updating your status. (For more information, please see: How to share your admissions results.)
