<p>5</a> Reasons Why Every Single College Ranking Is a Pile of Crap - The Consumerist</p>
<p>Cool!..I agree with the article for the most part.</p>
<p>From the article: “Real experts – as opposed to people trying to sell magazines full of car ads – who look into this stuff have realized you can’t compare colleges in any meaningful way.”</p>
<p>So the U. of Bridgeport and Cleveland State are the equivalent of Harvard and Berkeley? I don’t think so. The issue isn’t whether one can compare - it’s just a matter of how one compares. And that’s clearly different for different people. The main problem with college rankings that I can is that they’re typically one-size-fits-all approaches to prioritizing.</p>
<p>I read somewhere on this thread that all schools should be in tiers of say 30 schools, and then every adjacent tier can be considered equal. I think its a great idea, because honestly yes, current rankings are crap</p>
<p>Zac Bissonnette greatly exaggerates the crapiness of the major college rankings.</p>
<p>Claim: “College rankings are often based on opinion and not actual data.”
Reality: 75% of the USNWR score is based on data, 25% on opinion. We can debate whether the opinions of college administrators and high school guidance counselors are fully informed and unbiased (I for one don’t believe they are). Still, it’s not as though they picked 1000 people randomly off the streets. In criticizing the US News ranking methodology, Bissonnette singles out the magazine’s list of the schools with the strongest “commitment to undergraduate teaching”. However, this listing is not even factored into the scores.</p>
<p>Some other college rankings (such as stateuniversity.com, Washington Monthly) are completely data-driven. Their results are indeed different than the US News results. Their criteria are different. Nevertheless there is considerable overlap at the top of the lists. For example, most of the 25 national universities that Washington Monthly ranks highest for research are also among the USNWR top 25, even though the two rankings use different criteria. Even the much-maligned Forbes ranking generates a top-25 set with significant overlap. If different rankings, using different criteria, come up with very similar sets of 25 top schools out of many hundreds of possibilities, then it’s hard to argue they are all a complete crock.</p>
<p>In examining outcomes, Bissonnette focuses on the financial cost-benefit. This is certainly important to many families. I agree that too many people are taking on too much debt to pay for schools they cannot afford. However, the mission of selective universities is not exclusively to ratchet up alumni income. Universities are knowledge factories. Knowledge is worth a lot to employers, but it also has intrinsic value aside from its use value. It may be hard to measure the relative contribution of different universities to discovering and sharing knowledge. That does not mean that every institution does it equally well or that we cannot meaningfully compare their performance.</p>
<p>i completely agree with the article</p>
<p>Even someone as young and inexperienced as Zac should know that a sentence that contains words such as always or every is … rarely correct. </p>
<p>As the NACAC surveys indicate, most students in the United States apply to a small number of schools and usually end up attending schools their first or second choice. This confirms how small the application circle truly is. </p>
<p>Although his approach worked for him, the views of Zac B do reflect that rather provincial and geographically limited scope. As the result of his success, Zac tends to believe his view are the only that are worthy of an audience. </p>
<p>The article, just as his soon to be released book, is bound to appeal to an audience of could not care less, and leave the people who have accumulated a modicum of knowledge on the issue presented unimpressed. </p>
<p>AOL meet TMZ meet college admissions!</p>
<p>Gotta love these articulate, highly reasoned article headlines. This one comes from Zac Bissonnette, author of the upcoming book “Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents.”</p>
<p>[5</a> Reasons Why Every Single College Ranking Is a Pile of Crap - The Consumerist](<a href=“http://consumerist.com/2010/08/5-reasons-why-every-single-college-ranking-ever-published-is-a-pile-of-crap.html]5”>http://consumerist.com/2010/08/5-reasons-why-every-single-college-ranking-ever-published-is-a-pile-of-crap.html)</p>
<p>Haha quantnet.com had this article long before you guys xP</p>
<p>It’s an interesting article, at any rate. I do think that he majorly simplifies the issues - i.e. college rankings aren’t based solely on PA, and undergrad and graduate degree markets are vastly different. I agree with the overall message, though - go whereever’s best for you.</p>
<p>Although, could someone explain point #5 to me? I’m not sure I get what he’s trying to say.</p>
<p>He’s saying that it’s impossible to compare colleges anyway.</p>
<p>The article is pretty vanilla, IMO, but the comments are well worth reading!</p>
<p>1 Reason Why Every Single College Ranking Is a Pile of Crap
If the author started with reason #5, the others become moot. I don’t think I’ll be buying his book.</p>
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Good choice ;)</p>
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<p>That is probably the most meaningful part of the entire article. I think the rankings DO have SOME truth to them, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter which college you attend, but what you do with the education you learned - academically, socially, mentally, emotionally…etc. </p>
<p>Yea, I think that an MIT/Stanford or Ivy education is definitely going to be worth a lot more than many colleges, but I don’t think that it was the school that will ultimately decide the student’s fate in life, but who they are.</p>
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<p>A great thing to keep in mind. However, one could replace “not which college they attend” with any number of the big yet small decisions one makes. What neighborhood they grow up in, which high school they go to, what sport they decide to play, which starting job they take, the person they marry, whether they decide to move to NYC or LA. </p>
<p>Individually none of these things make or break a person. As an aggregate, though, they influence how you turn out very much. </p>
<p>While in some sense most colleges can’t be compared in a meaningful way for all students because the definition of success is different for all students, you can very much compare them across people with similar definitions of success. IMHO.</p>
<p>I would just point out that the college you attend, along with a lot of other things, becomes part of “who you are.”</p>
<p>I disagree slightly. I would say its a steaming pile of crap.</p>
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Anyone else think that someone who is portraying themselves as an “expert” in personal finance, would have a lot more credibility if they were majoring in something like, I don’t know, finance?</p>
<p>This article hits the right note. As a first year college student with high scores and grades, I have been spending the last six months explaining this to people and justifying why I did not attend the best USNWR ranked college that accepted me. What school you choose is a complex decision based on personal aspirations, financial considerations, personality, future trends, etc. I’m not saying Wright State in Dayton, Ohio, is anywhere close to Harvard, but it’s insulting to our intelligences to produce a list of colleges based on general excellence. </p>
<p>There are two more important reasons not to trust the ranking system.
- As education beyond a bachelors’ degree is become more and more common and important for success, college rankings based on “general excellence” become less valid. USWR rates colleges in a vacuum, based on the assumption that this is your only degree. Systems that look at how much you get paid after college can only look at those who went straight into the workforce. Its a very different story, though if you want to continue your education.</p>
<p>2) The rankings are took fickle. With the exception of some really excellent schools that are always at the top, USWR is full of “shooting stars”–colleges that for a while are lauded and reach the top 20, only to return to where they came from. In the world of education, its hard to believe that a college can jump 10 to 20 in two years. Since it takes four years to get a diploma, its worthless to use a ranking system where your school might fall by the time you graduate. In the end, all USNWR does is tell you what colleges their “experts” think are cool.</p>