<p>Some point yesterday, I was considering why some schools are considered "top" schools on CC while other schools, whose stats are better but who might not be as selective, are just "normal" schools.
So i came up with a thought experiment (it could be a real experiment, but I can't run it). What if the admins of CC one day decided that a random school from the alphabetical list of schools was a "top" school, and moved its forum to the "top schools subforum"? A school whose stats (excluding acceptance rate) would merit being put there, but that isn't there. The immediate effect would probably just be to invigorate the discussion on that school's forum, but what would the long-term effects be? Is CC popular enough that it would convince enough people to apply who wouldn't have otherwise to impact the acceptance rate enough to give it a boost in the USNWR rankings? Could CC actually turn a "good" school into a "top" school?
What do you think?</p>
<p>What school would you suggest?</p>
<p>No chance this would make an impact on overall perception. Based on ComScore metrics, CC gets on average 844K unique users per month from the U.S.(over the past year). That is ~0.3% of the US (on a worldwide basis CC gets about 1M unique users per month). Even if every CC users started “peddling” that specific school (which is unlikely as a certain % of users, in classic CC fashion, would not agree with that school being a “top school” for various reasons) it would be highly unlikely that they would be able to make a meaningful impact in changing the perception of a university.</p>
<p>there aren’t enough people reading this website for it to make that huge of an impact. ask the average person what ‘college confidential’ is, and they couldn’t tell you (whether they’re college-bound, college-educated, or not).</p>
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I wouldn’t (and purposely didn’t) because I’m biased.
Both good points, but remember that the people using CC are (generalization) usually the people applying to the top schools or the parents of people applying to the top schools. Even the top schools like Harvard “only” get about 35,000 apps per year (which is a lot for a school of its size, but might be unimpressive for a large school). For a similar size school that now gets about 15,000 apps per year, 850,000 unique views per month could make a difference even if only 1% of them translate into applications (and maybe even if only .1% of them translate into applications). It might also increase the yield of a school. Both of those translate into higher USNWR rankings, which could cause a snowball effect.</p>