Colleges Rebel Against U.S. News Rankings

<p>I know several Ivy League grads that are out of work or severely unemployed. And several people who went to “no name” schools who are very successful and well off</p>

<p>IMO where you get your undergrad degree means very little. What matters is the experience, the work you put into it, and your work ethic post-grad. </p>

<p>I’ve done 100’s of interviews with applicants over the years. Unless it is a first job (entry level) I don’t recall ever asking anyone what school they went to. The degree was just a box to be checked. What matters is what they had done with it. </p>

<p>This whole ranking and prestige issue seems to matter the most to parents living through their children’s accomplishments to validate themselves. And to be able to brag to their friends.</p>

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<p>Highly regarded liberal arts college in Oregon; most comparable schools are U of Chicago and Swarthmore.</p>

<p>Anyway, let the masses be impressed by chasing the same set of schools. It’s far more elite and prestigious to have the self-confidence to choose a different path. My very favorite post on CC, ever, was by bclintonk after his D had gotten into Haverford and it elicited “huh?” from his neighbors in Minnesota. She calmly explained that it was a highly regarded LAC in Pennsylvania and that they’d never heard of it. * Tant pis pour vous. * It’s not necessary for average-schmoe people to have heard of it. The quiet satisfaction of knowing that you’re going someplace that’s excellent even if no one recognizes your sweatshirt is something.</p>

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<p>Surely you jest. There are whole categories of stories for which the Huffington Post is entirely unreliable and unprofessional. </p>

<p>[Science-Based</a> Medicine Pseudoscience In Medical News at the Huffington Post](<a href=“Pseudoscience In Medical News at the Huffington Post | Science-Based Medicine”>Pseudoscience In Medical News at the Huffington Post | Science-Based Medicine)</p>

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<p>Quoted for truth. </p>

<p>Another CC participant shared this link once: </p>

<p>[Harvard</a> Number One University in Eyes of Public](<a href=“http://www.gallup.com/poll/9109/Harvard-Number-One-University-Eyes-Public.aspx]Harvard”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public) </p>

<p>Whether any magazine publishes on the issue of college comparisons or not, members of the general public will have perceptions (true or false) about which colleges are especially good. You can say what you will about your own opinions, but your neighbor just might form differing opinions.</p>

<p>starbright,
I’m pretty sure that you and I inhabit different philosophical camps on a lot of things, including the way that many colleges and faculties treat their undergrads, but I’m not sure how my suggestion of letting the consumer figure it out gets extended to claims about Washington and lobbyists and healthcare and……I think that’s a pretty big stretch. </p>

<p>One thing we can probably agree on is that there is no foolproof, perfect system for college search, but I’m in the camp that says gives the consumer access to lots of information and let him/her use it if he/she wants to. Compare this to buying a new car (which is what I had in mind in my earlier post). I’m no mechanic, but I can read magazines or talk to friends or visit dealerships or…and get some sense of which cars make the most sense for my needs. Not sure why the college search process should be so different. </p>

<p>USNWR is just one of the sources that consumers can use and the data that it provides can often be very helpful and very enlightening. Should it be the sole source? Of course not. Should it be the dominant source? No. Should small differences in ranking be interpreted by consumers to mean anything? No (on this one I would guess we might agree as I would rank in tiers of 10-15 schools). Should colleges act to improve their rankings according to the published methodology? That’s their business prerogative, but don’t leaders have a higher responsibility to develop and build a quality product? And shouldn’t they have the integrity to provide accurate numbers? I’ll leave it up to them to decide on how to position and market their school, but I would also greatly penalize them for any improper manipulation. </p>

<p>Anyway, I surely wish that there were an outside opinion being included in USNWR’s results. As most kids are heading into the for-profit world after they graduate, the most valuable information would be how a college’s students are viewed by employers. Are they smart? Are they well-prepared? Are they critical thinkers? Are they adaptable? Can they interpret and then act? Can they mesh with others? How do the students at ABC College compare to XYZ University? And on and on and on. That is what employers care about and what most career-minded students care about. Instead, we get stupidity like PA scores. The next employer that I meet who actually cares about PA scores (if they even know what it is) will be the first. And yet these corrupt responses grossly distort the rankings and mislead students. If you or anyone else wants to hate on USNWR and sling some arrows in its direction, then PA scoring should be the bullseye.</p>

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<p>And even then - the school that’s known for the arts and sending kids to Broadway and Hollywood and producing screenplay writers and musicians and so forth is going to look totally different from the school that sends everyone to the same 5 jobs on Wall Street. And, of course, entrepreneurialship wouldn’t be well-measured. I myself would hate to see the same old 5 jobs that everyone on CC salivates over (mgt consulting, ibanking, etc.) being used as the sole source of evaluation of post-grad “success.”</p>

<p>I agree, Pizzagirl. The problem with using outcomes as objective measurements of quality is that not everyone wants the same outcomes. Outcomes are certainly a useful thing to know about and consider, but each student will consider them from a unique perspective. </p>

<p>In this as in other respects, saying “which college is better, X or Y?” is like saying, “who would make a better girlfriend, Julie or Jenny?” There is no generic answer, only individual ones.</p>

<p>Thank you, tokenadult. The HuffPost’s pro-quackery bias is repulsive. Every idiot celebrity who’s decided that vaccines are harmful gets a platform there. Ugh.</p>

<p>p’girl & night,
I don’t think we’re disagreeing as I’m not necessarily placing a value on the outcome data. My suggestion is less to creating a ranking based on this than it is to a desire for a datapoint that is highly relevant to many prospective college students. If you want to go into the theater, then this is part of what you’d learn thru the due diligence process. But if you want to go into i-banking, consulting, etc, you’d also learn this and which schools do a better job of placing into those industries. Some schools will do this on their own for select departments, eg undergrad b-schools, engineering schools, but as the large majority of students are usually in Arts & Sciences, providing such data about their relative success could do a lot to unmask the pretenders from the contenders.</p>

<p>I think the outcome thing is very tough. If the English majors at one college tend to go to law school, while those at another go into academia, which has a better outcome? It is a little more clear cut for something like musical theater.</p>

<p>Agree with you, DonnaL and tokenadult. HuffPo’s science coverage is awful.</p>

<p>No, hawkette, we’re not disagreeing at all :-).</p>

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<p>Which is why I roll my eyes at any thread which goes something like this (Yale chosen randomly): “School X sends more kids to Yale Law School than School Y. See? School X pwns School Y!” Uh, no, idiot, perhaps more students from School X wanted to go to law school in general, or Yale Law School in particular.</p>

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<p>This is good sounding logic on the surface. But look deeper and it gets really difficult.</p>

<p>If you are an employer, how do you create a criteria for evaluating the colleges. What kind of metric do you apply determine if one school produces adaptable students while another doesn’t produce adaptable students. What kind of metric do you use to evaluate the smartness of graduates?</p>

<p>An employer should treat schools fairly in an unbiased way. If you have a lot of graduates (my company) and accurate performance evaluations, you might be able to tie workplace performance to particular schools.</p>

<p>However, if you work at a small company, your pool of students from any one university will be small and it will be hard to draw any meaningful conclusions. If you don’t have accurate performance evalutions, it will be difficult to separate how the individual from the university education. Hire five lazy people from MIT and you might infer that all MIT graduates are lazy while this probably isn’t the case.</p>

<p>Pizzagirl,</p>

<p>What you are saying is exactly correct. The students who go to various schools are not randomized. (i.e., studnets considering going to law won’t be randomly enrolled in various universities. Those most likely to go in to law will go to undergrad programs that have strong pre-law programs.) </p>

<p>A person cannot do a good statistical analysis of non-randomized data.</p>

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<p>Well, and one “bad” person who flames out doesn’t reflect on a school. I had a U Chicago PhD who was brilliant but had zero people skills who worked for me. He flamed out. However, that doesn’t reflect on U Chicago. It reflects on him.</p>

<p>big,
I agree that it’s not as simple as I make it sound. Hiring is messy. You make mistakes. Things change…and so do people. But do enough of it or be exposed to enough of it and you get a sense of things and of schools. Stereotypes develop and while there are always going to be individual exceptions, there often is more than a kernel of truth underlying the stereotype. </p>

<p>Schools have personalities and so do their students who often adopt the same worldview as the institution. Go from school to school to school and it’s interesting to see this and consider how the students perspective is shaped by the community. This is not small stuff as it can extend to important things like work ethic or creativity or awareness of important trends or sense of entitlement or even ethics. You pick up on stuff and if you see it in the same place 3 or 4 or 5 times in a relatively short period of time, it’s a pattern that you need to be aware of.</p>

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<p>What you’re describing is very true. The problem is that what you are describing is a feeling or impression based on experience. If you work at a company that has a couple dozen hiring managers, there very likely may be a couple dozen different opinions. It’s highly unlikely that 50+ will all agree that University of Wisconsin graduates work well or that Yale graduates are lazy or that Caltech graduates are really smart.</p>

<p>A larger company has to develop a metric or a guideline to give to the hiring managers and that is really difficult. A good metric should be based on sound data which is hard to come by.</p>

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<p>Yes, but the pool of companies that will be hiring sufficient numbers from various schools to be able to even weigh in to such an analysis and compare School X to School Y will be a small pool – and they in turn will reflect the things that are important to big companies, which may or may not be what other employers are looking for. </p>

<p>I’m just not all that sure that Student A’s performance in the work world reflects upon the quality of the education he received at School B. I think so much of it reflects upon Student A’s work ethic, demeanor, ability to get along with others, etc. Put another way - it’s often said on CC that Smart Student A who gets into State Flagship and Elite School but chooses State Flagship for finances or other reasons will get as far as if he had gone to Elite School. Therefore, if he does go to Elite School and does well, how can Elite School be deemed “responsible” for his excellent performance in the work world? Elite School may have given him more opportunities – but he’s the one who took them.</p>

<p>To be honest, I personally don’t even put all that much stake in acceptance rates to law schools, med schools, etc. It’s the student who accomplishes those things, not the school.</p>

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<p>Heck no, why should they? Our little company ignores resumes from HYP bcos we know we can’t afford them. UCLA is a great research Uni, but 'SC generally produces more hand-on accounting types, as does Cal Poly SLO. OTOH, UCLA has top-notch engineers.</p>

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Huh? I probably have personally known over 50 hiring managers in my career, and I don’t think I know a single one (or a single honest one) who wouldn’t agree that Caltech graduates are really smart. You don’t get into Caltech, let alone graduate, unless you are really smart. Would they necessarily want to hire a Caltech grad over somebody else? Not necessarily, because being “smart” isn’t the only metric in hiring, or even the most important metric in my opinion.</p>

<p>And I went to UCSD, but even going there, I am smart enough to know you have to be pretty sharp to graduate from Caltech.</p>