One reason….Because this is not true:
2 Likes
Yes, and more broadly, rankings are (or should be) relative to each applicant. What’s #1, #2, #3, etc should depend on what major one wants to pursue, where the college is located, and other preferences an applicant may have.
This may work with some kids, but where I live it’s very common to hear the “top kids” say they want to apply to all the T10s and HYPSM. That tells me they don’t really know what they’re looking for other than prestige and I wouldn’t use their application shortlists to determine school rankings or fit.
That should depend on what the student wants to pursue. If more of a humanities kid, Yale may be more attractive but Columbia’s Fu School should be a higher pick for an engineering student. Similarly if a student is interested in mechanical engineering then none of the Ivies would be a top 10 choice.
4 Likes
Early Decision has its roots in the little ivies, and yes, from the start, it was because one group of colleges thought it was the only way to even the proverbial playing field:
Today’s ED programs are relics of an entirely different era in academic history—actually, two eras. The first rough precursors of today’s early system appeared in the 1950s, when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton applied what was known as the ABC system. Their admissions officers would visit Exeter, Groton, Andover, and the other traditional feeder schools. They would chat with students, talk with counselors, and look at transcripts, and then issue advisory A, B, or C ratings to the students. A was a likely admission, B was possible, C was unlikely. “It was a system that gave students from certain backgrounds a lot of access,” Karl Furstenberg says. “It reflected the privileged relationships that existed.”
By the late 1950s smaller New England colleges had come up with the first early-decision plans, as a way to make inroads with these same students. Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, and Williams, allied at the time as “the Pentagonals,” offered what has become the familiar bargain: better odds on admission in return for a binding commitment to attend. “What’s interesting is that from the start competitive considerations among colleges seem to have been the driving force,” Karl Furstenberg, of Dartmouth, says. Soon after, other colleges began to adopt early decision.
The Early-Decision Racket - The Atlantic
4 Likes
USNWR is, IMO, given a very inflated sense of importance among members of the public. We have all seen many posts on this site in which someone simply says “XYZ College is #12 on USNWR” as if that’s their number one criteria.
Rankings are in the eye of the beholder, and for a lot of people, USNWR rankings are overly important. As I said a long time ago, I personally like any rankings list that puts my kids’ colleges as high as possible.
12 Likes
In my experience very few people fully recognize that the rankings are merely a business product designed to keep an otherwise defunct publication afloat. Far too often applicants (and their parents) think of the USNWR rankings as an objective, unbiased and carefully thought out list of schools and subsequently place far too much weight on it.
As an example: last year one of my friend’s son was applying for CS and he asked me to help review his application list. I noticed his list was too reach heavy and he had UVa on his list but not our state school Rutgers. I asked him why and his response was “Rutgers isn’t all that good. They’re like #37 for computer science”. 
He had included UVa because at #31 it was “much better for CS” in his view.
I had to point out that a) #37 was pretty darned good given that there are literally thousands of schools offering CS degrees in this country and b) 6 places higher on a list put together by a magazine isn’t all that meaningful.
That’s just one example of how much weight kids place on USNWR rankings.
10 Likes
Not sure this is true. Collectively those of us here, or likely in our immediate peers groups, are not a representative sample. We’re all a far more informed than average self selected group. And nothing else in the world suggests the average consumer is well informed about much of anything. Not sure why this would be any different. The bottom line is USNWR mostly sustains itself as a business from this ranking and colleges believe students and parents care enough about it to go to great lengths to perform well in the ranking, all suggesting a lot of people do value it and likely don’t appreciate its shortcomings.
6 Likes
Ranking is a starting point. This year we had a hard decision between madison and Rutgers for CS. Madison had some negatives going for it to offset the much better regard that industry has for it and we ended up picking Rutgers. I am guessing most people would use rankings in this manner
deleted by poster.
Cornell has the tenth-ranked undergrad mechanical engineering program per USNWR 
2 Likes
And that’s certainly fine.
That’s where I disagree. I think for too many people the rankings are the be all end all of college search.
9 Likes
Why do you think both have to be mutually exclusive? Best products are the ones that help their consumers.
If USNWR was actually to become helpful for users was if it allowed people to rank the categories as they deemed important, and then used its database to give families their customized rankings based on their preferences. Perhaps the premium/subscription version of USNWR does this, but I doubt it. But having a great deal of data aggregated, including some reputational factors (which are important to many), all in one place could be useful to families as it could save a great deal of time and help them to narrow their search (for instance, if they put geographic limits on their search/rankings).
3 Likes
I didn’t say that.
Yes, of course. And there are plenty of companies that produce valuable products for their customers. USNWR isn’t one of them, in my opinion.
The proliferation of products like USNWR rankings shows that there’s a demand for such products. However, if USNWR (or others like it) wants to help consumers, it should just provide a calculator so that consumers can select the criteria they deem important and specify their own weights for each of these criteria to produce their own lists/rankings. Instead, USNWR believes, correctly I might add, that the DIY product wouldn’t be a financial success because most consumers prefer the simplicity of a ranked list of colleges over the DIY approach.
2 Likes
The WSJ rankings allow you to reset your personal weightings of their primary categories: Outcomes, Resources, Engagement and Environment. The default weightings are 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, respectively. Explore the Full WSJ/THE 2022 College Rankings List - WSJ
Ranking services that dig into costs, net price after financial aid (and generosity of FA), and outcomes (job and grad school placement and starting salaries, preferably by major) provide valuable information in one place that is hard to collect among a large number of colleges. For the consumer, having an idea of the likely range of outcomes paired with the net cost of attendance, IMO is much more important than a ranking system driven primarily by the attributes of the applicants/students and resources of the university when it is not clear who the resources benefit.
3 Likes
I have seen numerous sites try this and they are totally awful and useless. I’ve not spent much time figuring out why that is, but they do’t generate meaning results IMO. I’m not suggesting it isn’t a good idea, just that the execution so far has proven tricky. I suspect many people would have little clue how to effectively weight their criteria too.
2 Likes
For many students, the most important ranking or fit factor is net price of attendance.
2 Likes
How common is it for NJ students to move Rutgers significantly downward in their preferences, compared to what it would be using their stated preference factors?
Many outcomes are heavily influenced by major, more so than college in many cases.
There used to be a site that would let you put in financial information and then try to run colleges’ net price calculators and web scrape the results to make easier comparisons for a given student / family financial situation. However, it was slow, and colleges probably did not like it. But something like that would be much more useful to individual students and families than the general financial aid information that is available for comparison.
2 Likes
Rutgers is 30 minutes from us. Neither of my first two kids applied. Youngest one probably will as a safety. No question it would be a great economic deal comparatively. Older kids were significantly turned off by our tour, which occurs almost entirely in a bus. The college is five separate mini-campuses that require busing to get between, with two of the campuses on the other side of a highway from the others. Only one of them looks like a classic campus. One of them is in a not great urban area of New Brunswick. Probably didn’t help that the tour guide only seemed interested in sports and frats and couldn’t answer any questions about academics. Some of the individual programs at Rutgers are amazing and its a great school, but the overall impression wasn’t strong.
That said, Rutgers probably ends up with more students from our HS than any other single college, so it still attracts a strong share of locals. My son had many friends go there and they all seemed good with it in the end. I know several locals in my community who are professors. One turned down an offer from Stanford.
It’s disappointing that a state with as strong an overall student population as New Jersey doesn’t have a state college system as strong as Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, etc.
3 Likes