Do College Rankings Really Matter?

<p>yeah id def have to see those findings before i give them any merit......but you guys have made some very valid points...so far a very solid thread</p>

<p>College rankings in US News, Gourman Report, and so on are based on much more than prestige. They are based on various indicators of quality. Prestige itself is a valid indicator of quality because universities and colleges acquire prestige by being associated over a long period of time with excellent students, excellent faculty, excellent educational experience. Prestige is important because it is generally based on quality factors that are real and important. Prestige says something about the kinds of students and faculty with whom you will be spending four years. It says something about the level of intellectual discourse. It says something about the effective teaching. It says something about culture. These things matter.</p>

<p>The US NEWS and such are a good way to group the colleges into 'tiers.' Like the top 30 would be tier 1, etc.</p>

<p>I think once you get into college, you'll understand that the nitpick discussions on rankings that often thrown around here are immature and useless. Part of the reason is that colleges are too complex to be summarized in a simple ranking.</p>

<p>Aurelius-
Colleges are complex but prospective students need something objective on which to base their decision. After all, they are going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars. You don't want to be in the dark about this. Consumer Reports has an Auto Issue every April to help consumers choose cars. Why not something similar for colleges (on which you spend far more money)? </p>

<p>The objective rankings are very important for consumers. Without them, you are more or less at the mercy of the college marketing departments and hearsay. It would be very difficult for prospective students and their families to make an informed decision without the rankings.</p>

<p>I am not saying the rankings should be the only basis for the decision. And, I am not saying they should be treated like the ultimate authority. They are a very good starting point.</p>

<p>"Consumer Reports has an Auto Issue every April to help consumers choose cars. Why not something similar for colleges (on which you spend far more money)? "</p>

<p>There is a major difference between Consumer Reports and college rankings (like USNWR): When Consumer Reports rates products, they actually test and evaluate each of them. USNWR, on the other hand, does nothing remotely close. They use various measures that are correlated to academic quality; however, they do not control for anything that may skew these measures. These measuures also rarely differentiate the schools much--the difference between two schools' overall scores is often indistinguishable. The only evaluation that actually done in most of these rankings is the peer evaluation, which provides an extremely incomplete picture. </p>

<p>If would be all for something that helped students make such a large decision similar to Consumer Reports; however, I don't think rankings are it. Some of the rankings provide students with an extremely skewed picture of the college world (as often exhibited on these very boards) and I think that these rankings also do their fair share of misinforming students. On the ranking of top accounting schools, for instance, USNWR lists MIT's business school somewhere in the top 30, despite the fact that MIT doesn't offer any non-introductory accounting courses, which might not be a big deal if it weren't now legally required that CPAs have an accounting education.</p>

<p>I don't think that the answer lies in a ranking so much as a more evaluative approach. Students really need to look for which school fits them better (in terms of academic rigor, culture, etc.) rather than trying to see how high they can get on the USNWR ladder.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Wake Forest (#32) and UNC - Chapel Hill (#27)?

[/quote]

Wake is tied with UNCH actually :)</p>

<p>"After all, they are going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars. "</p>

<p>Hey, how come they got a discount?</p>

<p>No, they don't. Certainly not at the level of exact numerical rankings. Nobody knows or cares what those are.</p>

<p>I would suggest that the rankings are a rough guide, but not an end-all under any circumstances. In many instances they are certainly suspect and in fact are probably harmful and lead to the establishment of a pack mentality.</p>

<p>From a read of many posts on this board it would appear that many seeking information hold them as Gospel. This is tragic and wrong.</p>

<p>Rating services sell a lot of magazines and subscriptions, however. The more controversy they can generate the more such items they will sell...which will lead to the services taking greater liberties with facts, just beacuse it increases sales. Whose ox was gored this year? Yours, mine or the folks in the other state? </p>

<p>Too much schadenfreude. It's become too much like sports...We're number 1 and you suck! No matter what, you and your school sucks! This has gone too far, and ratings services have contributed to it.</p>

<p>Ratings gloss right on over the enormous efforts of thousands in hundreds of universities. But - ratings are easy and scalable to apply; they give the uninformed and ignorant a handle with which to grasp astonishing accomplishments and complexity they could never comprehend in real life.</p>

<p>Princeton Review tends to be very weighed down with prestige. Prestige matters in certain professions. But, prestige is far from an indicator of a school's academic quality.</p>

<p>I agree with most of the posters here that in many cases, perhaps most cases, prestige and rankings don't really matter.</p>

<p>However, there is one field where prestige and rankings matter a LOT, and I mean A LOT - and that is academia itself. If there is one industry that is truly obsessed with rankings and prestige, it has to be academia. If you are trying to become an tenured professor, then where you went to school (and especially where you got your doctorate) matters a lot. For better or worse, you will always be tagged as the guy who studied from School X, and that's something that will follow your CV forever. Now obviously, it isn't deterministic. Yet the fact is, the vast majority of tenured profs at the top schools have themselves studied at the very top schools. For example, there are very few engineering profs at MIT who came from a no-name engineering school There are very few law professors at Yale Law who came from a no-name law school or other grad-school (for those law profs who didn't go to law school but instead got PhD's or some other degree). Part of it has to do with simple selectivity (in that the best schools tend to have the best students who will tend to become the best profs), but another part of it is the simple political nature and incestuousness of academia.</p>

<p>This creep to elitism is unhealthy, in my opinion for our Republic. </p>

<p>I liken it to the military in WWII. Prior to WWII the military officer corps was staffed mostly with the dedicated few who sought the military as a career. Consider these the 'elite'. (Especially after the poor economy of the 1930s, let's assume these officers were the best and brightest - not to mention politically connected - that made it through the existing military screening process).</p>

<p>After the general mobilization the military took a huge cross-section of society - as officers, non-comissioned officers and foot soldiers. All were sorted, eventually, by merit (leadership, commitment, intelligence, etc)into the ranks. The elite began to lose influence as their political power was diluted by this influx of the great unwashed (from the perspective of the elite).</p>

<p>Despite this loss, the military won huge gains, increment by increment, on the field due mostly to the non-coms and lower ranking officers who made it all happen - and who were, in the main, not the elite or the not-elite.</p>

<p>After the war and the demobilization, these now experienced and trained, yet not-elite soldiers went back into society and began to go into higher education and work. Society benefited greatly in all sorts of ways. The military elite, having now lost some authority, now had to compete with the ranks. Their political infuence diminished, I suggest society performed more successfully.</p>

<p>Just a muse here on Memorial Day.</p>

<p>
[quote]
If there is one industry that is truly obsessed with rankings and prestige, it has to be academia.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>This is generally true, and for legal academia, there's absolutely no question about it. But for academia in general, I think that who you study with can matter as much as where you went. A Ph.D. from George Mason isn't inherently prestigious, but if the degree is in econ and your advisor was James Buchanan or Vernon Smith, it will be more impressive than a Ph.D. from Harvard or Princeton where your advisor was a less-distinguished assistant professor. It's also much more of an individualized application process than law school.</p>

<p>parent2noles, I have no idea what you're even trying to suggest. Students are already "sorted by merit" in high school and through standardized tests.</p>

<p>In twenty years, having a degree from a well known school will give some comfort during casual conversation,but will be less important than personal accomplishments. Five years from now, it might impact what graduate or professional school you get into, once again, depending on your accomplishments as an undergrad. Remember every year some Havard grad fails to get accepted at Harvard Law..and some one from some state school gets in...so the advantage of rank can be overcome by effort.</p>

<p>For application purposes. Rankings reflect a value system. It would be rare if your individual values are identical to the originator of any given ranking system ..you need to use the list or lists to give guidance not finality to your decision. Class size might be important to you...so you might look at the maximum class sizes as important...but depending on the major your particular classes at a school may never approach the maximum or even average class size.</p>

<p>Know thyself and to thy own self be true. Where will you be most comfortable and best challenged? I would use rankings to create my mega list and then I would reduce it according to my "fit" criteria and finally by using their graduate placement profiles...How many (or percentage) of each schools graduates got into the career or graduate school of my desire.</p>

<p>Good Luck</p>

<p>there was an article in the hartford courant today (i cant find it online), and it was saying that college grads class of 06 are in the best job market in years. they ranked the most important criteria in hiring potential candidates (from talking with numerous recruiters at prestigious Fortune 500 companies).</p>

<ol>
<li>Experience</li>
<li>Interview</li>
<li>GPA</li>
<li>Where you did your undergrad</li>
</ol>

<p>I am suggesting that the 'elite' are selected by more than just academic merit. For example, being able to game the system through close association or being politically connected in one sense or another to the Ivy league.</p>

<p>I do like Mr. B's analysis, though.</p>

<p>
[quote]
there was an article in the hartford courant today (i cant find it online), and it was saying that college grads class of 06 are in the best job market in years. they ranked the most important criteria in hiring potential candidates (from talking with numerous recruiters at prestigious Fortune 500 companies).</p>

<ol>
<li>Experience</li>
<li>Interview</li>
<li>GPA</li>
<li>Where you did your undergrad

[/quote]
</li>
</ol>

<p>I would point out that a lot of the Fortune 500 isn't particularly prestigious. Fortune 500 is a simple measure of revenue. Just because a company has a lot of revenue doesn't necessarily mean that you want to work there. General Motors, for example, is a huge company, #3 on the Fortune 500 list. Yet I don't know many of the top college graduates who really want to work for GM right now, considering all of GM's recent financial difficulties, including laying off thousands of people and slashing salaries and benefits left and right. There is a significant chance that GM may have to file for bankruptcy in the next 5 years. In fact, many of the best people at GM are looking to get out of GM to find something more financially stable and more invigorating (it's pretty demoralizing to work at a place where everybody is scared of being laid off and you may have already seen some of your friends get laid off). Or take Delphi as an example. Delphi is one of GM's largest parts suppliers. Delphi is in the Fortune 500. Yet Delphi filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. Does anybody really want to work for a company that is in bankruptcy? </p>

<p>I would also point out that while I agree that traditional employers care far more about your experience than about where you went to school that much, often times the most prestigious and 'sexiest' employers care a lot. For example, consider the hiring practices of Google:</p>

<p>"For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon--America's top engineering schools--even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. "If you've been at Cisco for 20 years, they don't want you," says an employee. "</p>

<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The same could be said for the elite consulting and banking firms. Having years of solid experience is probably not as likely to get you a job offer at, say, Goldman Sachs as going to Harvard would. That's because these kinds of firms only recruit at certain places and at certain times in your career. They hire right after undergrad, and they also hire right after graduate school (especially after business school). But if you've missed the boat both of these times, then it's very difficult to get in later. </p>

<p>Don't get me wrong. I agree that for most jobs and most positions, having a prestigious degree doesn't really matter. But if you are gunning for certain industries, such as academia, such as management consulting, such as investment banking, such as highly elite tech companies like Google, then prestige matters a lot.</p>

<p>Interesting information, sakky, and I would say accurate, based on my own professional experience.</p>

<p>I agree with your view, despite my earlier remarks. Even at my alma mater, USNWR second-tier rated Florida State, the administration insists (so I am told) on an Ivy League pedigree to even be hired in a tenure-track slot. Then, despite that credit on your CV, I understand the pressure to publish is enormous. 'Publish or perish' I believe is the phrase.</p>

<p>Academia can be pretty rough.</p>

<p>I disagree that academia is the only place prestige matters. In ELITE business jobs (the most coveted by top grads) the top 10 schools outshine the others considerably. To illustrate this point, Look at where UVA McIntire sends its grads (top 5 business, UVA top 20 overall), then compare this to Dartmouth or Duke. UVA will send most of its grads to the second tier firms (PWC, Accenture, etc) while the Ivies will send many more to the elite firms. Even though places like Williams, Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, Columbia, etc don;t have business schools their graduates have much better chances at top jobs because the name matters bottom line. And if UVA is disadvantaged, this accelerates significantly as the prestige goes down. Sure, there are Maryland grads at Goldman sachs, but I bet the number of Duke grads is ten times that number (and duke is a much smaller school). That isn't to say you NEED to work at Goldman, but if you want the opportunity you'd be much better off going to Duke, Dartmouth, etc.</p>

<p>Even outside of these areas where you went to undergrad seems to matter, its an immediate stamp of approval - people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. I've seen this happen personally numerous times. Its like showing up to an interview in a nice suit with polished shoes. Sure its not required at all to get the job, but it sure helps alot.</p>