First...throw out the rankings

Parents Forum
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<p>Sort of the anxious parent version of Shakepeare's take on lawyers. The rankings are magazine marketing campaigns which have the single primary objective of selling more magazines (or online subscriptions) by appealing to an over advertised exposed, designer label fixated group of ace consumers. The reason the rating criteria must be tinkered with annually, is the undelying data is too static to show any kind of reshuffling otherwise - and if the rankings didn't change somewhat from year to year, well, see the single primary objective above.</p>

<p>I'm still amused by the responses in this forum that go to great pains to try to distinquish between the quality attributes of schools that are indistinguishable. It's trying slicing pie with a sledge hammer. It's cliche, but the best school is the one at which your child will get the best education, meet the best friends, have the best transition into adulthood and find the best things to do with that adult life - or at least some reasonable facimile thereof. Leaders in virtually all walks of life come from such a broad assortment of colleges that it's ridiculous to conclude a substantial advantage accrues from some short list we cloud with the "prestigious" labels. In fact, if you want to optimize on some minimal set of variables, the choice of major probably has more an impact on post-college life than the school attended.</p>

<p>Okay, so without the rudder constructed by self serving editors, where do we turn. Well, it's not that hard - although having been through this process twice in the last several years it is exhausting. Although most 17 year olds don't know, or have difficulty articulating what they want, they are reasonably adept at recognizing what they don't want. </p>

<p>So, you have to visit and visit and just when you think you're off the road, visit some more. You have to do independent research, practice active listening and be a bit of a pain in the neck to the adcoms (I highly advice the latter be done out of earshot of your child - we embarrass them enough just by being there). </p>

<p>I know, you can't visit all the possible schools that could "fit" your kid. However, it only takes a little bit of homework to come up with a workable list (no fair peeking at the rankings). Most kids have some idea of what they think they want and where they might fit in. Although, I wouldn't initially narrow the list too much. Visit a big school, a LAC, something in an urban environment and one where you can throw a rock and hit a cow (although not advisable if you want to go back there). Find opportunities for your child to interact with the kids who were your child a year or two prior. The dining halls were our favorite places to get a feel for a school. If your kids are anything like mine, the research on academics will probably fall mostly to you. Go to the bookstore and look at textbooks. The science and math books will be highly correlated from school to school, but the English, history, political science, economics, etc. texts will tell a lot about the faculty and the quality of course offerings. Talk to professors. Review the syllabi (I was amused at a comment in an earlier thread that said something to the effect - one of the biggest surprises to kids attending prestigious schools is the difficulty of the math and science courses). This is someone who hasn't a clue what's really going on across the spectrum of higher education - but that's another subject, or at least tangential to this one.</p>

<p>Once you complete the initial survey, then it's time to focus down. Hopefully, at this point, your child is ready to do a reasonably serious self assessment. If not, remind him or her they either start to narrow the type of school they want or will be subjected to sharing enless hotel rooms with you for every free night of their foreseeable future. So, be it LAC, public university, urban, rural, Ivy (see I can do artificial labels too) - whatever, it's time to visit, visit and visit some more. That, and data collection. I was surprised at how much data schools are willing to share - if you are well enough informed to ask specific questions. Graduate school admittance success, internship support, faculty retention rates, number of Rhodes and Fullbright finalists, starting salaries by career field, average GRE scores, undergrad research opportunities, major geographic concentrations of alumni, financial aid, merit scholarship criteria, etc., etc., etc... whatever you think is remotely important to what your kid wants, and keep hounding them for information. I got a lot of it through email and off web pages.</p>

<p>Now, armed with spreadsheets worth of data, it's time to come up with a hot list and visit, visit and visit. At this point, you're hopefully comfortable with the list of finalists and you can leave the final selection process to your child. We got down to about a half dozen with each kid (although I sensed and was right with the eldest we were just going through the motions and the choice was already made). With the youngest, the final choice would have lost me a bet and was made after an overnight. However, what was common with both is they knew where they wanted to be, while they were physically there. So, hopefully you have an understanding employer and some frequent flier miles built up, because although my personal data set is two events - I'm convinced the process works.</p>

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<p>processedout, would you recommend visiting the summer before or in the fall of senior year? My s wants to visit colleges once school starts and that's what his father thinks, too, but my s has seen zero schools at this point in time.</p>

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<p>Even though it is not the most optimal time to visit, since S is going to be a senior in the fall, you should do the visits over the summer. If possible sit with him now and put together a list of what he is looking for in a school:</p>

<p>Size large research University, medium, small liberal arts college. </p>

<p>Location: Urban, Rural, Suburban. Is weather a factor, mountains, water etc. </p>

<p>Do you have constraints ? No Flying , no more than a 4 hour drive , etc.
Cut throat competitive or lots of warm fuzzies</p>

<p>Single sex or co-ed school</p>

<p>Is money going to be a deal breaker? Have this conversation now what you realistically can and are willing to pay for his education. Are you looking for schools that are generous with merit money or are you looking for schools that meet 100% of demonstrated need and is generous with scholarship grant aid (use one of the financial aid calculators to get an idea of your EFC)</p>

<p>Strong greek presence or no greeks?</p>

<p>Are sports important to him either as a particiant or a spectator?</p>

<p>Is he looking for a specific major or speciality school?</p>

<p>Is he looking to study abroad? Internships, etc.</p>

<p>These answers will help you put together your list.</p>

<p>Remember that once school begins, in NYC it starts after labor Day, you have a really short window between the start of school and the Nov 1 deadline if S wants to apply ED or EA. Some schools want their students to submit their rolling admission apps in oct.</p>

<p>In addition they are getting acclimated to their senior schedules, juggling classwork, getting recommendations together, working on applications , interviews etc. Use the summer as a weeding out process, and use the fall to schedule overnite visits at his top choices.</p>

<p>All the best</p>

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<p>Hey, P.O.:</p>

<p>To me, this statement seems like an absolute truth:</p>

<p>"However, what was common with both is they knew where they wanted to be, while they were physically there"</p>

<p>I am quite willing to drag my son to every college East of the Missippi, and a few west of there, if I could get him to go. He is a homebody, and busy taking a college course this summer at Johns Hopkins, so we'll see how many I can get him to go see.</p>

<p>My son hasn't expressed much positive or negative about any of the places we have been. At Carnegie Mellon (and, please, students, parents and Pittsburgh residents, dont take this as an insult in anyway) he said, "It smells bad here". When we were leaving Pittsburgh, he also said of CMU, "It seems kind of small". Nothing really positive, but he did say after we got home he wanted to apply there. </p>

<p>we are making our second visit to U of Florida next month, also visiting Tulane. I haven't yet gotten my son to see the value of seeing more schools, but I am working on it. Previously, we visited U of Miami, Flagler College, Princeton. I would also like him to see Case Western Reserve, Vanderbilt and possibly a couple more state schools. For my kid, I think it is going to be a larger college or university....but, I don't know yet.</p>

<p>If I were the student, I am sure I would know the right school when I saw it. And everybody around me would know it, too. :) However, my son is pretty non-commital, so maybe I won't get that kind of reaction from him.</p>

<p>Bottom line: Can other parents please comment about the reactions they get from their kids on these visits?</p>

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<p>Processedout - after all that, I see why you are "Processedout" :).</p>

<p>Gnusa - to visit or not to visit is almost as personal as what size school do I like. My daughter, who I would have thought would have enjoyed just seeing the different sized schools, took after her Dad in this - this was like shopping as sport to her = not fun. She knew what she wanted after the first 3 visits, and didn't see the sense in wasting time with other visits.
I insisted that she visit and overnight if at all possible at schools she was seriously considering for an ED application - I think she saw the value in that - it is essentially an irrevocable decision. Beyond that, I think it depends on the kid.
Perhaps you should just ask him - have we visited enough colleges of different sizes for you to know what size you like? Are you considering ED? Do you understand (this will have to be carefully worded) that selective smaller colleges will expect you to have shown interest?
If he's fairly set on bigger schools (and I would include Tulane and Vandy as "bigger"), then there is not a lot to be gained by visiting, and I wouldn't waste his attention span on more state schools - let him visit a friend after he gets in, if he is really interested - there is a difference in UGA and UF for sure, but who cares until you are actually making a decision.
The risk you run is that he will wake up in Dec and realize he should have been looking at LACs or Furman or in Maine - but chances are if he is non-committal he either truly doesn't care, or has plans you are not privy to, which will become apparent when he actually begins filling out those applications! The worst that can happen is that he realizes either after the deadlines or during freshman year that he wildly off base - going to UF when he should be at Flagler - that's what transfers are for, and he may be much more mature, and certain of what is right for him at that point.
Kids grow and change a lot during this process - more than you understand until after they are finished. Part of your job is to intervene at the points where doors are shut, or crossroads are looming - gentle reminders that this decision closes off these options, and that's OK, you, the student, just need to be aware of that. As long as his applications have some rhyme and reason, and he has safeties - you are doing OK.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
If I were the student, I am sure I would know the right school when I saw it. And everybody around me would know it, too. However, my son is pretty non-commital, so maybe I won't get that kind of reaction from him.</p>

<p>Bottom line: Can other parents please comment about the reactions they get from their kids on these visits?

[/quote]
gnu - there are many of us out there. My S has been in the "grunt" phase of communication for some long while now. He wasn't talkative on our visits (no surprise). He would have resisted wildly any sort of post-mortem quiz on our parts after each. BUT, we could tell quite a bit while out there. Some schools he didn't want to take the tour - cross that one off. Some schools (in his case, 4 as I recall) he wanted to buy the t-shirt. This was his personal (conscious or unconscious) signal of interest. At the one school he ended up choosing, he wanted to explore the city (of course, that was Tulane in New Orleans :D) and commented that he wished he could be back there without us style-crampers (or words to that effect). We kept all the various college guidebooks in the car (Princeton Review, etc) and he actually spent time thumbing through them, which he had virtually never done at home, so the wheels were turning even if he didn't share it with us. After a few visits, we would ask and he would answer(!), "So, which do you like best so far?" That list changed a bit over the course of our April and June visits, but there were always a couple of mainstays.</p>

<p>Fast forward: He emerged in early October from his lair, without any prompting on our part, to announce his top choice and his other possibles. So the trips were oh so valuable even if he wasn't doing what I would have done, which is talk-process-talk-process the whole way around.</p>

<p>One veteran poster (I forget who) had a great idea she used with her non-communicative S. I would have used it if I had read it before instead of after our visits. She made a rule - after tour/info session at each school, when back in the car, she would not start up the engine until S gave a one-liner of his impressions. She said they were cryptic but showed a lot of instinctive insight.</p>

<p>edit (after reading cangel's helpful post): gnu, at highly opportune times, S announced the "worthlessness" of these visits and how they were wasting his time. Opportune times being at the airport gate waiting to board the plane, etc. (He sounds awful, I know, but he's really not). Yet, he really did value the process and knows he would never have zeroed in on his first-choice school without the visits. So, while cangel has a definite point that more visits may not be necessary, I wouldn't necessarily decide that based on your S' expressed interest. Sometimes they do want us to steer and push them. Just mho.</p>

<p>PS - great post, processed out. A lot of good points.</p>

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<p>Processedout: I certainly agree that the hairsplitting that goes on in trying to rank colleges of extremely similar selectivity easily reaches the point of absurdity. However, completely disregarding the rankings is, I think, giving up something that can be very useful in developing a beginning working list. First of all, students need to ball-park where they can generally aim when starting to consider schools. A ranking list helps do that more easily than wading through the web or one of those giant books. Secondly, one of the wonderful things about college, as opposed to high school, is it allows students to be surrounded by like-minded kids in terms of the importance they place on academics and intellectual challenge. The rankings can give the student a good idea of the continuum, and they can then look into those schools that provide their comfort zone. So, my point is, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.</p>

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<p>Donemom,
I have to disagree with using a ranking list as a starting point. Most 17 year olds (and parents for that matter) are impressed by the top 10, start to lose interest when they hit the 30th school on a ranking and think that anything below 50 is useless. As a result, many kids end up with top-heavy lists because they START with reach schools. I personally believe it is better to start with schools that are potential safeties and matches and, once those have been identified, you can add a few reaches if desired. But that means reading rankings from the bottom up in most cases, not top down.</p>

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<p>The on-line version of USNWR lets you pick which column to sort by - so you can sort by SAT, or % in top 10% or 25% of HS class, and so on. That lets you look at a range of selectivies by, for example, SAT.</p>

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<p>There are soo many ways to come up with lists.... but a list for visits is almost the easiest to pull together. Pull out a map and a calendar.. also have the web available so you can go on line to see when the school you want to visit have tours and admissions sessions. Here is our actual timeline and school list that we visited. </p>

<p>For example, our first official visit to a college was summer btwn soph and junior year to Dartmouth and Middlebury. We went over a weekend and finished the trip by visiting the younger son at his camp. Then our child did a 4 wk summer program at Cambridge University in England. I wanted his first college sighting to be in the US. The next visit was to Colby and Bates, then a visit and interview with subject department of interest at Bowdoin that fall. XMAS of junior yr, he and his dad went down to Yale on the 20th of Dec if I remember correctly, I stayed home to continue playing Santa....wrapping and present gathering..... that spring we drove down to Boston College and Tufts cause Cal Tech was having a session in Boston that got us to make that journey. The summer btwn junior and senior year he was going to a 4 wk pgm at Stanford, so we planned a week prior to visit 6 schools in California. We saw Berkeley, UCSB, UCLA, Cal Tech, Pomona and Stanford. (We also visited Hearst Castle, Muir Woods, Universal Studios etc, some fun along the way.) UCLA lets you make reservations for their tours on-line. I believe you can schedule your Pomona interview on-line also. </p>

<p>Once back east we went to MIT over Labor Day wkend....it was actually arrival day for freshman, the class of '07....so all these kids were walking around with 007 badges....very fun......esp at MIT....
and went to UNH on the way home.....</p>

<p>We never visited Univ of Chicago... though he always considered it a great option.....</p>

<p>Up here in the northeast, a lot of folks in New England consider schools like Colgate and Hamilton which are serious drives.... I pitched Univ of Chicago cause it is a 2 hr flight.....same with Notre Dame....2 hr flight and 1.5 hr by car is a lot less than 8 or 9 hrs to Hamilton.... for some kids they won't consider a plane ride at all. </p>

<p>Another example worth mentioning is that Miami of Ohio is about an hour from Cincinnati airport....which is a big Delta hub and lots of Delta flights out of New England to Cincinnati......</p>

<p>South was never an option cause skiing was important...not recruited ski athlete, but son wanted to be able to ski ie club level or leisurely....</p>

<p>So, the net is to plan some routes....look at everything within distance....and maybe even take a trip via plane to another region... I will alwys treasure the CA trip.....even tho only 1 of 6 made final app list.... </p>

<p>hope this is helpful.....not trying to "showoff" where we visited.... more just sharing specific visit timelines......</p>

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<p>Carolyn...what you describe still constitutes a misuse of the tool rankings provide, which is unfortunate. I know that when people have asked me for suggestions regarding schools to consider for their kids, I do a mental (and often physical) run-down of the lists, just to get names at my finger-tips. From there, the real work begins in terms of the research processedout outlines. Avoiding looking at the rankings could mean not thinking of certain schools and perhaps missing out on the most suitable place.</p>

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<p>A classic line! I didn't mean to imply that you should definitely not push him a little to visit, or poke and prod a little, only that you have to play him basedon what you know of him, and that more may be going on in his head than you know. Also, judging from your list, you've done quite a few visits already, and covered a pretty broad range of schools, he should have some thoughts, if you can prise them out of him.</p>

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<p>Visits made a big difference in our family. The "top school' (and most selective) went from the top of the list to the bottom of the list (she got in, and was happy to turn them down); the school near the bottom zoomed to the top.</p>

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<p>I don't think I was even aware of rankings until I discovered CC -- after my daughter had applied to all the colleges on her list. Our strategy, such as it was, was to read the Fiske and Princeton Reviews cover to cover, over and over, to come up with a long list of possibles. We then visited the schools on the list as opportunities arose, starting with the closest geographically, which also happened to accord with Carolyn's recommendation that "it is better to start with schools that are potential safeties and matches." One of the first two we visited made the final cut; the other didn't. These we visited during Feb. vacation of Junior year (because we had a family vacation in the Southwest planned for April vacation). Early in the summer before senior year we hit Bates Bowdoin Colby in one fell swoop (an easy weekend drive from home), and we did another weekend trip to Williams, combining it with hiking. The big vacation for the summer, however, was an 8-college marathon in a week (combined with family visits): Middlebury, Hamilton, Colgate (where we were caught by the black-out of '03), Vassar, Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Smith. Five of those colleges made the final cut. Swarthmore and Haverford were reaches, but we kind of wanted to test where the ceiling was. We nearly cut Smith off the list because of exhaustion, but maternal determination to hit all the bases held sway, and Smith ended up being my daughter's final destination. We added UVM as an extra safety, site unseen until after the appllcation was in, visiting it for the first time during Feb. Vacation of senior year, combined with a second look at Middlebury and cross-country skiing in the Middlebury Snow Bowl. Smith had wooing weekends for prospectives both in the fall and in the spring, both of which we attended. I have to say, these events really are worth it for the colleges that make the effort to put them on: both Smith and the safety seemed to leap to the top of my daughter's list as a result of these weekends.</p>

<p>When all was said and done, however, my daughter herself never really had a first choice: she felt equally positive (for different reasons) about all eight of the colleges she finally applied to. Hence it wasn't worth it even to consider ED. In the magic of things that were meant to be, Smith -- the college we all were surprised we liked so much -- has turned out to be the best of all possible worlds for her. </p>

<p>So, rankings be damned. What worked for us was trust in intuition, based on as much first-hand experience as possible, supplemented by the kind of research Processedout describes (though we didn't do it nearly so intensively).</p>

<p>For a student with a more developed sense of what s/he wants to pursue in college, however, I expect the MO might be rather different. If I were writing about our child #2 throughout this post, for example, there would be no first-person plural.</p>

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<p>People like ranking lists. I enjoy them. Like most people I frequently disagree with them, don't take them too seriously, and recognize that they have little to do with what works best for me. I fully agree that they are not the best way to choose a college. But they're fun, and useful in a limited way. Let's not throw them out, just take them with a grain of salt.</p>

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<p>While I agree that the USNews rankings are bogus, the common data set info that they use is very helpful. My son used it as a general screening tool, focusing on data such as merit aid, SAT scores, s/f ratio, size, %age in top 10 percent of graduating class. He ended up with a prelim list of about 16 colleges, some in the top 50, others somewhat lower understanding that the rankings were very subjective at best and perhaps somewhat fraudulent given the manner in which the criteria have been selectived and munipulated.</p>

<p>After that it was a quest of his to investigate the colleges web pages, reading their on line student newspapers, programs offered, ec offered, etc. He also visited Ratemyprofs to get an idea of student opinion of faculty in his intended major.</p>

<p>After that we visited 8 colleges on the prelim list of 16 of which he applied to 6 plus one he did not visit, was accepted to each and offered lots of merit aid at all but one college, Oberlin.</p>

<p>The botton line is that information useful to student in making that very important college choice decision can come from many sources. If they can come up with some type of sensible plan, it makes the whole process much easier and can help to erase some of those doubts when decision time arrives.</p>

<p>I think it is our role as parents to assure them that 1) there is no one perfect college for any particular student, 2) there are many colleges out there where they will be happy, 3) set some parameters for them during the selection process such as the amout of money that the family will be able to contribute, 4) offer some gentle guidance based when necessary, and 5) supporting them in their final decision.</p>

<p>Processedout, who is a parent, constantly used the personal pronoun "you" in his post. While it may have been unintended, it connotates too much parental involvement in the overall process in my opinion. Based on the postings of many parents here, this may be a far to common practice.</p>

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<p>We visited UofCh, Princeton, Yale, UPenn, American, Georgetown, NWestern, Wm&Mary, during the summer. The visits really worked with my DD - primarily to eliminate. It was easy to figure out what she hated. And really easy when she fell in love with a school. The rest were ones where she could go if...Interestingly, she was rejected at first choice, accepted just about everywhere else, and chose one we had not visited. She just read about it and decided it sounded good, had about a week to get the app in, and just about didn't. She sent it in, and then she visited accepted student's weekend, and really loved it - luckily, the $ was good, and she is on her way. But it was the visits that made her take a second look at her school, because it seemed to fit what she had liked on the visits.</p>

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<p>Donemom - I concluded a while back the "like minded kids" argument is as flawed as the rankings. If you mean intellectual range, you're hair splitting - most anyone who grasped the basic concepts of their high school courses and scored in the 1100 range on the SAT is capable of succeeding at Harvard. Whether or not they'd choose to do the required work is another matter.</p>

<p>If you mean other students who are "serious" about academics, I submit that disribution is pretty constant from one school to another (with a couple of exceptions - Chicago, Wake Forest and a handful of the engineering schools come to mind). Youngest had a group of high school friends over the other night for a sort of reunion. The group represented a good cross section of schools (Virginia, Georgetown, Dickinson, Maryland College Park, Villanova, Dartmouth, Rhodes, St. Lawrence, Lehigh and Columbia). A couple were obviously focused on academics, a couple had found social conscience, and a couple had discovered the challenges of trying to have too much fun (one wondered out loud if the summer could pass without having parents find out about the previous semester grades).</p>

<p>Based on my limited experience, the 18 year old you know so well now may only bear a casual resemblence to the 22 year old who hopefully graduates in four years. Although I don't appreciate the price tag, the ability to transition to adulthood in a relatively safe environment is one of the really valuable aspects of college.</p>

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<p>So you think that not just the ranking lists but the idea that some colleges are better than others is bogus?</p>

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<p>We approached college visits in four stages:</p>

<p>1) Incidental visits - these mostly had to do with rehearsals and summer programs that happened to be at a college, auditions to get into a summer program, private instrument lessons at a college, or drive throughs at a college that happened to be en route to somewhere else we were going. These started early on in elementary school (summer programs) and continued until last week (lessons). The purpose of these visits was to get a feel for some of the options out there so we could make a long list of possibilities. Daughter's reactions ranged from "Yuck, I would never want to go there" to "Yeah, this is OK." (The latter being rather high praise from her.)</p>

<p>2) Targeted pre-application visits - We did not visit every school on the long list, but we did get to most of the ones within driving range that we thought had a chance of making the cut. These started Spring break week of Sophomore year (that may seem early, but daughter was interested and so was I) and continued through October of Senior year. The purpose of these visits was to help determine to which schools she would apply. She wound up applying to seven schools that we had visited and three we had not. In addition to the standard campus tour and visit to the admissions office, they also involved meeting and taking sample lessons with faculty members on daughter's instrument. Daughter's reactions ranged from "Eww, he creeps me out." to "I wish I could combine the teachers at this school with the campus and facilities at one of the others."</p>

<p>3) The audition tour - since daughter is a performing arts major, part of the process involved performing a live audition at nearly all of the schools to which she had applied. This lasted from December through March of Senior Year. It gave us a chance to revisit several schools and to see how they dealt with large numbers of stressed-out applicants. After an early non-binding acceptance with decent aid offered, she withdrew applications from four schools that were clearly lower on her list. Post audition comments ranged from "Oh, well, I didn't really want to go there anyway." to "I thought that went pretty well." </p>

<p>4) Post-acceptance overnight stay - after receiving three acceptances and three rejections, the choice was reasonably clear. Just to be certain, she went on an accepted students overnight visit at her top remaining choice. After that one, she was sure of her decision. We would have gone back to the other two if necessary, but it was not. Daughter's reaction was "Sign me up."</p>