I saw Birdman recently. It won an Oscar but i thought it was dreadful. It didn’t make it less awful that it won an Oscar, but it did make me stop and appreciate the artistry in the filming, staging, and blocking. It was innovative visually and had artistic merit. I still didn’t enjoy the movie.
That’s what the rankings are for. I personally think that ABC colleges are highly overrated (and yes, I have many on that list). I’ve spent time on those campuses, I read what comes out of the press office in terms of grants, awards, faculty citations, I’m familiar with the undergraduate programs and many times the grad programs. I personally may think they are overrated- but will concede that a college which has jumped 10 places in the ranking systems has likely done something innovative recently to change that up.
Are the changes meaningful to me? Depends. But the rankings are a tool with which to evaluate. There are also a lot of colleges which are underrated in my opinion. Sometimes there are things about them which mean they will never soar in the rankings- a small endowment which limits their ability to move the needle in certain ways. But they do what they do very, very well.
That’s it. A tool. Not the word of god from on high.
It’s puzzling to me that schools will or won’t make the list based solely on USN rank.
What if the school requires a student to apply to a major and if interests change, they can’t get into the new one? What if D’s major is not offered at all?
One can take the top X from the USNWR list but some majors like nursing or engineering simply do not exist at the school. THAT very basic level of research seems important to me, even if it’s assumed that a core vs open curriculum doesn’t matter, location doesn’t matter, size doesn’t matter, etc.
Just for the record, my high stats kid also disliked Stanford. It did not fit her personality at all. She was much more the UChicago type (and applied there and got in). I have a friend who went to Dartmouth – turned out to be a miserable experience because the school was not a fit for her interests and personality – but she had a large scholarship (outside the school, but from Dartmouth alums) and felt obligate to finish her education there. She still wishes she could have gone somewhere else. I went to Michigan – it was fine, but definitely wish I could have had a different (smaller LAC) college experience. Don’t come back complaining to us if (1) you don’t have time for enough visits in April, and (2) surprise, surprise – your kid is unhappy a year into their college experience. And if you think it is expensive to do some visiting ahead of time, you haven’t considered the expense and challenges of transferring (likely with less FA, starting over socially, maybe all credits not transferring, and the general psychological/confidence hit a kid takes when their initial college does not work out). But carry on…
You can learn a ton from a college visit. For instance, on my own college visits I saw two peer schools on the same trip. On paper they were extremely similar. On CC kids talk about both in the same breath. Think Amherst-Williams or Harvard-Yale. My visits helped me to see some differences in culture at the schools. One example-when I asked the tour guide what people did on the weekends at the first school I heard about ski trips and a bus to the city. At the second they talked about things happening on campus, informal dorm gatherings and all-campus events. I asked around and found my impressions verified by other students-that at campus A students left for the weekends and on B they stayed on campus. If I had been a kid who wanted to get away from school on a regular basis I might have chosen the first. As it turned out I wanted a school where people interacted with larger groups (not just small groups of their friends) on weekends so school B was better for me. Some of my fondest memories are of hanging out in friends’ rooms talking about everything-religion, politics, literature, our futures, with groups of kids that fell together almost at random. I could certainly have had similar discussions at School A, but I do believe the environment at School B was more conducive to them.
At some schools the setup of the dorms made it clear the school valued privacy for their students, at others communality. It’s not something that would have been obvious from a guide or on line. At some schools it was clear students interacted a great deal with the community around them, at others the campus was more self-contained. It was something we noticed when we watched student foot traffic patterns.
At one school we found out that a program touted by the school in all their messaging was actually hard for the students to access. If we’d depended on what we read on the school’s website we would have assumed our kid just needed to sign up. At another we found out about an aspect of the school that was very attractive to our kid, and that wasn’t well advertised.
It’s hard to know what you’ll notice on a campus visit. Sometimes it something stupid, like the tour guide’s Birkenstocks. Sometimes it’s something useful, like the tour when my husband and son passed a group of kids who made no effort to hide the fact that they were getting stoned in the middle of the quad. My kid could have put a lot of effort into the application for that school but after the visit it was obvious it wasn’t the right place for him.
Your kid will be making her college choice based on ONE visit. Or are you planning to take her on multiple visits to each school once she gets accepted? But you aren’t going until after acceptances, right? We visited before applications were sent.
Of course my family knows the rankings, and the numbers of applicants, as well as the fabulous reputation Stanford has. It’s a great school.
My kid didn’t like it. At all. She didn’t really like the campus, she didn’t really like the size. She didn’t care much about it…at all.
But then, we also didn’t force our kid to look at rankings and the like when making college application choices.
We had good family discussions about colleges and choices. But in the end, the kid chose where to apply. We agreed with all of her choices…all four of them. She vetted her college application choices before applying.
Family decisions vary about these things, you know.
I do not understand why you all giving Californiaa a hard time. Her approach is valid. They will eliminate some top 30 schools based on widely available online information (including this forum) and apply to the rest. Then they will compare ranking of all schools where her daughter was admitted, select the lowest and be done with it.
For example, if she is admitted to #3, #11 and #17 she would matriculate to #3. Whatever was good enough for President Bush should be good enough for Californiaa’s daughter. And she will make no mistake by choosing this school.
If Californiaa’s daughter decides on the university on the British Islands I have full confidence in Californiaa’s abilities to figure out where Scotland ends and Ireland begins.
The danger is if Californiaaa’s daughter applies to #1-30, plus the California universities, and only gets into the lower California schools. Will she be okay with Merced? Riverside?
According to what we know Californiaa’s daughter is Hispanic with great academic stats and ECs undecided on a major. Should be admitted to at least one top 30 university. I would add some LACs like Barnard or Wesleyan to the list as safeties.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think you should put more thought into where you’re going to live, study, and work for 4 years than simply what arbitrary number is assigned to it by a company seeking profit. :-??
(Oh and I still don’t think we have any idea what the D wants…)
“If Californiaa’s daughter decides on the university on the British Islands I have full confidence in Californiaa’s abilities to figure out where Scotland ends and Ireland begins.”
^ TCD isn’t very expensive. Roughly $140K all-in for 4 years. Some of McGill’s degrees are about that much as well (not taking in to account currency fluctuations).
I won’t try to convince @californiaaa about rankings.
Just know that you have three rankings to use:
National universities and National LACs, including women’s colleges (Wellesley, Smith, Scripps, in addition to Williams Amherst Pomona Bowdoin Carleton ?) and regional universities (Santa Clara, Chapman, Trinity). LACs are as difficult to get into as research universities because they’re small thus recruit fewer students, are well-connected to boarding schools/prep schools, and use Ed heavily; you can typically go deeper in the list without much compromise in academic quality. Not everyone knows about them but those who do hold them in high esteem (generally ‘old money’ will know - it’s no coincidence BrynMawr and Haverford are on the Main Line where the Philadelphia upper class families live, for instance.) Another example: in the northeast, if you’re going into finance, Middlebury or Hamilton are good picks. They don’t have a finance major, they don’t even have a business major, you wouldn’t see them in business program rankings, but their graduates are well-represented on Wall Street. The ‘people who matter’ know. If you trust rankings, use the top 100 rankings by Forbes to cross reference choices from the national LAC category but remember these are like boutique firms so check on this website asking people.
Regional universities: since rankings matter to you, pick top 5 for the northeast and top 3 for the west/midwest. Those 8-10 are usually easy to do, may have no application fee, and I’d recommend them as ‘practice applications’ to be done early in the cycle (your daughter will send essays that, once completed, she realizes she could have improved. That’s what these applications will be for - speed up the process of realization). She’ll complete them early (hopefully in July), be happy, but will realize that there’s a little thing she could have tweaked. This experience will help her improve her next batch of essays, which in turn will help her improve her last batch of applications. Therefore the ‘last batch’ should be the 5 schools she most wants to go to.
At all of them, her first step should be to complete NOW the ‘request info’ form on each private university 's website. Since she hasn’t visited and most private universities will count ‘interest’, (IE., she’ll have to offset not visiting by showing interest in other ways - all ways of shoIng interest are equal, not everyone can visit, but it’s important to do something), she should make sure she clicks on every email they send her and follows up with one question to Admissions based on what she read. Ideally this would be done in June.
