<p>“Rather than rankings, our kids tended to look for a set of schools that fit their preferences for size, location, and intellectual climate (including majors available). Then the list and search process basically involved finding schools that met those preferences but differed in the degree of difficulty of admission, i.e., selectivity.”</p>
<p>Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. That’s what we are doing. I will say there are significantly more “gunners” (good word) at the highly selective schools than at the less selective schools and my kid is not really a gunner and doesn’t want to spend four years surrounded by them. He is very bright and will work incredibly hard when he is super interested in something but not when he could care less. It seems like the less selective schools with intellectual reputations are full of those kids. I think it just comes down to making a well considered decision. </p>
<p>“There are perhaps more “successful” kids going INTO higher-ranked colleges (meaning, they had more academic and other accomplishments in high school) but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily more successful coming out. As has been debated ad nauseum on this site, plenty of successful people didn’t go to elite colleges.”</p>
<p>Right. And part of what some of us value is the qualitative experience of being on campus WITH a good concentration of those “successful” kids, regardless of whether there is necessarily any more quantifiable salary / $ coming out of it on the back end. Of course there are plenty of successful-in-life people who didn’t go to elite colleges. That’s not the point. And of course none of this has anything to do with mental health and happiness, which are the most important. </p>
<p>My kids’ schools are on different lists (LAC and research uni) and they do (lightheartedly) tease one another if one is higher than the other, but we all know they’re in the same ballpark and it’s brother-sister teasing in good fun, since they can’t compete on football teams :-)</p>
<p>"None of my kids would have been happy on a campus where the strongest concentration of kids were in econ or finance and gunning for IB banking.</p>
<p>Exactly. Or just “gunners” in general. Some very smart kids just prefer a more laid-back environment where they can explore ideas and interests with others like them. My son didn’t like many of the super-driven, competitive kids at his high school, even though he was every bit as academically talented. He certainly didn’t want to go to a college with even MORE kids like that."</p>
<p>Then he shouldn’t. No one is saying that the rankings should overrule personal preferences. I think it’s more – when you’re deciding between two places that are both well-liked and suitable for the student’s intended major that are <em>wildly</em> different in rankings, should that matter? (And by “wildly” I don’t mean 10 points or some other nonsense.) Penn vs Swarthmore doesn’t qualify; they aren’t different. Duke vs Notre Dame vs Rice doesn’t qualify; they aren’t different. Smith and Florida Institute of Technology is a weird one because Smith isn’t a great choice for an aspiring engineer; a better comparison would have been MIT vs Florida Institute of Technology.</p>
<p>If it’s your first child it’s easy to get “sucked in” the ranking game, but if you take a deep breath you realize it’s a small, small fraction of kids and generally with a very narrow perspective (they are afterall for the most part still teens). Even with engineering I purposefully “made” my 3rd tour and consider the small engineering schools and the LAC Plus schools in PA that have engineering. It’s up to the kids (and the parents) to filter factors that are important to them. Plus half the time in the vast majority of majors the difference between 10 and 50 or sometimes 10 and 100 are minor and will ultimately not have that much bearing on the student’s future. IB and Engineering might be two outliers…there may be more if I think about it long enough. If your kiddo wants a more “esoteric” major or has a particular career or industry in mind, the general overall rankings become less important and the reputation of that college with that major are far more important - Geology, Archeology, Marine Biology, Petroleum and Mining, Packaging, Zoology, Oneology, Art Conservation or Restoration all come instantly to mind. </p>
<p>As we all know many, many kids don’t have any clue what they want to do and the decision comes down to getting them the best basic education one can afford where ranking might play more of a factor or sending them to a big school with a plethora of options for them to settle into. </p>
sally - a lot has happened since 2010. The world is a bit different now. Finance is no longer the golden ticket for a lot of graduates. It is just one of many options they have.</p>
<p>It is foolish to disregard ranking and it is also foolish to use it as the only data point. What I see over and over again on CC is that it is always either/or. People like to fall back on “fit” when it comes to college selection, but is it so surprising that high performing students find it is a better fit when they are surrounded by similar students? It just so happens that high ranking schools tend to admit more high performing students. Those higher ranking schools also happen to have better facilities and programs than lower ranking schools. If those factors are important to your student, why wouldn’t you take ranking into consideration? If your student wants a more lay back school, closer to home, provide more vocational internship then he/she is not going to care as much about school ranking.</p>
<p>“Smith and FIT are two different schools. If my kid was interested in engineering, no sure why I would consider Smith even if it was ranked higher. Silly comparison.”</p>
<p>You may think it is silly, but those were the last two schools on her list. I didn’t like Smith for her either, nor would I have liked it for me, but it would have been a good fit for her sister (who, ironically, could not have gotten in). The question was whether the student would have eliminated the lower ranked school and my answer was that she didn’t. She wasn’t aware of the exact rankings, but knew that Smith was much more prestigious and it just didn’t matter to her. She knew that her beloved uncle really wanted her to go to Smith and it didn’t matter. She had a friend who did choose Smith and it still didn’t matter.</p>
<p>Most students do not worry about ranking because they are happy to have a school to go to because they either don’t have the stats or the means to get into those high ranking schools, but it is not the case with the CC crowd. Most parents here have students with 2100+ SAT scores and are top 10% of their class. </p>
<p>Rankings can be used as a search criterion to identify potential schools of interest, without being the driving motivation or criterion for selection of the list of schools to apply to. To my kids (and to me and my significant other) once they had identified a set of schools that were potentially interesting based on their selection criteria, rankings were irrelevant. That said, however, since both kids were high performing, and driven by certain intellectual interests – very different interests from one another – they tended to like the higher ranking (and more “selective”) schools within their choice sets. But both kids were anti-ranking, and not climbers.</p>
<p>I came to the US in the 80s. I did not now know anything about USNWR rankings or Fiske Guide to Colleges. I applied to a local CSU campus, 2 SouthCal UC campuses, and NorthCal UCB campus. I was admitted one SouthCal UC and the local CSU campus (the UC did not route my application to UCB because I lived in SouthCal. The UC admission office at that time only allowed students to name at most 3 campuses on a single application and it routed the app to only one campus for consideration). I had to make my own rankings and I chose the UC over the CSU because of the UC acedemic strength that I learned by stydying the catalogs. I was always happy and proud of my UC campus. During a lunch discussion, one guy said that he planned to transfer to Stanford. I thought he was joking or crazy because in my head the UC was enough for me and paying more to go to Stanford was a waste of money.</p>
<p>Fast forward, I graduated, got a good job, got married, bought a house, had kids. I recommended my nieces, nephews to apply to the UC campus that I attended. I paid attention to all good events happening at my alma mater and planned to send my kids there. But when my oldest kid was at the end of 8th grade, my thought about where to send my kid to college changed…</p>
<p>@oldfort- my son has a 2100+ SAT but his school does not rank. He is not interested in a school " closer to home, provide more vocational internship." I do doubt that he would be accepted to a top 10 LAC or RU but he certainly could be competitive for schools ranked in the 10-50 range, he just hasn’t found any that he liked and we have visited a bunch. I also don’t agree that higher ranked schools always have better programs and facilities. We have done all the super-match kind of stuff and we’ve crossed off the schools where he’d be an intellectual island-obviously those wouldn’t be a good fit, but there are a surprising number of lower ranked schools that attract quite brainy kids. “High performing” doesn’t necessary mean thoughtfully intellectual, sometimes it just means that they were pretty smart kids who got pushed really hard by ambitious parents and that’s the kind of peer they are used to. But I really didn’t mean to get anyone’s dander up about any of this. I just wondered if USNWR was suddenly wiped from the planet and everyone’s memory, if using different data would have changed your child’s list. That’s all. </p>
<p>My D2 would be exactly where she is today. She turned down U of Chicago, Swarthmore, and Carleton, all higher ranked than her beloved Harvey Mudd. D1 turned down higher ranked schools as well to attend Dickinson, and was very happy. “Higher ranked” for USNWR isn’t the same as “higher ranked” for a specific kid. Tough concept for some posters (parents and students) to understand out here sometimes…</p>
<p>“Most students do not worry about ranking because they are happy to have a school to go to because they either don’t have the stats or the means to get into those high ranking schools”</p>
<p>Or they just don’t care - they aren’t interested in maximizing, they’re just interested in going off to a college that is familiar, affordable, offers their major and is likely to have some of their friends attending too. For people like you and me, this is one of the biggest decisions and it requires a lot of thought, but for a lot of people, it’s “oh, that sounds good, I know a lot of people who go there and it’s within my family’s budget, so why not.” They just don’t agonize about it and it isn’t the year long or greater project it was for some of us! </p>
<p>It’s a year-long or greater project for most of us. It’s not less-thought-out just because the decision ends up not being the same as yours or oldfort’s. In fact, I’d argue that it takes more research and effort to come up with a list that doesn’t resemble the USNWR top 20 or other schools kids have “heard of” (NYU, UCLA, etc.).</p>
<p>The upside to not going after the same schools as everyone else is less “agonizing”–I will give you that. It is actually fun to look at the range of college options with an open mind. </p>
<p>oldfort, your sweeping generalizations just aren’t always true. There is no direct correlation between ranking and facilities, for instance. In fact, plenty of people on this forum criticize average state schools for investing so much money in fancy new dorms, athletic facilities, and so on.</p>
<p>A more laid-back school does not mean closer to home or more vocational. A lot of great small colleges all over the country are laid back and offer a classic liberal arts education. </p>
<p>The types of internships often obtained by students at the college I referred to before are every bit as professional as those from the schools you favor. Students are recruited for internships (and full-time jobs) at corporations like Target, 3M, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, Thomson Reuters, US Bank, Medtronic and major healthcare systems. </p>
<p>@intparent “My D2 would be exactly where she is today. She turned down U of Chicago, Swarthmore, and Carleton, all higher ranked than her beloved Harvey Mudd”</p>
<p>“It’s a year-long or greater project for most of us. It’s not less-thought-out just because the decision ends up not being the same as yours or oldfort’s. In fact, I’d argue that it takes more research and effort to come up with a list that doesn’t resemble the USNWR top 20 or other schools kids have “heard of” (NYU, UCLA, etc.).”</p>
<p>I was describing the majority of high school kids in my area, who are choosing between Northern Illinois, Illinois State, etc. on the basis of exactly what I said - it’s familiar, nearby, offers my major, I’ll likely have friends going there and it’s within my family’s budget. I certainly agree that your approach was / is thoughtful and that isn’t what I was describing.</p>
<p>FWIW, there was only 1 USNWR top 20 university on my kids’ combined list. </p>
<p>“My D2 would be exactly where she is today. She turned down U of Chicago, Swarthmore, and Carleton, all higher ranked than her beloved Harvey Mudd”</p>
<p>To be fair to Harvey Mudd, some people (myself included) would put Harvey Mudd at roughly the same level as the other three you mention,"</p>
<p>Exactly. These kinds of tradeoffs aren’t the kinds of tradeoffs we are talking about. (Neither is mathmom’s son turning down Harvard for CMU, either.) These aren’t meaningful differences in any bigger picture. </p>
<p>True, although I have to admit every year when they publish the senior scholars at our highly ranked little public there’s one kid going to a pretty non-competitive in-state public and I have to admit I always stop and wonder why which is why. Then I get mad at myself for ‘wondering why.’</p>