Again, as I’ve been saying, it depends on what you value. If to you, “better” means a more academically accomplished class (test optional and grade inflation aside), then yes. If someone else defines “better” differently: whether that means a school that boosts social mobility, or provides a more well rounded experience, or maybe has a huge sports presence, or Greek life, or whatever is important to them, then no.
as a parent of a kid who chose a lesser ranked school over more prestigious options, I don;t really care about the rankings per se, or the bragging rights. what I do care about are employment opportunities and the advantages/disadvantages that school name on a resume later in life might bring. And unfortunately I still think it matters. I know a kid can come out of any college, even ones ranked outside the top 200, and be CEO or brain surgeon or judge or aerospace engineer and do amazing things. But when employers have 2 applications in front of them, one saying Penn and one saying Ohio State, will that make a difference? maybe not to the top of the top kids from Ohio State, but that Penn kid can prob be middle of the pack or bottom 25% at Penn and still get a look.
Hoping this changes. I know if I was an employer in the market for a new hire, I would not be impressed by Ivy League and the like on a resume, but in the real world…I’m just a little concerned about it.
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This question has often been discussed on various other threads.
The school name makes a difference for new hires (fresh out of college, or at most 2-3 years out), and significantly so in certain industries. After that, a candidate’s skills and experience will matter far more and the school may not matter at all.
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Depends on what the company budget is for the position too. Might not be able to afford the Penn kid. IMO as a hiring manager (of very often entry level positions) I’d interview both of them and see who was a better fit for the role. Also my opinion/experience but once someone gets past their first 2-3 positions the “where you went to school” is almost a non-factor.
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If your only criteria for “success” is how much $ you might expect to make in your occupation then it might be a usable tool. But in terms of an actual ranking it’s going prioritize schools that offer programs that lead to careers in high paying jobs (medical/legal/etc).
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2-3 positions before school becomes a non factor? that’s a little scary to me.
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I never was talking about the elite LACs so dont put words in my mouth.
In what way is it scary? Assume most early career people spend 1.5-2.5 years in each of their first positions… so we’re looking at someone’s first say 4-6 years or so. After that the hiring manager is looking at the resume to understand experience, have they shown a propensity to learn and achieve, etc.
If someone went to Harvard and in their first role they are an entry level data analyst and stayed in that role for 6 years it’s a red flag to me more than the kid that went to UStateX and took progressively more responsibility in roles every couple of years.
I disagree. I’ve worked at multiple firms in senior level positions, and we never offered different salaries for the same role based on the school. Besides being nonsensical, such a policy would be ripe for lawsuits.
Also, if the second pain is 4-5 years out of college, the name of the school shouldn’t matter. At that point you’re hiring for skills and experience, not academic knowledge.
This is my last word here on this as it’s veering off topic.
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There will always be those that prefer the ROI-based approach and those that don’t (which is why its great, if there’s going to be rankings, that there are multiple rankings with different methodologies to satisfy different consumers).
But the criticism of the new WSJ ranking was that it didn’t actually achieve a meaningful rank of ROI. No point in rehashing all the reasons here as that topic still survives and there’s detailed analysis behind that conclusion from many others here.
The USN ranking has never been ROI-focused, and the categories you regret them dropping or diminishing were not ROI-related.
I actually agree, personally. The quality of the student does matter.
Though there’s a case to be made that focusing on test scores and GPA is not the full measure of a “quality” student and further perpetuates the privilege of students from well-off families. USN has been under attack from officials at universities (and others) that their ranking perpetuates this, so it’s not surprising since they need the support of influential university officials to survive that they would try to demonstrate that they are being responsive to that criticism. Which is why their changes were tailored to improve the results for top publics.
When I was at UCLA many years ago, I was surprised how easy it was to excel in most classes because of how low the bar was set by the average student. Despite it being hard to get admitted (though certainly easier than now), many students seemed content to coast and enjoy the rest of the non-academic college experience. After sophomore year I got into a heavily impacted major that only admitted about 10% of applicants exclusively after sophomore year, largely (but not only) based on your 2-year college GPA. And those major classes were night-and-day better because everyone in the class was engaged, intellectually curious and an achiever.
Two morales to that story. 1) Yes, quality of the student made a big difference; 2) In my experience at the time, there was little correlation between HS stats and those who ended up in the major after 2 years at UCLA. I wouldn’t have made the cut. I came from a crappy HS, was not GPA-motivated in HS (few were and the HS didn’t care), and had a middling SAT for the profile. I still recall how discouraging it was at Freshman orientation when they rattled off aspects of the class profile and said the average entering student already had 32 units from AP credits when I had none (our school didn’t offer them and when I had inquired of the schools college counselor about taking a couple elsewhere on spec he said not to bother and talked me out of it). My peers were full of stories about turn arounds in college after experiences in bad high schools.
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One thing the USNWR does not factor in is alumni networking. If you are going to the flagship school in a state, you will have great networking. if you go to an elite school, the network is also pretty strong. It can help you land an internship or first full time job. Of course as you progress, school affiliation matters less but that initial first job could really help you set your career path.
In the real world, networking is a very big factor.
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Other widely noted rankings
https://www.shanghairanking.com/news/arwu/2023
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So colleges that don’t bias toward the subset of schools that offer AP’s are screwed? (And I don’t believe there is any national stat available on how many “honors” courses students take, if their schools even offer them.
As for SAT (and I assume ACT), it’s become a useless measure since the majority of people don’t submit and those that do are self-selecting based on their scores. Plus colleges can easily manipulate who submits – witnesses the university that is actively telling students in info sessions not to submit unless they are at least at the 75% cohort specifically to push their averages up.
As an aside, supposedly some colleges are working on Big Data/AI/machine-learning sorts of approaches to pre-processing applications, which very likely includes some sort of preliminary automation of the transcript evaluation process shown in this Holy Cross video:
Based on prior practice they are likely going to keep all that very proprietary/trade secret.
But in theory, a public version of that could be created and used to evaluate incoming academic credentials. The problem is you would need all those transcripts, and those probably won’t be released either–although if anonymized, potentially they could be.
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You are describing the current state.
WSJ also considered how much debt students left college with. USNWR did not. I think that is clearly an area that should matter a lot to parents/students.
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Sorry - I didn’t say it very well the first time (or you misinterpreted) - my statement was that if I have $80K budgeted for a role as an XYZ, that $80K may not be enough to entice the hiring of the Princeton kid but it might get the Ohio State kid.
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Why don’t you read the US News methodology and confirm that the criterai being used deserves the title of Nations Best Colleges.
Yeah, the concept of normalizing GPAs for course rigor makes sense in theory, but how to do that in practice given the complete lack of standardization of secondary school curriculums is extremely challenging.
That video I just linked sorta illustrates how it has been done for a long time (although it didn’t quite get to the end). Basically, human AOs take the transcript, school report, counselor recommendation, possibly test scores, possibly teacher recommendations, and possibly other information like internal tracking data and regional AO experience, and come up with an internal academic rating.
There is no way to duplicate that with the data in, say, the CDS. But as I mentioned, apparently there are efforts to develop AI-equivalents, at least for preliminary purposes.
Absent something like that, any attempt to summarize the distribution of academic qualifications of entering students is going to be pretty useless across wide ranges of broadly similar colleges.
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Yes. To illustrate the point that heavily weighting such factors opens up the rankings to gaming.
Besides, this stats driven admissions process wouldn’t be welcomed by colleges, or by high paid private consultants.
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