Should you always go to the best overall college that you can afford?

[vonlost]

<p>Change “schools” to “professors” in my previous post:

I’m a professor of 18 years. I’m also president of our professional association (which covers 10,000 faculty members across thousands of colleges), and I’ve been an administrator. </p>

<p>PROFESSORS do not care about USNWR rankings. Trust me. Yes we care very much about prestige and research reputation, but that has NOTHING to do with magazine ratings, which are entirely intended for students and their parents. In fact, a high ranked school by USNWR may be considered low rank and unprestigious by faculty; and vice versa. Where some school falls in the ranks has no impact whatsoever on our ability to hire faculty. What we PUBLISH and our reputation our field based upon our research impact is what matters to us.</p>

<p>I can also tell you that what these rankings do is drive administrators and Deans- not professors- to scramble to influence the next set of rankings. Over and over and over again they play at the edges, playing around with very very superfical stuff, repackaging, seeing what the others are doing, playing with numbers and how things are reported, working on yield, and lots and lots and lots of marketing. The actually EDUCATIONAL component, the curriculum, the pedagogical approach, never changes because that is not relevant to USNWR.</p>

<p>I know for a fact that USNWR has been very very bad for the college education system. It has wasted TONS of valuable time, energy and resources on all the wrong things. It has nothing to do with ‘education’ and everything to do with selling a product that can convince naive consumers that its worth buying.

<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/9945929-post35.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/9945929-post35.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;