<p>Use Chrome and open the link in an “incognito window”.</p>
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<p>Delete your browsing history. That makes the NYT think you haven’t read any articles this month.</p>
<p>“And schools know that, if they want to get a better ranking, they need to spend money like mad even though they will have to increase tuition that is already backbreaking. If you figure out how to do the same service for less money, your U.S. News ranking will go down, says Kevin Carey, the director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. The rankings encourage trends that ill-serve the country.”</p>
<p>Hmm.</p>
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<p>How I wish that were true, Steve. The other “areas of the country” are any areas with a high international (immigrant) population. The USNWR rankings absolutely drive those families’ college list decisions. It is very, very sad. More than 60% of that population is seeking science programs, and not close to 100% of them are top-tier-qualified applicants. (more like about 15-20% of them) Yet the remaining 80-85%, which includes many students with 3.4 - 3.6 gpas and other uneven features, “will not consider” attending anything but a “highly-ranked” institution. It doesn’t matter if 10 unrealistic reaches are on their list.</p>
<p>Sadder (to me) is that the “lower-performing” students among those (obviously merely meaning not super-achievers) would have hundreds of fantastic opportunities in higher education, to shine as undergrads, both grade-wise and in research, which they did not in high school, if they were to be given those opportunities. Yet they get pressure not only from parents but from their high school peers. (Sometimes I think more so from the latter. “Not a good school” is the comment from the adolescent “experts” :rolleyes:)</p>
<p>Btw, more often than not, “not a good school” = “I have not personally heard of it in my vast 16 years of life, which include an almost-vast 6 months of college information.”</p>
<p>Ah yes, the imperiousness of youthful authority. :D</p>
<p>CCleaner is an easy way to get rid of all the tracking junk on your computer. I use it daily and have unlimited access to the Times.</p>
<p>[CCleaner</a> - CNET Download.com](<a href=“http://download.cnet.com/CCleaner/3000-18512_4-10315544.html]CCleaner”>CCleaner - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download)</p>
<p>“I found it worthwhile to subscribe to the NYTimes digital edition just because I like the content so much.”</p>
<p>I found it worthwhile to use the NYT paper edition to line my cats litter box.</p>
<p>I agree with the overall sentiment here, rankings only mean something if you want them to. A friend of mine goes to UVA and she told me that one of her professors helps calculate the ranks, and even he thinks they are a load of nonsense.</p>
<p>Epiphany: “not a good school” = “any school I haven’t heard of” – sounds exactly like my mother in law. If it isn’t a giant football school, she hasn’t heard of it, and it can’t be a worthwhile school!</p>
<p>Something like this could be said about all rankings of all things. Do we really believe that the “top ten” restaurants in NYC are really ‘the best’ ten restaurants? Or the top ten movies of all time are really the top ten in that exact same order? Of course not. But generally speaking the things at the top of a long list are going to be ‘better’ than those in the middle or at the bottom.</p>
<p>As the article says: </p>
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<p>Ranking is only one component that leads to the lustre of a college. I remember USNews putting Caltech as number one on the rankings one year. I don’t think it cause a rush of application, and any bump it did get was mitagated in future years. Name recognition is the big deal most of the time for those looking at colleges. When prestige and lustre are up there on the list of what one wants in a college, most people want to also have heard of the school. </p>
<p>One criticism I have about the US News list is that it really should put the schools in categoires rather than actually ranking them 1-2-3, something it has done with schhols that are not in top echelons. It is ridiculous for HPY to be swapping spots each year with the old names occaisionally interspersed in there. Who the heck cares if Yale is ranked over Harvard on a 1-2 basis, and it truly means nothing in the scopre of things. It doesn’t mesh with reality. In most people’s minds the ranking is HPYMS and then it’s onto the next group of schools, and then the next group and then the next. That a point differentiates JHU and Emory, for example at any given year is irrelevant. If a school is racking up points over time to be included in a category that is beyond what the perception of it is, that is of interest, but it the time element should be taken into account so that a one or even two years blip in the way the ratings numbers turn out doesn’t affect it’s over all rating much. It also makes it more diffiicult to manipulate the numbers, something that is being done on a concerted basis. </p>
<p>These days, if I even look at the list, which I’ve yet to do for this new year’s one, I just skim them and am interested in the outliers. I don’t really care why P is now 1 over Y and H and that C has managed to climb in their in the rankings. Not news.</p>
<p>epiphany–I disagree that there aren’t other areas of the country that have high immigrant populations but the people I know and the people here that are all about ranking certainly are not immigrants most of the time. It goes hand and hand with a lot of other lifestyle differences on the east coast vs the rest of the country, plain and simple.</p>
<p>If “people” are misguidedly impressed by rankings, doesn’t it follow that some of those people will be employers and others in the position of giving opportunities to college grads?</p>
<p>Love the whole “I hate the northeastern ny times”/“here’s how to steal articles from it if you just can’t get enough” theme here. ;-)</p>
<p>Some employers will be people who pay a lot of attention to rankings. Others won’t. There are actually real fields of employment outside the handful where rankings are critically important.</p>
<p>There are many jobs where the elite school label can be a disadvantage. It all depends where and what your kid is seeking. YOu want a high desired public school teaching job? Look at where most of those teachers went to college. There is school pride and comaraderie in all schools, and there are far more non “elite” schools than the other way around.</p>
<p>"Love the whole "I hate the northeastern ny times "</p>
<p>As someone from the Northeast, I think its more of “I hate the fact the NYT thinks they invented journalism and their editorials are slightly left of Karl Marx”</p>
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We got a subscription to the NYT Sunday physical paper, and that comes with a free digital sub as well. (You could line fifty cat boxes with just the Sunday paper, by the way.)</p>
<p>The NYT remains one of the few institutions that practices something that could be considered responsible journalism. They are certainly not perfect, and have fallen afoul of their share of frauds and jerks over the years. But they do ATTEMPT to do the right thing, and largely succeed. They also appeal to people who have an attention span longer than 20 seconds.</p>
<p>Steve,
Either I misunderstood you or you misunderstood me. :)</p>
<p>Here’s what you said earlier, which I previously quoted:</p>
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<p>Again, both formally and informally, this is objectively untrue. Any area of the country with a high immigrant population (especially various areas of Asia) may suffer from rankings fixation (and not understand its limitations).</p>
<p>Yet here was part of your reply to my statement:</p>
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<p>?</p>
<p>Where, in my post on page 2, was a declaration about which “areas of the country” do and do not have high immigrant populations? (Answer: nowhere in my post.)</p>
<p>Repeating:</p>
<p>Areas outside of the northeast which have high immigrant populations (and I’ll be more specific – especially from China, HK, Korea, India) are areas with an atmosphere of disproportionate emphasis on college rankings, coming from the parents --not the employers necessarily-- with corresponding pressure & assumptions filtered to the students.</p>
<p>Does “could care less” (your phrase) refer to employers or to families of college students?</p>
<p>Still and all, part of the very definition of elite means - you don’t have to CARE what other people think, and you sure as heck don’t run around making sure all your actions are “approved” by others. </p>
<p>As an example - and I’m not going political here, just using this example - of the Bush twins, one went to UTexas and the other to Yale. Do you think that the one who went to UTexas “suffered” in the least or is embarrassed in the least for not going to an elite school? Nope, because she’s already elite. She could have gone to East Directional State U and it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s what eliteness buys you - not having to impress others. That’s what’s so wannabe about the desperate chase for Ivys - not recognizing that the true mark of eliteness in this country means you simply don’t have to put your choices up for others’ approvals, that your own satisfaction is enough.</p>
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<p>There are also many, many people who simply don’t care one way or the other. Harvard isn’t going to impress them or not-impress them compared to State Flagship U. In an interview situation or business situation, they are going to make their judgments by the impressions they receive of the person in front of them, and they aren’t going to use the school for signaling purposes one way or the other. CC overthinks how much the average person thinks about or cares about college rankings. </p>
<p>Put another way, if you ask the man on the street, what’s the best university in the country - they’ll probably say Harvard. Does that mean that person thinks that Harvard grads are more desirable as employees, or that they’d cut off their right arm for their kid to get into Harvard? Nope. Most of the schools that get obsessed over on CC (my kids’ schools included) are just not on radar screens for most people in this country. This is a special-interest board in the most precise definition.</p>