USnews using high school counselors is a bad idea!

College Search & Selection
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<p>[Calling</a> on High School Counselors for Input on America’s Best Colleges - Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings (usnews.com)](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2010/04/22/calling-on-high-school-counselors-for-input-on-americas-best-colleges.html]Calling”>http://www.usnews.com/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2010/04/22/calling-on-high-school-counselors-for-input-on-americas-best-colleges.html)

<em>emphasis mine</em></p>

<p>In any case, I hope the GCs are aware that Bemidji State University accounting graduates pass the CPA exam at a higher rate than the state average. Go Beavers!</p>

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<p>“THE POINT IS counselors are not qualified to rank hundreds of colleges and universities.”</p>

<p>I totally agree with that statment.</p>

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<p>Luckie Starchild says:

Then, just 12 minutes later:

</p>

<p>LOL</p>

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<p>^^^^ Quick, switch feet. The sock on the foot in your mouth is getting all slobbery.</p>

<p>But the underlying point–that no one can have the breadth of knowledge needed to accurately rank colleges across the expanse of the country is undeniably true.</p>

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<p>IUPUI even ranked over the U of Illinois and Rutgers ‘‘Newark’’ (as well as New Brunswick) tied UIUC! I don’t know how to explain those issues, but I think one thing different in this ranking than most is that most of the counselors are biased toward, or at least more familiar with humanities and social sciences, so the good natural science, and math schools, especially those not specialized towards hard sciences and engineering (i.e., not the ones like MIT and Carnegie Mellon) got overlooked a lot. Everyone and their grandmother in the midwest knows you go to Purdue for engineering, so they are ranked well here, but UIUC has excellent engineering as well, in addition to world-class computer science and physics, topnotch accounting, etc., but they are ranked behind good social science schools schools like American University, Northeastern, Syracuse and George Washington (as well as schools like Virginia Tech). Instead, UIUC and many other strong science schools such as U of Washington (in WA) are relegated to the ranks of the likes of Auburn, Baylor, Iowa, and UCSC or worse. Georgetown beats Cal Tech, Northwestern beats U of C and so on.</p>

<p>Being pro-humanity/social science for high school guidance counselors makes sense if you think about it though, because a: if they are really into hard sciences it won’t tie much into the path to being hired for a high school gc career, so they will tend to be more interested in social sciences skewing the types of schools they value, and b) a disproportionately high amount of hard science and engineering degrees are earned by people from other countries, so less interest in the sciences is coming from American high school students, making strong science schools less relevant to US gc’s. and a) may help promote b) when the students and gc’s are evaluating options.</p>

<p>I also notice that the gc’s also don’t seem to value state flagship campuses much, at all. UIUC is only .2 points above UIC (i.e., what Duke is to University of Chicago, apparently) and as mentioned, IUPUI beat UI and Rutgers Newark tied Rutgers New Brunswick, Colorado Denver tied Colorado Boulder, Iowas State is only .1 behind Iowa, tying U of Indiana, and so on. I don’t know why this is, perhaps anti-elitism?</p>

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<p>^^It’s not anti-elitism, it’s anti-intelligence. Too many HSC are not qualified to be rating colleges and universities. That’s the only way to explain why IUPUI is ranked as highly as it is by them and above superior schools.</p>

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<p>I agree 100%. They are only focused on the kids in high school now and getting their applications out. They pay no attention to any of the colleges that the kids are actually going into. It’s not like they recommend colleges to the students.</p>

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<p>The IUPUI data point struck me as an obvious outlier, but I view the college counselor rankings differently. </p>

<p>The USNWR rankings have become so en-grained in our thinking, that for many of us, they become “the single version of the truth” – of course Michigan is better than Wisconsin, Wisconsin is better than Indiana, and so on. </p>

<p>I believe that getting, and integrating, other viewpoints is very healthy. It allows schools that have been pigeon-holed into a narrow range in the rankings to get another look. An excellent example of this is Kansas University. An excellent school, but one that is, IMO, lower in the rankings than where it belongs, and overlooked by many due to its location. However, at least last year, the counselor rankings had it much higher, and that was one factor in my D strongly considering it. </p>

<p>Rather than assuming that many high school counselors do not know what they are doing, I would say they may have some insights that others have overlooked. As long as their input is not over-weighted, I view it as a very useful data point that should be included. As a parent, I have a lot of respect and appreciation for what they do, the value they add, and the very difficult job they have, particularly in larger, under-funded urban public high schools.</p>

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<p>rwehavingfunyet, while it is true that USNWR is overused in this country and needs more competitors, it is not just USNWR that holds those rankings to be true. If you look in other rankings, even from other countries (though they tend to be more graduate focused), such as the Academic Rankings of World Universities and the Times Higher Education QS rankings, you will still find that Michigan>Wisconsin>Indiana (and you will never find that Virginia Tech>Minnesota>Illinois). You will also find many of the councilors’ top 200, and even a few of the top 100 schools aren’t in the Princeton Review’s 371 Best Colleges. This doesn’t happen with the USNWR rankings.</p>

<p>That said, maybe the GC’s have different priorities than we are used to in rankings schools. I think the USNWR rankings, while flawed, will give a general idea of the order of schools in which a really smart person who hasn’t chosen a major would want to go. Excluding Tech schools, they start out pretty much with schools that have strong programs in almost all major fields then get thinner, until by the end of the top 100 where they become a mixture of schools with a combination of pretty strong and pretty weak programs and those with overall above average programs, but no real standouts (except maybe in uncommon majors). The counselors may be instead looking at overall experience and good fit for the majority of students (outside the obvious ones great schools like MIT). That is why humanities and social science schools do better than science schools, and schools with a lot of big or TA taught classes do poorly, even if they do offer smart fellow students and faculty, so your classes can move quicker and cover more. I don’t think most students follow up to the point that counselors can see which schools prepare students best for hitting the ground running in their career or grad school, so the students’ early impressions of schools and even visits will be most important for the counselors’ personal experience with these schools. Hence why some schools with great grad school placement and great price like Stony Brook get 3.6 rated alongside University of Montana and some Texas A&M satellite campuses (although the fact that Stony Brook’s strongest programs are in the hard sciences doesn’t help either).</p>

<p>The councelors’ job is to get these students into the schools they choose, not choose it for them. Especially at top high schools, I think the students and the parents will do more of the choosing themselves, with the GC typically just providing some suggestions, but mostly focusing on tips on the application.</p>

<p>As far as Kansas University goes, they were outranked by their instate competitor, Kansas State, by the counselors for 2011. In contrast, USNWR rankings put Kansas State at 132 and KU at 104 (in the GC ranking they were tied for 98, which means basically 98-121st place if they were a little more specific). I don’t know about other past scores, but in 2009 KU was ranked 89th in USNWR, so they had at one time, not even very long ago, been better recognized in the USNWR scores than they are today in counselor rankings.</p>

<p>Anyway, I don’t think that most counselors don’t know what they are doing (though as mentioned, I think they are more experienced with what comes after colleges are being selected than during), but I do wish they gave a sample of the GCs’ comments and perspectives when they were rating colleges, like Princeton Review does when they question students about their colleges, so we can see if their opinions were relevant to us.</p>

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<p>The counselor rankings are indeed a horrible idea. Even though I went to an excellent high school, the advising was absolutely horrible and probably adversely affected many students with just plain inaccurate information (like consistently and wrongly articulating “FAFSA” as “FASFA” to parents and students). To see why that’s a problem, look at the “sponsored link” on Google when you enter “FASFA”. Seriously, almost every counselor I have ever come across at the high school level has been dumb as a brick - especially when it came to guidance in careers in STEM fields.</p>

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<p>According to the HS Counselors, Judson College in Marion, AL, which accepts over 80% of applicants, has middle 50% SAT CR+M scores of 1010-1180, a freshman retention rate of 54%, a 6-year graduation rate of 46.3%, and has a US News PA rating of 2.0 from its peers, is better than Haverford College which accepts about 23% of its applicants, has middle 50% SAT CR+M scores of 1300-1480, and has a US News PA rating of 4.0 from its peers. Go figure.</p>

<p>An outlier, you say? Well, the HS counselors also rated Birmingham-Southern (admit rate = 59%, SAT middle 50% 1030-1170, PA 3.0) equal with Haverford. They rated Bates, Pitzer, Bucknell, Macalester, New College of Florida, Occidental, Sewanee-The University of the South, and Trinity ahead of Haverford, a perennial top 10 finisher in US News. They also rated those same schools ahead of Carleton, another perennial US News top 10 finisher. They rated 35 schools ahead of Washington & Lee which usually finishes in the US News top 15. They rated 46 schools ahead of Hamilton which usually finishes in the US News top 25. I’m not saying US News is gospel, but I defy you to produce any objective measure by which any of those other schools can be ranked ahead of Haverford, or Carleton, or Washington & Lee, or Hamilton. Can’t be done. These are ratings based on blind ignorance, nothing more and nothing less. As bad a ranking as US News was before the addition of the HS counselor rankings, the addition of this nonsense undercuts any remaining shred of credibility US News had left.</p>

<p>By and large HS counselors know the top colleges in their own state, a small number of big name national universities, an even smaller number of well known LACs, and the most popular schools among their own students which tend to be strongly regional in character. They’re deeply unqualified individually and as a group to make these kinds of assessments on a national basis. The HS counselors didn’t rate Haverford (or Carleton, or Washington & Lee, or Hamilton) so low because they thought poorly of these schools, They ranked them so low because most of them had never heard of these schools, because few people from their own regions apply. But a lot of HS counselors in the South–a region with few LACs and a region from which relatively few students apply to Northeastern or Midwestern LACs—had heard of Judson and Birmingham-Southern and Sewanee, and so they probably racked up lots of votes in their home region. Nothing wrong with that on one level. But you sure don’t want to rely on that sort of ignorance to guide your decision about a college.</p>

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<p>^^ Judson College ahead of Haverford??? C’mon people, that’s just plain BANANAS!!! They might as well simply pick names out of a hat.</p>

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<p>bclintonk hit the nail on the head. Looking over the methodology used by US News, there was a 21% OVERALL rate of reviewing a particular college. One would probably guess that while #1 Harvard and Williams in their respective categories would sit at a near 100% response rate, schools like Haverford and Washington and Lee could easily have seen response rates at low as 5-10%. Any statistician would have a field day tearing apart the legitimacy of these numbers.</p>

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<p>The process/implementation clearly needs some work. Some of the outlier data points (of which there appear to be several) admittedly go beyond insightful, and instead appear to be just plain odd/wrong. I agree that the data is really only meaningful with enough data points, and smaller/regional schools should be handled differently. </p>

<p>That said, I stand by my viewpoint that feathering in alternate viewpoints (such as high school counselor rankings) that challenge the status quo is a welcome addition.</p>

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<p>I don’t know what sorts of GCs you’ve been dealing with, but GCs at my school are extremely well informed. Obviously they wouldn’t be able to give a fair assessment of every single school in the US, but they certainly know a lot.</p>

<p>When I told my GC that I was interested in a specific type of double degree (and I didn’t even know if such a thing existed), she came up with five excellent programs I would never have thought of on the spot.</p>

<p>And if this is the type of guidance councelor US News is polling, I don’t see the problem.</p>

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<p>Likewise, do you seriously think a guidance counselor in some teensy, mostly rural New England state knows the difference between Grinnell and Macalester?</p>

<p>“Fly-over” presumes the world revolves around the coasts, which it doesn’t, Luckie Starchild.</p>

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<p>I also think that bclintock hit the nail on the head. </p>

<p>Obviously there are actual GCs who are intelligent and knowledgeable about a wide range of schools. Sybbie and Carolyn from CC spring to mind. But the relative ratings of the LACs cited here show that most of them are incompetent to make this kind of judgement.</p>

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<p>A point related to L Starchild - are any of the peer assessment scores, either from colleges or high schools, regionally limited? How well informed are colleges and high school counselors in CA about midwest LACs? Or how much do the poor folks stranded in flyover states know about the cool cats on the coast?</p>

<p>It would seem reasonable to limit the peer assesment questions to schools in your own region. Otherwise you will likely be relying on secondhand info to respond to the questionnaire.</p>