I honestly wonder how student’s choices would differ if there were no rankings. What if all the elements that make up the rankings were known, but the rankings themselves disappeared. So you would still have information on selectivity, average grades and GPA, student/teacher ratio and the rest. I imagine the very top tier would still remain at the top. Those few, prestigious, well known universities would remain in everyone’s consciousness and be dream schools, but what about the vast majority lower down? Would students feel more free to choose a school based on fit, finances or their own research if they didn’t have to justify to themselves and others why they chose a “lower ranked” school?
Princeton names the best 382 colleges in the US, but lists them alphabetically, not in any particular order. Basically, the implication is that all these schools are reputable – go find the one that meets your needs. I think this is better. What do you all think?
Neither of my kids attended the highest ranked school they got into. One attended her safety and the other attended the 4th school in ranking on her accepted list. So for us, it wasn’t a big driver.
I know people like to hate on the ranking systems. But in some ways it was helpful. It was fairly easy to figure out where my kids “topped out” — how high in the rankings were they realistically able to get into? Then looking at the rankings from there on down helped identify reasonable schools for them to look at. Below a certain rank, I knew we should look very carefully to see why the ranking was low and if it was a deal breaker for us. So there is a certain sorting & summarizing in the process that was helpful to us.
If there were no rankings it would be just like back in the mid 70’s when I was applying to colleges. With no rankinga and no internet, marketing materials and course catalogs at the library were the main ways I could find investigate schools. You had to pick a school based on whether you thought it fit you, not what its ranking was.
There were no rankings. You relied on your guidance counselor (for better or worse), your parents, and the librarians. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t (the smartest girl in my HS-- the ONLY girl in AP Chem my year, and she got a 5) who ended up in a non-BSN nursing program. I’m not sure that would happen now- someone would suggest " a higher ranked program" which at least would have tracked her to a four year college degree. Or the dozens of really capable and academically oriented girls from my neighborhood who went to teacher’s colleges (even the ones who did not want to become teachers).
I don’t think it would effect my kids much, if at all. But it seems rankings can occasionally be helpful for families who think the only good schools are ones they’ve heard of. Sometimes seeing the ranking list with schools not everyone has heard of can actually make a positive difference.
If we went back to the 70’s, many folks would start making less informed choices. Once you start building tools to compare colleges, you create a “ranking system”. Even before US News, we had an informal ranking system in place.
We may not like that colleges are being ranked, but we are enjoying the benefits that come from being able to compare universities and programs.
I think it would be more helpful if the rankings were “buckets” or “tiers” instead of numbered rankings (knowing full well that schools would game that, too, and it wouldn’t sell as many magazines/generate clicks.)
I think there needs to be some kind of easy and more or less reliable way to compare schools.
In the 1970s, it was difficult to get basic information out of the schools on things like graduation rates or student loan debt. Nowadays, schools are required to provide that information to students. I think that means more informed choices for students.
Agree with #2 and #4 above, with some additional feedback from my experience —if there were no rankings, as was the case when I applied to colleges in the early 1980s, you relied on not only the guidance counselor and parents but also on the word of mouth from neighbors and friends in your community who gave feedback on the colleges that their kids attended. i think that was the most helpful in retrospect. My family and I never consulted our librarian. And thankfully we recognized our guidance counselor was not too good, but only because his views on certain colleges flew against “word of mouth” of the excellent education and experiences that many neighbors and friends’ kids experienced at the colleges he dissuaded us against. While the Princeton Review Top 382 colleges (and also Edward Fisk’s Guide) are good resources, they omit some great schools—for example, SUNY Buffalo and Michigan State are not in the Princeton top 382 and they should be). I also like rankings in the USNews&World Report because it includes over 1600 colleges and universities and ranks them not only based on objective criteria but also breaks them down between national university, national liberal arts college, regional universities and regional colleges in the north, west, south and Midwest. And it has a detailed Directory of up to date Facts and Figures for each college/university listed. College search with or without rankings is truly Caveat Emptor—buyers beware (and get informed)!
I don’t know how many parents back in the 70’s even knew if the guidance counselor was “not too good”. You went in for your meeting, you came out with a bunch of brochures and a list scrawled on the back of one of them, and that was the input of the “professional”. My parents were college educated so we were ahead of the game, but my friends who were first gen really didn’t get help. And mind you- for the boys (depending on their draft number) it was literally life or death to get an educational deferment- both undergrad and then afterward for grad if someone didn’t want to serve.
As crazy as the current mania for ranking is, I still think it’s better most of the time. Even parents who didn’t go to college themselves can see that comparing Framingham State to Carnegie Mellon is apples/oranges, or figuring out if U Mass Lowell is “better” than Williams is the wrong question to ask (they are more different than they are similar, despite being in Massachusetts which is mostly what people understood in the 70’s).
When it comes to top colleges, not that many people care about the ranking per se. I mean, no one cares how high or low MIT is ranked because MIT is still MIT. Same thing with a handful of schools. IMO the ranking comes into play when there is a significant difference in the rankings between two schools. For example, if one school is ranked 140 and another is ranked 6th, then I would think that fact could or would be important, but if one school is ranked 8th and another school is ranked 4th, who really cares? Or if one school is ranked 100th and another is ranked 80th, I don’t think that would matter all that much.
I think the ranking is helpful if the ranking reasonably reflects the prestige and/or how good the school is, but even if there is no ranking people are going to know which colleges are prestigious, just as most people know Benz is more sought after than Camry even though there is no ranking per se for cars. In this sense, I don’t think ranking is all that important in the selection process. I mean, if you are the kind of person who is debating between Princeton and Stanford because of the ranking difference, that is laughable, or if you are debating between UCSD and UC Irvine because of the ranking difference, that too doesn’t make sense. Or between Univ of Kentucky and Univ of Arkansas because of the ranking difference. You get the idea.
Often, aside from the important deciding factor of finance and maybe distance, people choose a specific school because of the way they perceive one or two things which are often not logical or all that important in the scheme of things, i.e., based on very subjective reasons. Some kids will choose to attend one school because his or her close friends go there, or is closer to home or has better weather or a nicer campus or better food or better parties etc. Nothing wrong with it. Heck, had I known Cornell was located at such a cold place, I would not have gone there. But then, I really had no choice because it was by far the highest ranked college and was almost free to attend.
Do you need rankings to differentiate these schools? In my hypothetical, you still have all the underlying data: Admit rate, GPA, test scores, student-teacher ratio, etc.
@gallentjill In my post, I do touch upon this. I conclude that you really don’t need the ranking per se because people are going to know the difference between the two schools, just as people are able to tell that MIT is a darn good school no matter its ranking. The very fact that US News college ranking flip flops the rankings from one year to next shows that small differences in annual rankings is irrelevant.
Rankings can provide valuable information if you don’t take them too literally. I’m not sure my daughter would have applied to her school if it hadn’t been fairly highly ranked. It’s a school that’s not instantly recognized in our area. So, knowing that it was a top-30ish national university provided some reassurance and made it “worth a look” when she was planning college visits. She fell in love with the school and ultimately chose it over more well-known schools with higher rankings.
@Elliemom But this is actually my question. Your daughter would not have applied if it had not been highly ranked, even if she like everything about it. I suppose the ranking provides a level of credibility. If there were no rankings, people would probably use selectivity as a proxy and it would turn out about the same.
Both of our kids applied to colleges without ever reading a copy of USNews or any other rankings. We never knew the rankings of the colleges before they applied and chose where to matriculate. Frankly, the rankings didn’t matter to us.