What if there were no rankings

My daughter created her own ranking based on what was important to her. That said, I think being able to google the top ABET accredited undergrad engineering programs was a starting point. It also helped her argue with extended family who gave her grief about not applying to the family alma mater because the OOS public was ranked higher in her field.

Growing up in Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley), I had general ideas about college. My dad was a college grad (UConn), but not my mom. My older brother was attending UCLA. I had an uncle who was a college professor at Caltech. Beyond that I knew the names of lots of colleges because I watched football on TV.

Perhaps where I was the most clueless was on the national testing regime. My parents were no help. The first time I took the SAT was in my senior year. That was also the first time I even saw the exam. Prep for it? A good night’s sleep. I did OK, but also retook it and did better. I’m sure my scores didn’t help me very much. However, I was 5th in my senior class in GPA, a “star” athlete in a minor sport (track), and had advice about my essays from the smartest person in my household: my mother, who had been salutatorian of her high school class way back when – though she raised 5 children and did not attend college. My dad was an aeronautical engineer (aerospace as a later term), but not clued in about the college scene.

My most valuable source of information about colleges was my Caltech uncle. We had a sit-down session and he named lots of colleges that he thought might fit me. Next step: go to the public library, find addresses of these colleges, write to them for “information and application forms.” So I had quite a few college catalogues to work with, and began to sort out where to apply to. I would have been happy going to Berkeley (I didn’t want to settle for UCLA, and I didn’t like the snobbishness of USC).

Caltech was where my next younger brother ended up, majoring in physics, in which he ultimately earned a doctorate. In the end three of my four siblings attended UCLA. One went to Caltech. I went to Reed. I only first heard Reed’s name from my uncle, who told me he almost went there himself. I only first saw the campus when I arrived by train for freshman orientation. It was a good choice for me. My parents paid the $1,240 freshman year tuition as well as the $600 room and board. Reed college for $2,000 a year! (Adjusted for general inflation of the dollar, that would be $16,700 today. What a bargain.)

If there were no rankings, there would be thousands less threads here about picking colleges based on ranking…and that would be a good thing IMO :slight_smile:

@socaldad2002 I am well aware of the criteria that USNWR utilizes. I did not mean to imply that we ignored every data point that is used to create the rankings. We simply made a decision to pick and choose the criteria that we felt were important and to create our own spreadsheet (not ranked) to use. For example we did look at things like freshman retention rate, academic stats, graduation rate, endowment per student (which can be found in guide books or online) but we did not feel that the peer assessment was particularly valuable (based on discussions with friends who are admission officers/academics). We also added to our spreadsheet things we or our kids were particularly interested in such as student population size, location (urban/suburban/rural), distance from home, etc.

Additionally, in our searches we looked at some schools that would have been on the national university, LAC, and regional university rankings so it was also easier for us to have one spreadsheet instead of referring to multiple rankings.

We did go through the USNWR lists quickly to be sure we were not missing any schools we should visit/add to our list. I think that the value of rankings is to help people quickly get a sense of what level/tier a college may be at. Rankings are one of many tools available in a college search – people can utilize the various tools in whatever way they see fit. I believe we are in agreement on that point.

My initial comment was to say that the rankings did not change our search process or impact any final choices for my kids. I am not looking to debate this – I am not telling everyone to do what we did – I am just stating what worked for us.

When I applied to college there were no rankings that I or any of my classmates in my rural central Oregon HS were aware of. But even without formal numerical rankings we still knew that HYPSM were viewed as the very top in prestige and quality just as they are today. The service academies, Caltech, and the rest of the Ivy League were also highly regarded, although I doubt that any kids in my HS could name all eight members of the Ivy League or tell you in which towns or event states say Dartmouth or Brown were located. Berkeley was viewed as a formerly great school that had been trashed by hippies.

The main ranking question that most kids were concerned with was Oregon vs.Oregon State. There were fierce partisans on either side and the issue never got settled. And the annual football game (“The Civil War”) was seen as one more round of the perpetual argument.

We seem to be doing something similar to @happy1 . There are elements that are a large part of the rankings that mean nothing to us, such as peer assessment. That makes up about 22% of the rankings. Muhlenberg gets dinged pretty badly here. On the other hand, we do care about retention and graduation rates, student/teacher ratio, and a few others. Even within these metrics though, you have to be careful. One school on her list had what seemed to us to be a fairly low graduation rate. When we dug deeper, it seems to be related to the fact that the school takes in a very large percentage of pell grant recipients. 35% of the class. Thats a huge number. Those kids often have financial and family issues which make it harder to graduate.

Then there are metrics which may actually cut the other way for a particular student. The rankings assume the smaller class size the better. However, some kids actually prefer a slightly larger class. So the information is important but the rankings may be far off as they apply to the individual.

I still don’t see the difference between looking at rankings and looking at admissions percentages, scores, etc. Those who care about going to a high-quality college that is attended by only the strongest students still will be able to screen for super-selective colleges. I see no difference between my looking only in the “most competitive” category of a Barron’s book many years ago and kids’ looking at the top 50 in US News now. In fact, both systems yield more or less the same colleges, even over 30 years apart.

GJ, but at the right college for any of our kids, retention, on the whole, doesn’t tell how our kids will do. I knew that, in the right place, D1 would stick. And for various reasons, we weren’t going to give D2 the option to laze her way through to a degree. And between DH and me, we had a great sense of peer assessment (meaning, our own, based on familiarity with a variety, not just the obvious schools.)

There are so many schools that are good. So many PhDs xommitted to their fields who, for various reasons, end up teaching at all sorts of colleges. My local directional, eg, has some strong faculty, some top programs, as much stretch as a kid wants. If mine were interested in one of those programs, the competitive national ranking fades in importance. My keywords were stretch and empowerment.

And USNews doesn’t consider bullets like administrative logjam or too preppy/not inclusive or the number of kids who disappear on weekends. The number of Pells doesn’t matter so much, imo, if you find a college committed to learning and academic support (another factor not ranked.)

More individuals would read the Common Data Set, the student comments in The Princeton Review and visit the departments of their intended major(s). Researching fit and academic quality is not difficult, just time consuming, but a life lesson for a prospective college student. Most families want the quick and easy way to complete the process. It is relatively easy to ignore the few bragging about rankings.

Back in the early 70’s when I was applying to colleges we just knew which schools were the top/elite schools. Part of that is because my Mom went to Seven Sister college and my dad an Ivy. Being from the NE, we also knew all the top LACs. I also was at a private high schools, where most kids went to these schools. We didn’t need ranking lists.

Many schools today which are much more difficult to get into (Emory, NYU, GW for example) were the schools where C students went.

@TheGreyKing A couple of comments…

–I agree with you that rankings can be useful to help a person quickly get a sense of what tier a college may be in.

– When looking at any ranking (USNWR or otherwise) it is important to understand the metrics underlying the ranking. As I noted in our case we did not feel all of the metrics that USNWR rankings utilized were things we cared about/felt were particularly valid.

–In terms of comparing the way people use USNWR rankings to the old Barron’s (which I had in my day as well LOL) the main difference is that the USNWR rankings are numerical, not by broad category. What concerns me is when some people blindly say that (for example) the #3 ranked school must by definition be better than the #10 ranked school without examining the details, what is the right fit for the applicant etc.

@thegreyking

At the very top, this may be correct. However, as in my Bard/Muhlenberg example, this can lead you to exclude some great schools that might otherwise tick all the right boxes. This is due to the fact that selectivity is not the only metric.

For example. Bard college ranked 46 (within the top 50) accepts 56% of applicants. Muhlenberg ranked 71 (outside the top 50) accepts 48% of applicants. So that ranking cutoff screens out a lot of potentially excellent schools.

If selectivity or average gpa or test scores is the student’s important metric, why not just screen for that instead of using rankings as a poor proxy?

So, don’t exclude them.
You know, right, that so many kids really like their experience at Bard, Muhlenberg, and more. They come out well educated and prepared for the next steps.

And how many they accept is a factor of yield. Lots of bright kids who apply to Bard may choose another college, thus affecting the number the college takes, to make their matriculate numbers. We have to believe every kid who does get an admit letter is fully qualified, pleased the adcoms.

In some circles, the joke is: only Harvard knows the vast majority of kids will enroll. Even the other Ivies can wonder if Kid X will accept or choose H or Y.

Adding. Among the factors I do think matter are, eg, lab facilities for the ardent STEM kid. Not so much now, but not so long ago, some facilities were markedly less updated. That matters in that world. Career services is sometimes hard to assess, but it matters that there’s an active, funded group helping kids connect. (But not, to me, how much the average new grad earns; that’s a matter of major, opps in one’s own field, willingness to go where the work is, etc.)

If a kid is interested in creative or analytical writing, the presence of a program or visiting authors can be a boon. A policy that prioritizes only research opps to upperclassmen would restrict our driven lowerclassmen. Similar in club roles or theater/music opps. These “day to day” realities mattered more to us than which colleges were top 20 or top 50.

But also, in line with knowing our kids, mine wanted community engagement (service opps.) After their academic and social interests, it was a major factor. No media ranking tells that the way exploring a college does.

@lookingforward I couldn’t agree more. This is the problem I have with people using the rankings as a screening tool or cutoff. It doesn’t always capture what is most important to any particular student. How many people will actually dig into the rankings to realize they are using metrics that are meaningless to their individual situation? How many will just do what @TheGreyKing described and stick to the top 50?

We agree that being arbitrary is so limiting.

In many ways, saying it needs to be in the top XX range is kind of dismissive (you’ll all forgive me for that, I hope.) When D1 thought that 60-ish college would be great for her interests, it was about the profs and the courses. At the time, we didn’t know it was a 60-ish. We knew she’d do well. (Needs to be said, she’s a successful social type and knew that, within some parameters, she’d do well socially wherever she chose.)

Now, that Ivy that rejected her would have been a supreme experience. But not for the ranking or the fame. Rather, for her interests, they offered what would have been an unlimited acadeic buffet, across several department lines that interested her. It was not her first choice.

The other point is that you individually may not care about rankings but your fellow peer group, future employers or graduate colleges may consider it when deciding which colleges they, for example, give internships to or which applicants have been sufficiently prepared for graduate school. Again, rankings are one factor but they certainly are not meaningless.

I think the ready availability of so much more information about colleges these days, as well as the prestige rankings, has changed the process of college search a lot. For sure young people want to attend colleges that fit them on several dimensions. They also often look at college as mainly a stepping stone to a career. But to me – and to my kids – fit, not prestige, was the main thing.

To add to my previous comment about my choosing college without reference to “rankings,” the Caltech professor uncle who sat down to talk college with me had made a prejudgment. He knew I was a good student. He asked me “How old are you?” When I answered “Sixteen,” he said, “Well congratulations! You can look forward to attending school for the next 10 years.”

That was a shock to me. He’d pegged me for an academic career. I went to an excellent academically-oriented college (Reed) and after graduation went into a PhD program at UWisconsin. By the time I emerged from my PhD program, I was 27. Almost exactly as my uncle had forecast. He had directed me to an undergraduate college that would thoroughly prepare me for graduate school and “a life of the mind.” I wasn’t looking for the highest “ranked” programs (rankings as such weren’t available then). I was looking for “fit” to my abilities and possible future career.

In my senior year in college I wavered between whether to go to law school or a doctoral program. So I applied to both, and was accepted to Stanford, Chicago, and UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) law schools – as well as to Wisconsin and Princeton for doctoral programs. I chose Wisconsin as the best fit to my intended area of PhD study. I’ve had a long and productive academic career.

So how did I pass this experience on to my children? My son had zero interest in college rankings and guidebooks. Perhaps he’d inherited something! He told my wife and me that he wanted to attend a college “where it’s safe to be a thinker.” We picked all the colleges on his list, based on our assessment of his abilities and interests. It was a diverse list of public and private colleges and universities. He attended UChicago, a college that he’d never visited until he attended “accepted students day” in Spring of his senior year in high school. We knew it was a good fit to his intellectual interests and that he could go in any direction after that. I urged him to give science a chance. He chose economics. Although he gave some thought to law and MBA degrees, he decided not to go to graduate school,

My daughter wanted to be an artist and only applied to stand-alone art colleges. But she spent virtually no time reading the online literature on colleges. She improved her skills and her portfolio by attending the summer programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. She wanted to attend college “in a real city in the East.” She attended RISD, and frequently visited her former classmates who were attending college in New York City. Later she went back to school, for an MBA. She now lives in NYC.

@socaldad2002 I agree that the overall quality of the school (including the quality of past people from that school who have been in a job/grad program) comes into play – but I have never heard any employment/grad school etc. decision based on the fact that one person is from the #5 ranked school and the other person is from the #9 ranked school.

Thing is, how many future neighbors or hiring managers know the diff between Swarthmore and Davidson or Carleton and USC? The dfferences are negligible. The point is the supposed rigor/depth/breadth at certain colleges. But that comes from the dept and the student, that mix.

In the end, we want out kids to be motivated, do well, be prepared for life- and have some pride. So frankly, we tried to spare them from getting too obsessive about, say, the diff between 40 and 60. Or 20 and 60. Until you get the admit, it’s moot.