I think everyone saying “students would do the research anyway” is vastly misjudging the majority of students. Just as blossom pointed out that most students aren’t vying for the top schools, even among the group of students who ARE vying for the top schools, a lot of them don’t bother researching anything about the schools they’re applying to. Those of you who are thinking right now “well MY kid did,” congrats, you have a very unusual kid. Even high-achieving high school students aren’t always interested in spending their free time poring over giant encylopedic-like tomes describing hundreds of colleges. That’s why so many of them just choose their list of schools based on the rankings list – it’s a handy shortcut.
So frankly, I think what would happen without rankings is that the schools that are the best at marketing themselves – which probably means those that are willing to spend the most money on it – will become the most popular. Marketing works. And most teenagers are highly susceptible to clever marketing.
So I think the ranking system is worth it, if only because it is a relatively impartial assessment of how prestigious a school is.
“I could change the rankings considerably simply by changing the weightings. The tippy top would probably still be the tippy top, but the constituents of the top 50 would certainly change.”
Exactly, this is probably the second biggest problem with USNWR rankings, change the criteria and a school at 25 could be 15 without anything changing in the school itself. The biggest problem is that all the factors can and have been manipulated.
I always use ratings on TripAdvisor to help me pick hotels. I sometimes use ratings to help pick restaurants when I travel.
Ratings and rankings have their place. They are a starting place for a search, just not an ending place!
The first aspect of college “fit” is a place where the level of the educational reputation, the resources, and the ability level of the students match your vision for your college education. Rankings help here.
But that is not where it stops. The next step is combing through college guides and reading up on each college’s environment. But where do you start reading in a college guide with 272 or more colleges in it? You start from the rankings lists!
Then, you read up on colleges in the guides, on CollegeConfidential and its ilk, and on the colleges’ own websites.
You start noticing things about environmental descriptions, such as, “I do not like the descriptions of fraternities and ‘work hard, party hard’ schools,” or, “I want to be within a six hour drive of home,” or “I don’t like the sound of urban universities with undefined campuses.” You start visiting schools that interest you, and you narrow it further: “I like small liberal arts colleges more than I like most mid-sized universities and a lot more than I like huge universities,” and “I like rural colleges best,” and “I want to play on a club tennis team,” and “I would like there to be a strong freshman orientation program and a real sense of community in the dorms.”
The search ends with considerations of “fit.” But it has to start somewhere. And finding colleges that admit students at your own level of competitive ability- your scores, your GPA, your drive- is important. That is a bigger part of fit than anything else. (It is not just snobbery to say that a top student at their high school would be more challenged and enjoy conversations with their peers more at a high-ranked Amherst or Williams than at a lower-ranked CW Post or Molloy. It is true!). You also need to know what is a reach, a match, a target for YOU. The schools that align with each of these levels often cluster together on the major rankings lists.
College rankings and users ratings on TripAdvisor (or similar sites) are very different. For hotels, there’re objective measures and a typical user would have experiences in multiple hotels. For colleges, very few have experiences with more than one college. I’m fine with surveys that identify a college’s strengths and weaknesses in any given field or area, but I have problem with the process of aggregating all these survey results into a single number – a college’s numerical ranking. Americans like simplicity, so a single numerical ranking sells magazines, newspapers, etc. But that single number is a distortion. It causes many colleges to play the ranking game, and more regrettably, it misleads many students and their parents.
1NJ- other than basic cleanliness and security I don’t know that hotels have objective measurements. I just stayed in a bed and breakfast which gets rave reviews on Trip Advisor and such- I thought it was horrible. Yes it was clean, and yes, the parking lot was around the back. But after that, I disagreed with virtually everything else in the reviews. The staff people were not charming and quirky- they were irritating and unprofessional. The place was NOT suitable for someone staying on a business trip (unreliable wifi for one, no desk or surface in the room big enough for a laptop, cell service was spotty in the hotel room and not everyone is comfortable conducting a business call from the lobby especially if confidential matters are being discussed), etc. So the numerical ranking- hogwash. (It got both “best value” and “best overall” rankings for this small city). None of the reviews mentioned that you can’t get a cup of coffee before 7 am when the breakfast room opens. Fine- but if you need to detour to a Dunkin Donuts before you leave to get to a meeting, I wouldn’t call the place “best overall” for a business stay.
One persons charm is another persons hellhole.
But the difference is that nobody is stuck with a college. (if you are traveling on business in a college city the week of commencement, you may in fact get stuck with a sub-optimal hotel, as I was…since there was nothing within a 50 mile drive when I needed to reserve). So don’t pick a college based on the ranking- use the ranking as a way to create a list of places to explore further.
Who gets mislead by a number??? I don’t buy that. If your kid wants a degree in nursing, he or she isn’t applying to a college without a nursing program. Are you going to insist on a “higher ranked” college that doesn’t have what your kid is looking for? Of course not. If your kid wants to study mechanical engineering are you going to insist on a higher ranked LAC that doesn’t offer engineering? No you are not.
The rankings are a guide but nobody gets stuck or misled (unlike hotels, sadly).
Lol, tripsdvisor is more like students review dot com. It’s user reviews.
Zagat or a food magazune might offer a more technical review. But it’s all essentially qualitative and anecdotal.
Usnews- or anyone else purporting to tell you who’s better than- is coming up with supposed absolutes. Like really, truly, were supposed to believe Princeton is better than Harvard? Better for whom?
It behooves us to be more discerning. Not fall into the thinking that, if there’s a list, and skme methodology, it must be right. And right for me.
I respectfully disagree with almost everything in this statement. The search does not need to start with a blended single number ranking. The search can start by screening for the factors that are actually important without muddying the waters with factors that are irrelevant to your student. If selectivity and average scores and GPA are the deal breaker for a particular student, that is easy enough to screen for. That way you don’t miss excellent schools like Muhlenberg and Reed.
I also have to note that I dislike the assumption that all high achieving high school students inherently view similar stat peers as one of their top criteria. I dislike when people make categorical statements to that affect because I think it pressures kids into thinking that is what they should want. honestly, that particular metric doesn’t even crack the top ten for my fairly high achieving D2. Her friends in high school span the gamut between super high achievers and academically challenged kids. She has no problem having meaningful and interesting conversations with all of them. She is looking for a school with a certain type of student, but GPA and ACT score are not the defining characteristic.
Your high stats kid might be wonderfully challenged at Stanford. The bar is high. But it can also be soul crushing, an unnecessarily rough ride, even for some top performers.
In the older days on CC, we more often asked, big fish in a littler pond or littler fish (or ordinary fish) in a big one? We have to believe in kids, that they’re more than just a stats fit or can only work at certain levels of competition. It’s true many won’t be fulfilled at some “show up and get a degree/any degree” colleges. But that leaves many solid choices. You don’t have to look "top down. "
@blossom The strength of crowd-sourced TripAdvisor data is that they average out “noises” and biases. If you only look at a single review (or a few), your chance of being misled is certainly high. But that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to look at the data (in this case, reviews) in aggregate.
For colleges, you may not be misled by the rankings, but plenty other people are, including some on CC.
I use “TripAdvisor”/“Yelp” often when choosing hotels/restaurants, but I specifically look at the one/two star reviews on these sites to rule out places, and it is a lot more fun to read scathing reviews than glowing ones anyway. Maybe the college rankings should be given out in stars, and include annonymous rants from students/parents/alums/faculties too. :))
Even at top colleges such as Stanford, there are going to be kids who are good in certain areas and not good in other areas. If you want good GPAs, you just have to take classes in which you are good. For example, my kid will be pretty bad (I think) in STEM classes and be so-so in Humanities classes in my opinion, but I think he might do pretty ok in Social Science classes and excel in languages classes. However, I want him to take various classes in different areas so he will be a better informed person even if this will mean lower GPA. If you are the type to be soul crushed by brilliant kids, you should avoid certain schools. Lower GPA can be compensated by many traits.
Its funny cuz I say about trip advisor, “Don’t leave home without it.” But that’s a trip or an idea where we might dine, not planning our future. And when we want great Italian food or a B&B, I’m not looking at the “best,” but those that meet our wants- has a dish I favor or is in a part of town we’ll be visiting.
But following makemesmart, I notice how often places with a great rating aren’t great. Not for us. Or places we love have fewer stars than we think they deserve. And that’s how college rankings can be.
Princeton may be #1, lol, but my kid would have been unhappy there. Ymmv.
Be mindful of your descriptions of these schools, that might need a little tweaking. Phrases like “coveted” and “statistics” and “metrics” “more striking” etc all indicate those rankings factor into your views. If you really want to determine what works for your D, just visit the schools and decide what matters.
Rankings can be used to estimate selectivity – not perfectly, of course, as sometimes School A is ranked higher than but is less selective than School B… but for the most part, as you move down a rankings list, schools gradually becone less selective.
Now, I think it is worthwhile to actually look up the stats in the CDS to determine exactly how selective each prospective school is. But I suppose if time were limited and you had to quickly make a list of Reach/Match/Safety schools, you could do that by going by (for instance) the USNews National U or National LAC ranking.
I went to a very large high school in the 1980s in a southern suburban setting, and our guidance counselors barely knew the requirements for the state flagship and the leading small LAC in the state. Rich kids had more knowledge from family, poorer kids had far less. Our chief guidance counselor, as well as another at our rival high school, became infamous for dismissing the college plans of poor kids—including several I knew who went on to graduate college with engineering degrees and 3.9+ GPAs.
The ranking system is arbitrary and I don’t like it, but the old ways were far, far worse for those not attending prep schools or who had parents who attended fancy colleges. My family traditionally sent its girls to a prestigious women’s college, and guys became lawyers and preachers; most did not have that opportunity to look beyond the local college or even community college.