<p>Of course no one is in charge, including you. Therefore, I invite you to do the same.</p>
<p>We all have our complaints. Mine happens to be people who make the same tired points in every thread, and I’ve seen nothing on CC that prompts that behavior more than the mere mention of rank.</p>
<p>Time for the OP to chime in ;).</p>
<p>Yes. I am very interested in knowing the reasons in turning down a clearly higher ranked college for a lower ranked one. I used the word clearly because I didn’t want to bog down the thread with Princeton versus Yale or Barnard versus Macalester hair splitting. I intentionally did not give a reference ranking system to avoid the controversy in picking one. Each poster is implicitly telling everyone that s/he had a personal ranking system that determined the eventual winner, and that s/he recognizes there is at least another ranking system that ranked colleges differently, hence the post.</p>
<p>The stories have already had an impact on me. There are factors at play here that I wasn’t aware of but should, and I thank everyone for contributing. Please continue to share your stories and perspectives so more people can benefit.</p>
<p>MS, I’m not the one “tearing out my hair” at the mention of the word rank, or making the assumption that some are doing a daily search for the word rank[ yeah right] or trying to steer a public forum with sarcastic remarks toward other posters ina narrow, confined direction because that direction is the only thing you are interested in reading,
so I will continue to stay on this forum without your permission.</p>
<p>Nuh-uh, you’re not allowed.</p>
<p>nice try…</p>
<p>So here is my Son’s story- He turned down Dartmouth, Brown, Chicago[ twice] Wash U, Pomona, Carleton, and 6 other colleges for the Calif sunshine, the chance to work with some top seismologists at SCEC at USC and a full Tuition scholarship. And he is very happy there with a great group of really smart friends.
There, are you happy now?</p>
<p>yes, emory is rated quite a bit higher than tulane on USNWR.</p>
<p>My son’s decision was based on cost and the fact that he knows he will go to graduate school. He declined NYU, G-town, BC, Cornell, UVA to attend Bentley University on full tuition scholarship. He will incur no loans for his undergrad degree which was a big factor for him and we are paying the Room & Board. He also really likes it there, he is doing really well in his classes and said numerous times since Sept 1 that he made the right decision.</p>
<p>menloparkmom, I suspect that the growing regard for USC over the years is partly due to others like your son choosing it over so-called “better” universities. Considering the weather, the strength of the alumni network, the big-time sports if that’s your thing, and the overall strength of academics, it strikes me as a perfectly good alternative to Dartmouth, etc. Hearing that your son is happy there does indeed make me happy.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall Tulane being a USNWR top-twenty school before Katrina hit and the school closed for a year. Is that right?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is an emerging theme, and it’s really making an impression on me. It gives me the idea to start a new thread…</p>
<p>Tulane gets unduly penalized by the weighting of the “peer assessment” in the US News rankings. There were good discussions about it in the Tulane forum.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tulane-university/619240-any-predictions-tulanes-usnwr-rankings-new-stats.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tulane-university/619240-any-predictions-tulanes-usnwr-rankings-new-stats.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tulane-university/731725-preliminary-2009-acceptance-rate.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tulane-university/731725-preliminary-2009-acceptance-rate.html</a></p>
<p>Tulane’s mid range SAT scores are comprable to Emorys, IIRC.</p>
<p>4 years ago USC was ranked about 40th in USNWR, so it has been “climbing the rankings”[ oops used the “r” word!] considerably since then. Son has always intended to go to grad school, so trying to balance UG academics and saving as much on tuition $$, especially given that he has 2 self employed parents was going to be a factor in any admission decision he was going to make.</p>
<p>Thanks for the interesting links, jym626.</p>
<p>
And you have the only opinion that counts?</p>
<p>Obviously – though you can’t see it – some people turn down a higher ranked college for a lesser one because they don’t care / don’t know about / and/or don’t accept whatever ‘ranking’ system is in place. </p>
<p>The OP asked “why” – not accepting/believing/agreeing with the ranking is often part of the “why”. </p>
<p>Why so hostile?</p>
<p>Actually, calmom, I don’t think what you just wrote is accurate at all. Without doing a head count, my impression is that in most cases people DO generally accept/believe the ranking differences when they are large, but had some compelling non-ranking reason for their decisions. The most frequent, unsurprisingly, is finances, but strength in particular majors/programs, weather, location, and size also come into play a lot. (Instances of less-than-clear ranking differences shouldn’t count.)</p>
<p>When people say “graduate school” in a thread like this, do they really mean “graduate school” </p>
<p>[Graduate</a> school - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_school]Graduate”>Postgraduate education - Wikipedia) </p>
<p>or do they mean “professional school”? </p>
<p>[Professional</a> school - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_school]Professional”>Professional development - Wikipedia) </p>
<p>Usually, a graduate student in a STRONG program will have full funding, so there is not much to save money for. Most professional school programs are quite expensive, so there is reason to save money for those, if those programs are a definite goal of the student.</p>
<p>
If posters succeed in driving away those who express opinions they don’t like or approve of, then you are going to form an “impression” about “most cases” based on an artificially screened set of data. CC already is an artificial, ranking-obsessed environment – also with a much stronger lean toward academics than real-world college choices. By that I mean that many students choose schools because of strength in specific areas like arts or athletics, which tends to skew very differently than rankings; to others, geography is the paramount consideration.</p>
<p>My D turned down UC Irvine, University of Maryland and UC Davis (I think it was within a ranking or two) to go to Boston University. Though ranked lower - not by much, but still - she wanted to go away from home (California - Irvine is just down the freeway from us), and she wanted an urban environment. Ranking was of no importance to her, and she couldn’t be happier. Prsonally I don’t think rankings mean much of anything if you don’t love the school, and besides Ivies, who cares?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah, but you see, I agree with the people who whine that rankings are subjective, unimportant, blah blah blah. I agree with them. This has nothing to do with silencing the opposition, and everything to do with sticking to the topic at hand. Someone asked a question. Let’s try to answer that question. There are already numerous threads all about the merits, or lack thereof, of college rankings. We should argue there, not here.</p>
<p>Calmom, I don’t know what, if anything we are disagreeing about. This thread is a perfectly nice compendium of reasons why people do not use academic rankings as their sole college choice criterion. Most of the time, it’s hard to disagree with them, or at least hard to think that they made a terrible mistake. As such, it has some real corrective value for people whose first tendency is to go for the highest ranked college. I know some such people in real life, and I see lots more here, especially students. Threads like this validate other choices, and tell you that it’s alright to choose U of Beach or Flagship State or Pastoral College without necessarily having to argue, to yourself or others, that somehow USNWR missed some factors that make it superior to Princeton in terms of the factors that rankings consider.</p>
<p>As for other types of rankings – we get PLENTY of sports rankings, thank you, and they are not superior in quality to any others (although on occasion they are at least testable). And I think people debate specific program ranks even more fiercely than they debate general numbers, although there (as in the overall rankings) small differences mean nothing, and sometimes apparently large differences also mean nothing (or mean nothing meaningful to a specific person).</p>