Hi, I am new here, and a mom. My son has applied to some UC’s as a transfer, great out of state schools, some Ivies, privates and Cal Poly.
We have this book recommended by a recruiter at Google- 384 Best Colleges. We love this book, and it really is better than so many others.
I was surprised to see that Cal POly did not make it into the book and it did not EVEN make Honorable Mention. In fact, another Cal State (I forget which one, did make honorable mention!) Why not Cal Poly?
Then I got another book from the library and that one includes other colleges I deemed less worthy and that one makes no mention of Cal Poly either.
In fact, IRL from real people in my neck of the woods, Cal Poly is THE school to go to if you’re a Biology or computer person who couldn’t afford UC’s or wanted a different campus feel, or whatever. A guy we knew that was a huge player at Apple went to Cal Poly and recommended it.
And yet, it’s just not ranked highly, even on US News and World Report.
Probably because it is neither a PhD-granting research university nor a liberal arts college, the two types of schools that the most ranking and prestige sensitive students and parents focus on, and which college ranking publications focus on as a result.
So CPSLO (and others) get put into categories that the ranking publications and people who read them pay less attention to (e.g. USNWR puts CPSLO in “regional universities - west” and ranks it #12 in that group).
I always say take rankings with a grain of salt anyway. Take USNWR for example. They rank Cal Poly as #8 in engineering programs that do not offer doctorate, but in individual departments, they rank no worse than #3. Civil is #3, AE, ME and EE are #2 and IE and Comp E are #1. In my personal opinion, rankings have done a tremendous amount of hard to secondary education.
For the same reason the US service academies (i.e. Naval Academy) don’t make many of the popular lists (i.e. WSJ, THE, etc.). Non-PhD programs usually don’t.
“A guy we knew that was a huge player at Apple went to Cal Poly and recommended it.”
I’m glad to hear Poly grads are still making a difference at Apple.
I agree with eyemgh that rankings are harmful for secondary education. There are so many great schools that don’t rank high (or even don’t make it) but have highly exceptional programs and in many cases extremely hard to get in to (i.e. Emory, Pomona, etc.). Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to affect corporate recruitment much because they seem know where they need to go to get great candidates anyways.
@emorynavy TBH, I’m not really sure how the ranking system works. Pomona grads are so highly-regarded–especially in the academic community. I’ve met a few Emory grads who went on to schools like Princeton/Yale for their PhDs.
@CalmingTea@ucbalumnus I also have these questions… what ucbalumnus says makes some sense but That doesn’t explain enough, for example, the Forbes rankings where Fordham and LMU are about the same as CP but much easier to get into and with much lower stats. Kiplinger and Money seem to rank it more appropriately.
Each ranking publication has its own criteria, and some of them may not necessarily be mainly admission selectivity and closely related measures.
Of course, if your personal ranking is based mainly on admission selectivity, you can do your own ranking approximation by looking up admission stats of the schools in question.
If you want to really peel back the skin of this specious exercise, just read Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent article “The Order of Things.”
My personal perspective is that we as Americans have lost the ability to make critical decisions for ourselves. We’ve lost our confidence and want someone to do it for us.
@julianc@CalmingTea No, I never meant Cal Poly Pomona. I was just trying to make a case using an example of two great institutions like Pomona College and Emory and how rankings don’t help when evaluating these schools (both also highly selective and are known for small class sizes with low teacher/student ratios).
With respect to entering performance on standardized exams, information I’ve seen shows Fordham students as scoring higher on average than those who attend Cal Poly. In context in the analysis below, Fordham placed 135th nationally, Cal Poly 164th.
Exactly. I’m looking at my daughter’s ranking and she wants to study English at #1 Emory #2 Pomona #3 Wellesley #4 William & Mary. I would prefer she ranks Wellesley higher but she ranks it lower only because it’s an all-girls school. smh
@merc81, Cal Poly is a different beast than Fordham or LMU. Students compete only with other students who apply for the same major. As a result, it can range from perfection like CS to pretty pedestrian like some of the other majors. It’s all about major at CP.
@eyemgh on your statement on critical thinking. While I agree critical thinking is in short supply you have to recognize that critical thinking is often a strenuous and time consuming activity. I would say that in this day and age there are some many decisions to be made and the college selection is a particularly complex one, that it would be difficult for most people to apply that logic - there is simply an overwhelming amount of information to deal with. There is a certain level of comfort and reassurance that comes with relying on “expert advice”. Not defending the rankings, I think they do a de-service to higher education, just pointing out the fact that I think it is a bit too harsh to say all Americans no longer do critical thinking or that it is easy to apply critical thinking to this particular problem
@iulianc, I agree. I didn’t state it well. Maybe I was tired.
It’s really more about looking for expert affirmation and assuming that rankings are those expert opinions. They aren’t.
It does take a lot of legwork to sort things out, especially if vetting a degree you’re not familiar with. Parents and students need to determine what is important to them. That’s hard if they don’t have a foundation. Ranking engineering programs though is very much like ranking ice cream flavors. It’s all a matter of perspective. For us, refining a list took about three years.
