8 ms·

Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students

36 points by jamesbritt 13y ago

adamzerner 13y ago
I agree, and I started a website to address this: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ http://www.collegeanswerz.com/.
- utefan001 13y ago
  Great site. Good resource!!
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  http://www.collegeanswerz.com/colleges http://www.collegeanswerz.com/colleges is returning the Heroku error page.
  - adamzerner 13y ago
    Yea, I'm working on something (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18681232/trouble-with-fixedheader http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18681232/trouble-with-fix...). It should be better in a day or two. If you want to see colleges, just use the search bar.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.
- gte910h 13y ago
  I'd say, they're not bullshit, but presenting them in such a finely graduated ranking is harmful There is a huge difference between the top 100 schools and the 201st-300th best schools.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrs99 13y ago
    There's probably a difference in the students at every level on average. if not strictly by intelligence, then by how hard they try and how much work they put in during high school. But I don't think the quality of teachers is going to change from top 100 to a community college. There are bad teachers at every school and good teachers. Some are famous in their field, and they don't teach or they can't teach well. And then you can go to a community college and find some really great teachers and small class sizes.
    - gte910h 13y ago
      However, if you only have solid B students, you end up teaching less material than if you have a class of A+ students (looking at HS grades). The depth of coursework is reduced the less esteemed the student body goes.
- L_Rahman 13y ago
  The problem is that it seems to matter in terms job prospects. I'm a biomedical engineering undergrad, so I thought I made the right decision turning down Harvard to come to Hopkins. However, our recruitment is abysmal compared to Harvard even for biotech and I'm seeing peers who went to a much less rigorous undergraduate engineering program that also has grade inflation getting the jobs I want simply because those companies are not hiring from Hopkins.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrs99 13y ago
    There are lots of kids at harvard saying the same thing. They think (understandably) just graduating from harvard should get them some decent job in their field of choice somehow. I don't think it's completely a matter of hopkins vs harvard.
- rz2k 13y ago
  We should decide why we are above it all though, shouldn't we? Is it because all of the top-ranked colleges are essentially the same, or is it because the top-ranked colleges are different in ways that are not captured by a single number. Furthermore, if we are going to distinguish between, prestige, selectivity, learning outcomes, jobs out of college, careers 10, 20, 30 years out of college, or whether we measure that by income, or influence, etc, before even moving on to distinguishing between the paths chosen by graduates of Yale, Juilliard, or CalTech, shouldn't we at least identify which is the one true metric, and why it is better than this magazine's? In dismissing rankings as but one take on the distinctions, I don't think prospective students are better served by the contention that the schools are largely interchangeable.
- ameoba 13y ago
  Not idiocy, limited experience. The target audience for these rankings is high school seniors and their parents. When you're 17/18 years old you don't have a lot of experience with judging the merits of higher education. This is a major decision that is (generally) only made once & few people will bother switching to another school after enrolling. Compare this to any other purchasing decision that is made in life. If you buy the wrong cellphone, you've got 30 days to return it and, worst case, you need to wait 2 years before you can upgrade. Even a car, which is a 4-6 year purchase, will be done multiple times so you can learn from the experience. Even houses, with 20-30 loan repayments, can be sold. The only other things you can do at this age that are as significant are joining the military & having a child. Both of which, arguably, have far more transparent and well understood pros & cons.
alanctgardner2 13y ago
Wow, those metrics are dismal. Here in Canada we have a similar report that Maclean's does, but it's focused on things like first-year class sizes, student satisfaction surveys, and other, more academically-focused metrics. Of course, the winning schools are usually tiny - 2013 looks to be Mt. Allison, where my brother is studying right now. He's had some pretty dismal experiences with the faculty there, but they do well because they have so few students, and the cost of living in a small town on the east coast is tiny. It's tough to say that any university ranking will be good, because there's a lot of complexity, but I think Maclean's is at least not completely toxic.
velodrome 13y ago
I think that the general US News College Rankings are useless. The rankings more specific to the major are more useful. College is what you make of it. Learning should not stop after college - it should be an ongoing quest.
darkarmani 13y ago
> At private schools, the percentage of students receiving need-based aid has actually declined! ..from 43% to 42%. This is not a significant amount. If the trend holds, we have something to worry about.
- caseysoftware 13y ago
  Considering most private schools are going to be significantly smaller than state schools, that 1% difference is quite likely a few dozen people tops. 1% at my private undergrad would be 18-20 people now.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    The number of students attending private and public universities are actually pretty close (for 4-year schools): "Nearly 7.5 million students will attend public 2-year institutions (source), and 0.5 million will attend private 2-year colleges (source). Some 8.2 million students are expected to attend public 4-year institutions (source), and about 5.6 million will attend private 4-year institutions (source)." http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
tobobo 13y ago
My personal (though admittedly not dire) experience with college rankings hurting students was with artificially constricted class sizes that were strictly enforced in order to impress the rankings by having classes numbering fewer than 19 students. It seems that this is yet another consequence of the bizarre split responsibilities universities hold—balancing the long-term goals of a large institution with the needs of its students, for whom the experience is much more ephemeral.
vermontdevil 13y ago
My college president, Bill Destler of Rochester Institute of Technology, has decried these rankings too. But he knows it's going to be promoted heavily by all the colleges that are not in the top 50 or so. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-destler/the-ultimate-absurdity-of_b_3247841.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-destler/the-ultimate-absu...
nwhitehead 13y ago
I agree with everything in the article, U.S. News' rankings are terrible and have hugely bad effects. There are better lists. For example, Affordable Colleges Online has a list of the best return-on-investment CS degrees [1]. It has it's own questionable methodological choices but it's a much better start for anyone thinking about getting a degree. [1]: http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-online/computer-colleges-roi/ http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-onl...
- token_female 13y ago
  Forbes' list also has a better methodology than US News - they look at salary and influence outcomes, student satisfaction, and student debt/financial aid, among other things. http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/07/24/ranking-americas-top-colleges-2013/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/07/24/rankin... But then again, RateMyProfessors reviews are a significant factor in that list. Every ranking is going to have its problems.
zwieback 13y ago
There are maybe 20 million students in the US and the top 10 schools in the rankings have maybe 50000 or 60000 students. That's less than 0.3%, just sayin'.
tokenadult 13y ago
There are a variety of college ranking schemes. I documented some of the other sources of rankings and recommendations of colleges in a thread on College Confidential, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/437362-looking-good-college.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection... a place where I've used this screen name I use here for a long time. But even better than my online list (which is alphabetical, removing the implication of a strict rank order of colleges) is the free website by Education Trust called College Results http://collegeresults.org/ http://collegeresults.org/ which lets applicants or their parents dig into lots of data-based comparisons among colleges. http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027 http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027 You can decide what outcome measure is important to you, and use that criterion to compare the colleges you are most interested in. People who are smart about shopping for colleges don't limit themselves to the U.S. News rankings, and you don't have to either. AFTER EDIT: Another source of information for informed shoppers is the website of a consulting firm that advises colleges, http://www.maguireassoc.com/ http://www.maguireassoc.com/ telling colleges how to improve their financials and their rankings with tricks like raising list price and then offering phony "merit scholarships" that just bring out-of-pocket cost down to somewhat above the actual spending by the college on student instruction.
rayiner 13y ago
I agree with the general proposition that the rankings hurt college students, particularly because schools raise tuition in order to be able to afford more merit aid, but I find some of the comments to be tropes: "1. College rankings hurt low and middle-income students. " It's hard to argue why offering aid on the basis of merit as opposed to need is a bad thing. "2. The rankings ignore job prospects." True, but mostly irrelevant. The rankings are broadly correlated with job prospects. "3. The rankings don't care about learning outcomes." College isn't about learning, and it's not clear there is much difference between colleges in this regard anyway. You don't go to Harvard because you think it'll teach you better than Penn State. You do it to associate with the other people who got into Harvard. "4. U.S. News runs a beauty pageant." The side-effect of the beauty pageant is that it tends to echo preconceived notions hiring managers already have. Arguably it does a huge disservice to say drive students away from Yale on the basis of a bunch of things like "learning outcomes" that nobody else cares about. "5. College rankings fuel ever greater college costs.' This is the real takeaway point. Overhead per student is a major component of the rankings, and it helps fuel the ridiculous construction craze that's happening with universities right now.
- token_female 13y ago
  1. If "merit" is determined by things like SAT scores, which correlate with race and class but not with anything useful, then it is a problem when colleges divert resources from the students who do better on metrics more closely correlated with success but can't afford to attend without financial aid. 3. That's entirely your opinion. It is nonsense to assert that "no one cares" about learning outcomes or anything other than networking. Make an argument for why learning outcomes shouldn't matter if you must, but that isn't something you can just assert and expect everyone else to agree with you.
mathattack 13y ago
Rankings systems are a necessary evil. If the US News didn't create them, someone else would. And they have flaws, as do all single measurements. (Stock price, imperfect. Page clicks, imperfect. IQ, imperfect.) That said, the article can be misleading. They claim that merit scholarships are crowding out need due to the rankings. According to their charts, public school aid is increasing very much and private school aid is flat as a % of students. What isn't included is the quantity of aid. Most top ranked schools (call it top 15?) have increased the amount of aid for people falling below a certain threshold such that they can graduate near debt free. This helps at Cornell and Chicago more than George Washington, but it's the winners who are leading on need based aid. The comments on reputation are a little strange too. They claim "High reputation schools do well because they are high reputation." This misses the virtuous circle of "Good reputation improves rankings" -> "High Rankings draw better students" -> "Better students get better jobs and donate more money" -> "More money enables investments in improving reputation" Despite all of this, the rankings only go so far. That's why it's good to have a lot of them, and other data points for choosing a school.
- jeffdavis 13y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "vulirtuous circle"? The good students will go somewhere. Why is it good that they go to the same school as other good students? Is that good for the good students, or good for everyone?
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Good for the schools that rank high and students that go there. It's a reinforcing cycle. (As opposed to being static, "You're ranked high based on an old reputation) Certainly one can take a step back and say that employers should look for the most talented people, not the highest ranked school, but that's another story.
randyrand 13y ago
"On the other hand, U.S. News put more weight on ACT and SAT scores, which are correlated by family income." Nit pick - but I didn't like this line because of how irrelevant it was. They shouldn't throw around words like 'correlates' if they don't understand them. Knowledge also correlates with income - whoopdydoo.
gojomo 13y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
bnejad 13y ago
The first point makes no sense... Universities should be motivated to recruit students with better test scores. Rewarding students based on merit seems like the logical approach. Not to mention, the difference in the two is a couple percent?
aswin8728 13y ago
Although I agree with the initial premise that college rankings are flawed, I still believe they serve a purpose: to inform students and parents of the schools that are the most popular. Brand recognition plays a paramount role in getting hired at certain companies, and the HR/hiring departments definitely keep an eye out for lists like this. It would be in someone's best interets to find the school that is most compatible with their future goals, but also keep in mind that going to a "top 20" school can impact their future signficantly.
mapcar 13y ago
The author doesn't think that reputation is just an academic number with no significance? Regardless of any metrics used by ranking agencies, if you go to a school that people hold in high regard, that's going to open doors for you.
aaron695 13y ago
Normal FUD. > 2. The rankings ignore job prospects. I think says it all. I certainly didn't go to university for job prospects, McDonalds would have taken me I'm sure. I did it to learn but also so I'd get a job that I enjoy and was a valuable member of the community in. This particular ranking list might suck compared to others, but this article certainly didn't show it.
losethos 13y ago
God says... Virtual-Notary.Org hereby notes that on Date: Tuesday September 10, 2013 20:03.04 EDT (UTC-0400) a random drawing in the range [1, 100000], inclusive, based on a hardware source of true randomness, yielded the following decision. Random Value: 18618 ---- water: 29:12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day: 29:13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 29:14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; 29:15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day: 29:16 (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by; 29:17 And ye have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:) 29:18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood; 29:19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst: 29:20 The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven. 29:21 And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law: 29:22 So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the LORD hath laid upon it; 29:23 And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath: 29:24 Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger? 29:25 Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt: 29:26 For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them: 29:27 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book: 29:28 And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.

36 points by jamesbritt 13y ago

adamzerner 13y ago

I agree, and I started a website to address this: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ http://www.collegeanswerz.com/.

utefan001 13y ago
Great site. Good resource!!
w1ntermute 13y ago
http://www.collegeanswerz.com/colleges http://www.collegeanswerz.com/colleges is returning the Heroku error page.
- adamzerner 13y ago
  Yea, I'm working on something (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18681232/trouble-with-fixedheader http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18681232/trouble-with-fix...). It should be better in a day or two. If you want to see colleges, just use the search bar.

notdrunkatall 13y ago

College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.

gte910h 13y ago
I'd say, they're not bullshit, but presenting them in such a finely graduated ranking is harmful There is a huge difference between the top 100 schools and the 201st-300th best schools.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jrs99 13y ago
  There's probably a difference in the students at every level on average. if not strictly by intelligence, then by how hard they try and how much work they put in during high school. But I don't think the quality of teachers is going to change from top 100 to a community college. There are bad teachers at every school and good teachers. Some are famous in their field, and they don't teach or they can't teach well. And then you can go to a community college and find some really great teachers and small class sizes.
  - gte910h 13y ago
    However, if you only have solid B students, you end up teaching less material than if you have a class of A+ students (looking at HS grades). The depth of coursework is reduced the less esteemed the student body goes.
L_Rahman 13y ago
The problem is that it seems to matter in terms job prospects. I'm a biomedical engineering undergrad, so I thought I made the right decision turning down Harvard to come to Hopkins. However, our recruitment is abysmal compared to Harvard even for biotech and I'm seeing peers who went to a much less rigorous undergraduate engineering program that also has grade inflation getting the jobs I want simply because those companies are not hiring from Hopkins.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jrs99 13y ago
  There are lots of kids at harvard saying the same thing. They think (understandably) just graduating from harvard should get them some decent job in their field of choice somehow. I don't think it's completely a matter of hopkins vs harvard.
rz2k 13y ago
We should decide why we are above it all though, shouldn't we? Is it because all of the top-ranked colleges are essentially the same, or is it because the top-ranked colleges are different in ways that are not captured by a single number. Furthermore, if we are going to distinguish between, prestige, selectivity, learning outcomes, jobs out of college, careers 10, 20, 30 years out of college, or whether we measure that by income, or influence, etc, before even moving on to distinguishing between the paths chosen by graduates of Yale, Juilliard, or CalTech, shouldn't we at least identify which is the one true metric, and why it is better than this magazine's? In dismissing rankings as but one take on the distinctions, I don't think prospective students are better served by the contention that the schools are largely interchangeable.
ameoba 13y ago
Not idiocy, limited experience. The target audience for these rankings is high school seniors and their parents. When you're 17/18 years old you don't have a lot of experience with judging the merits of higher education. This is a major decision that is (generally) only made once & few people will bother switching to another school after enrolling. Compare this to any other purchasing decision that is made in life. If you buy the wrong cellphone, you've got 30 days to return it and, worst case, you need to wait 2 years before you can upgrade. Even a car, which is a 4-6 year purchase, will be done multiple times so you can learn from the experience. Even houses, with 20-30 loan repayments, can be sold. The only other things you can do at this age that are as significant are joining the military & having a child. Both of which, arguably, have far more transparent and well understood pros & cons.

alanctgardner2 13y ago

Wow, those metrics are dismal. Here in Canada we have a similar report that Maclean's does, but it's focused on things like first-year class sizes, student satisfaction surveys, and other, more academically-focused metrics. Of course, the winning schools are usually tiny - 2013 looks to be Mt. Allison, where my brother is studying right now. He's had some pretty dismal experiences with the faculty there, but they do well because they have so few students, and the cost of living in a small town on the east coast is tiny. It's tough to say that any university ranking will be good, because there's a lot of complexity, but I think Maclean's is at least not completely toxic.

velodrome 13y ago

I think that the general US News College Rankings are useless. The rankings more specific to the major are more useful. College is what you make of it. Learning should not stop after college - it should be an ongoing quest.

darkarmani 13y ago

> At private schools, the percentage of students receiving need-based aid has actually declined! ..from 43% to 42%. This is not a significant amount. If the trend holds, we have something to worry about.

caseysoftware 13y ago
Considering most private schools are going to be significantly smaller than state schools, that 1% difference is quite likely a few dozen people tops. 1% at my private undergrad would be 18-20 people now.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  The number of students attending private and public universities are actually pretty close (for 4-year schools): "Nearly 7.5 million students will attend public 2-year institutions (source), and 0.5 million will attend private 2-year colleges (source). Some 8.2 million students are expected to attend public 4-year institutions (source), and about 5.6 million will attend private 4-year institutions (source)." http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

tobobo 13y ago

My personal (though admittedly not dire) experience with college rankings hurting students was with artificially constricted class sizes that were strictly enforced in order to impress the rankings by having classes numbering fewer than 19 students. It seems that this is yet another consequence of the bizarre split responsibilities universities hold—balancing the long-term goals of a large institution with the needs of its students, for whom the experience is much more ephemeral.

vermontdevil 13y ago

My college president, Bill Destler of Rochester Institute of Technology, has decried these rankings too. But he knows it's going to be promoted heavily by all the colleges that are not in the top 50 or so. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-destler/the-ultimate-absurdity-of_b_3247841.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-destler/the-ultimate-absu...

nwhitehead 13y ago

I agree with everything in the article, U.S. News' rankings are terrible and have hugely bad effects. There are better lists. For example, Affordable Colleges Online has a list of the best return-on-investment CS degrees [1]. It has it's own questionable methodological choices but it's a much better start for anyone thinking about getting a degree. [1]: http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-online/computer-colleges-roi/ http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-onl...

token_female 13y ago
Forbes' list also has a better methodology than US News - they look at salary and influence outcomes, student satisfaction, and student debt/financial aid, among other things. http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/07/24/ranking-americas-top-colleges-2013/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/07/24/rankin... But then again, RateMyProfessors reviews are a significant factor in that list. Every ranking is going to have its problems.

zwieback 13y ago

There are maybe 20 million students in the US and the top 10 schools in the rankings have maybe 50000 or 60000 students. That's less than 0.3%, just sayin'.

tokenadult 13y ago

There are a variety of college ranking schemes. I documented some of the other sources of rankings and recommendations of colleges in a thread on College Confidential, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/437362-looking-good-college.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection... a place where I've used this screen name I use here for a long time. But even better than my online list (which is alphabetical, removing the implication of a strict rank order of colleges) is the free website by Education Trust called College Results http://collegeresults.org/ http://collegeresults.org/ which lets applicants or their parents dig into lots of data-based comparisons among colleges. http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027 http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027 You can decide what outcome measure is important to you, and use that criterion to compare the colleges you are most interested in. People who are smart about shopping for colleges don't limit themselves to the U.S. News rankings, and you don't have to either. AFTER EDIT: Another source of information for informed shoppers is the website of a consulting firm that advises colleges, http://www.maguireassoc.com/ http://www.maguireassoc.com/ telling colleges how to improve their financials and their rankings with tricks like raising list price and then offering phony "merit scholarships" that just bring out-of-pocket cost down to somewhat above the actual spending by the college on student instruction.

rayiner 13y ago

I agree with the general proposition that the rankings hurt college students, particularly because schools raise tuition in order to be able to afford more merit aid, but I find some of the comments to be tropes: "1. College rankings hurt low and middle-income students. " It's hard to argue why offering aid on the basis of merit as opposed to need is a bad thing. "2. The rankings ignore job prospects." True, but mostly irrelevant. The rankings are broadly correlated with job prospects. "3. The rankings don't care about learning outcomes." College isn't about learning, and it's not clear there is much difference between colleges in this regard anyway. You don't go to Harvard because you think it'll teach you better than Penn State. You do it to associate with the other people who got into Harvard. "4. U.S. News runs a beauty pageant." The side-effect of the beauty pageant is that it tends to echo preconceived notions hiring managers already have. Arguably it does a huge disservice to say drive students away from Yale on the basis of a bunch of things like "learning outcomes" that nobody else cares about. "5. College rankings fuel ever greater college costs.' This is the real takeaway point. Overhead per student is a major component of the rankings, and it helps fuel the ridiculous construction craze that's happening with universities right now.

token_female 13y ago
1. If "merit" is determined by things like SAT scores, which correlate with race and class but not with anything useful, then it is a problem when colleges divert resources from the students who do better on metrics more closely correlated with success but can't afford to attend without financial aid. 3. That's entirely your opinion. It is nonsense to assert that "no one cares" about learning outcomes or anything other than networking. Make an argument for why learning outcomes shouldn't matter if you must, but that isn't something you can just assert and expect everyone else to agree with you.

mathattack 13y ago

Rankings systems are a necessary evil. If the US News didn't create them, someone else would. And they have flaws, as do all single measurements. (Stock price, imperfect. Page clicks, imperfect. IQ, imperfect.) That said, the article can be misleading. They claim that merit scholarships are crowding out need due to the rankings. According to their charts, public school aid is increasing very much and private school aid is flat as a % of students. What isn't included is the quantity of aid. Most top ranked schools (call it top 15?) have increased the amount of aid for people falling below a certain threshold such that they can graduate near debt free. This helps at Cornell and Chicago more than George Washington, but it's the winners who are leading on need based aid. The comments on reputation are a little strange too. They claim "High reputation schools do well because they are high reputation." This misses the virtuous circle of "Good reputation improves rankings" -> "High Rankings draw better students" -> "Better students get better jobs and donate more money" -> "More money enables investments in improving reputation" Despite all of this, the rankings only go so far. That's why it's good to have a lot of them, and other data points for choosing a school.

jeffdavis 13y ago
Can you elaborate on the "vulirtuous circle"? The good students will go somewhere. Why is it good that they go to the same school as other good students? Is that good for the good students, or good for everyone?
- mathattack 13y ago
  Good for the schools that rank high and students that go there. It's a reinforcing cycle. (As opposed to being static, "You're ranked high based on an old reputation) Certainly one can take a step back and say that employers should look for the most talented people, not the highest ranked school, but that's another story.

randyrand 13y ago

"On the other hand, U.S. News put more weight on ACT and SAT scores, which are correlated by family income." Nit pick - but I didn't like this line because of how irrelevant it was. They shouldn't throw around words like 'correlates' if they don't understand them. Knowledge also correlates with income - whoopdydoo.

gojomo 13y ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

bnejad 13y ago

The first point makes no sense... Universities should be motivated to recruit students with better test scores. Rewarding students based on merit seems like the logical approach. Not to mention, the difference in the two is a couple percent?

aswin8728 13y ago

Although I agree with the initial premise that college rankings are flawed, I still believe they serve a purpose: to inform students and parents of the schools that are the most popular. Brand recognition plays a paramount role in getting hired at certain companies, and the HR/hiring departments definitely keep an eye out for lists like this. It would be in someone's best interets to find the school that is most compatible with their future goals, but also keep in mind that going to a "top 20" school can impact their future signficantly.

mapcar 13y ago

The author doesn't think that reputation is just an academic number with no significance? Regardless of any metrics used by ranking agencies, if you go to a school that people hold in high regard, that's going to open doors for you.

aaron695 13y ago

Normal FUD. > 2. The rankings ignore job prospects. I think says it all. I certainly didn't go to university for job prospects, McDonalds would have taken me I'm sure. I did it to learn but also so I'd get a job that I enjoy and was a valuable member of the community in. This particular ranking list might suck compared to others, but this article certainly didn't show it.

losethos 13y ago

God says... Virtual-Notary.Org hereby notes that on Date: Tuesday September 10, 2013 20:03.04 EDT (UTC-0400) a random drawing in the range [1, 100000], inclusive, based on a hardware source of true randomness, yielded the following decision. Random Value: 18618 ---- water: 29:12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day: 29:13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 29:14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; 29:15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day: 29:16 (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by; 29:17 And ye have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:) 29:18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood; 29:19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst: 29:20 The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven. 29:21 And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law: 29:22 So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the LORD hath laid upon it; 29:23 And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath: 29:24 Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger? 29:25 Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt: 29:26 For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them: 29:27 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book: 29:28 And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.