The US News and World Report college ranking is out. IGNORE IT. See, I’m not even linking to it.
And love this final thought from Derek Thompson.
But rather than add to the national carpfest over college rankings, I’d like to offer high school grads some happy news. My new favorite rejoinder to the college ranking game is this study concluding that the most important indicator of future success is not where you go to school, but rather where you apply. From the author: “The best school that turned you down is a better predictor of your future income than the school you actually attended.” Words to live (and breath easy!) by, at least for your senior year of high school.
Apt. 11d 
O, well, little Miss y81 applied to Yale, so I guess she’s all set.
Seriously, the people who maybe ought to ignore the rankings, and just do their jobs, are university administrators. But the overwhelming majority of the people who read the rankings are consumers who don’t know a whole lot about colleges. (This includes generally well-informed people like me.) US News and other rankings are very useful for finding schools in the range where your child has a realistic chance of admission.
Or, more personally, our daughter is very unhappy at her current college, and we think a transfer might be appropriate. She’s been doing well academically–challenged but not overwhelmed–so the obvious task is to find a college at the same academic level but a different setting. US News is very useful for that purpose.
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During last year’s search I found Barron’s Guide to the Colleges, the Princeton Review’s 376 Best Colleges, and the Fiske Guide more useful. My kid took the PR book into her bedroom, and read up on colleges which interested her.
The College Board’s “Big Future” college search function is also useful, to create a list of colleges to investigate. There are other online search databases which do the same thing. We never used a search engine which required registration for use.
It would be great if a kid knew which major he wanted to pursue, but I don’t think most students know enough about the world at the end of high school to decide.
You do need information about colleges which is not provided by the colleges themselves. College marketing is slick and aggressive. It includes personalized emails, sent to your child’s email address. Personalized letters, sent to the parents, touting the financial aid available for kids with your child’s test scores. Websites with the link incorporating the kid’s name (“visit CranberryKidCollege123.edu to learn more.”) (I highly recommend _Crazy U_, by Andrew Ferguson.) After a while, they all sound the same, but the colleges do not fall over themselves to point out their weaknesses, such as the % of frats on campus, or the crime rate on campus.
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College marketing is slick and aggressive.
Does half of it still come from Northfield, Minnesota?
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I’m not certain there were postmarks–commercial mailings, you know. They went directly from the mailbox to paper recycling, so I don’t have any on hand to check. Never fear, my next kid’s due to start receiving such things after he takes the PSAT.
There was a NYT article about Royall and company a while back. I think they’re still in the business.
Oh yes, and the “special scholar” offers–sign on the dotted line, and you’ve applied. No need for an essay, application fee waived, etc. I suspected they just wanted her scores to boost their average. After all, if a kid’s never contacted you, what’re the odds she’ll drop her other colleges to attend yours? In April? Here’s an article about it: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/fastapps/?_r=0
It also artificially boosts selectivity, making parents and students panic about admission.
It’s from 2010, but they were still doing it last year.
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I have making a joke about two specific colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton) that sent a ton of mail to me and everyone I knew with decent ACT scores.
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Everyone has gotten into the game.
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I remember the school she’s attending. I recently heard another bad report from a parent, but this kid is bombing his classes. What’s the problem? What is she looking for?
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She just has not fit in socially. I really don’t know why, because most of her life she’s been pretty popular. Not the coolest girl in the class, but always a circle of friends. But after a year and a half, she really doesn’t have a single friend at Wake Forest. It seems like, although she herself has nothing against Southern sorority girls, and would like to be friends with them, they just don’t want to be friends with her.
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I think the data in the rankings can be interesting but don’t find any value to the rankings themselves. Maybe it’s helpful to know that colleges you don’t know much about are 50 steps apart, but where Yale is on the list in any particular year? not at all helpful.
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Oh, that’s miserable. She could first start by switching dorms. Sometimes different dorms have entirely different cultures. Or she could she join an acitivity that has its own subculture. I was very involved in the college newspaper for two years. Met a lot of like-minded people that way. She could do junior year abroad and then muscle through senior year.
But there’s nothing wrong with tranferring (as long as you make sure that all of her credits will be accepted at the next school). My gossip is mostly about public college right now. But if money is no object, there are plenty of colleges in the Northeast that have NYC-type girls who aren’t giggly sorority types. Lehigh. Tufts. I’ve been hearing great stuff about GWU from parents and college kids. Georgetown has a nice mix of Southern belles and NYC-types.
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I’ve tried to unparse what it meant to say “the best college you applied to” is just as reflective of future outcomes. Presumably, this correlates in someway with having had the high school record (or social/economic background) that would make the school a reasonable option.
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Yeah, that’s kind of our list, except Georgetown might be a little bit of a reach to get into. You will note that all these colleges are in the same range in the US News ranking. Certainly we would not be so stupid as to say, “O, no, you can’t transfer from Wake Forest to Tufts because Wake is number 23 and Tufts is 28.”
On the other hand, it wouldn’t make sense for her to go to College of Charleston (that was her super-safety two years ago) or its northeastern equivalent. One of her friends had a 2.3 (or some such) GPA: the girl’s parents pulled her out and sent her to Ole Miss, on the theory that there’s no point in paying Wake tuition for the amount of learning betokened by a 2.3 GPA. That isn’t our situation, thankfully.
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I assume you have professional advice in this search. If I had to help a kid transfer, though, I’d check out a college’s common data set before sending in an application. Schools have very different admission rates for transfers.
A friend’s daughter transferred from a southern school to Brandeis. Like your daughter, she never “found her peeps” in the south.
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Stinks about Wake Forest. My cousin (undergrad) and my husband (MBA) both went there and they’ve both had great opportunities in the south and nyc because of the name. No reason to be miserable though. I’d suggest a dorm change as well. MY cousin was a CT girl and it took time to find a group but she eventually did.
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None of the rankings are perfect, by any means. Nonetheless they are useful. Without them the answer to the question “how good is xyz school?” is “well, I have no idea.” Unless you have had some contact with them in the past, who knows? And that absolutely goes for pretty good schools too.
I also think that the attitude from colleges (and schools, and teachers, and administrators) that you can’t ever make a useful comparison is bullshit. This stuff is important, as a society we spend a lot of money on it, and ultimately we both care and need to know how one compares to another. An ordinal ranking may not be very good, but it sure beats nothing.
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