Some Thoughts for Collegebound Students and Parents on the Perilous World of College Rankings
We are now at the point in time when members of the Class of 2024 have no choice but to begin thinking – SERIOUSLY THINKING - about college and all that comes with college. The Common Application for the Class of 2024 goes live 113 days from today … 113 days.
To help get you started in the process, I will be emailing you periodically with some general advice and some pointed recommendations.
But, before we get to ANY of that, I do feel compelled to discuss one of the best and worst aspects of the college admissions process: COLLEGE RANKINGS.
I absolutely favor the idea of “ranking” colleges. College students are – in a very meaningful sense – consumers, and, as such, they should have some sense of the utility derived from the money spent on tuition, room, board, fees, etc. When one is shelling out close to $500,000 (and often far more than that) over four years, it’s nice to think that there will be some sort of a return on that considerable investment. In FAR TOO MANY CASES, students and parents GROSSLY OVERSPEND FOR COLLEGE or, just as bad, settle for a so-so education while ignoring real value at schools they never bothered to consider.
Plus – and let’s be perfectly honest here – colleges and universities are in desperate need of being made cognizant of the market forces that control the other aspects of our economy. Tuition hikes and profligate spending programs on rock-climbing walls, celebrity chefs in cafeterias and palatial administration buildings are terrible problems for our entire university system – problems which will have serious consequences in the immediate future at a great many “elite” institutions. As the Wall Street Journal informed us just last year (in an article that should terrify all parents), NYU is basically a high-end scam run by despicable grifters who prey financially on young people. The school, if it had a modicum of honesty left, should change it mascot to something more appropriate … like the Parasites or the Festering Leeches.
US News (which USED TO BE a respected media outlet and is now a profit-fixated, college/grad school “rankings” operation that cynically exploits the fear and insecurities of students and parents for money) recently released its Ranking List. Naturally, that list is on the minds of the parents of almost every college-bound student in the nation.
The first thing I can tell you after reviewing the rankings is that, NO, Florida State is NOT the 17th best “National Public University in America” …mostly because there is NO SUCH THING AS a “National Public College.” The entire term is a marketing tool invented and exploited by … US News. Clever, right?
FSU, like almost every college in America, has some very good programs. I am enormously impressed by the faculty of the Political Science department at Florida State, I love the dance program, and I have nothing but good things to say about its innovative and, in many ways, vital, program in financial engineering. That financial engineering program holds the promise of emerging as THE top academic program in the state of Florida in a few short years.
That said, I can … off the top of my head … confidently name 71 public universities that are, without question, better overall schools. The same can be said for UF, the new “gold standard” in college education for Florida parents. UF is great, but there are A LOT of schools that the folks at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company think are better – like Colgate, Tufts, Emory, Villanova, Williams, Illinois, BYU, Michigan, Olin, etc.
Again, this is not to say that you cannot get a good (or even great) education at a Florida school. You ABSOLUTELY can. But, there are some issues that you have to be aware of before deciding to attend a Florida school … or any school.
In my twenty-five years doing what I do, I have been to campuses all across this nation. I am in contact with admissions officers at some of the best schools in the United States and at schools that are working to improve their national reputations.
I speak to these folks almost every day. I listen to what they have to say. I ask them questions. I learn from these conversations, and I do my best to share what I learn with all of you. More importantly, my experience in law school taught me to supplement what I hear from others - even "experts" - with my own research.
The truth of the matter is that too many people apply to colleges for reasons that do not qualify as "reasonable" or even "responsible." So, I want to share the results of my research on college with you over the next few weeks and months.
There are so many books and guides out there on colleges. Some are pretty good. I used to be fond of Fiske’s, but they jumped the shark into SJW hell and most likely are a lost cause. Most of these “guides” are, I kid you not, WORSE THAN USELESS. So many of the books about college and college admissions do little more than rehash tired old clichés and “conventional wisdom” that may be very conventional but should hardly be characterized as “wisdom.”
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For decades now, US News and World Report has ruled the roost in the "field" of college rankings. (FYI – college rankings is NOT a field – it is FEAR PORN sold to panicky parents and social climbing turds from the North Shore of Long Island ...who are all apparently moving to Boca and PBI ... GROSS!!!!)
The US News “system” for ranking colleges takes into account such factors as the academic strength of respective incoming classes, annual alumni giving, student-teacher ratio and the like. It also divides its college ranking system according to the size of the institutions and the geographic scope of their recruiting efforts. This approach has a lot more to do with securing participation from the institutions being surveyed than with the actual academic merit of the institutions themselves.
For example, it is nice for the University of Miami to tell prospective applicants that it is ranked in the top fifty of “National Universities.” The fact that The U can make its “top fifty” ranking a part of its promotional literature encourages the school to continue its participation in the survey that forms the basis of the US News and World Report ranking system. That said, the idea that the University of Miami – which is, in many respects, a great school with outstanding students and several world-renown programs - is in the same academic league as say Bard, Colgate, Washington and Lee, Swarthmore or Rhodes is, in a word, ASININE.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the college rankings enterprise is the fact that the group that criticizes the rankings most vociferously (the colleges and universities themselves) seems to be the group that takes these rankings most seriously. Some colleges do some pretty amazing (and many would say unethical) things in order to manipulate certain aspects of the ranking systems and gain a rankings bump. These practices border on actual fraud, and colleges (most of which impose some pretty stringent honor codes on their students) should be ashamed of themselves for behaving in this way … but the folks who run these schools are beyond shame.
Seriously, some college admissions schemers make Jordan Belfort (a/k/a “The Wolf of Wall Street”) look like Saint Honestus of Nimes. (Art history majors like me get to know ALL the saints.)
So, when evaluating your college choices, DO NOT fixate on rankings -especially if you don’t take the time to understand them.
Identify a range of schools that suit your strengths, your interests and (perhaps most importantly) YOUR BUDGET. Find school schools that will, again, give you the tools that you can use to prepare for, and be successful in, life after college.
And, above all, DO NOT PICK A SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU THINK THAT THE “NAME” WILL IMPRESS A BUNCH OF DOUCHEY WANNABES AT SOME BOUJEE AF DINNER PARTY. Your college will NOT impress them … like at all. They have their own crap going on.
If you DO make your college selection based on US News rankings, let me know … I’ve got some land I'd like to sell you ... in Chernobyl.
In my #collegeadmissions post, I will let you all know how I go about evaluating colleges for each of my students. It is, in a phrase, HIGHLY INVOLVED.
Best,
SEAN