College Rankings
I love to rank things. Favorite books (#1 Their Eyes Were Watching God). Favorite movies (#1 Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood). Best concerts (#1Michael Jackson). Worst concerts (#1 Death Cab for Cutie). Best sports to watch (#1-10 Basketball). Best sports to play (#1-10 Basketball).
Ranking is fun. It orders information, choices, and possibilities and makes them more digestible. If I want to learn about the golden age of rap and hip hop, I’m not just going to dive in -- I’m going to find myself a ranked list of the best songs and artists.
When it comes to colleges, you’re probably most familiar with U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges rankings. Best Colleges ranks the best colleges overall; the best regional universities; the best regional colleges; the best colleges for veterans; the best HBCUs; the best undergraduate business programs; the best value schools -- you name it, it ranks it. It’s the place to which prospective college students and their families turn to help guide their college decisions.
Ultimately, though, ranking colleges is a lot like ranking your favorite songs. It’s subjective and it’s influenced by a host of factors, both seen and unseen. In a recent Forbes Magazine article, Susan Paterno explains that U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges is “an advertising and marketing powerhouse” that “manufactures competition to peddle products. Selling pseudoscience as an objective measure of academic quality, it leads worried and confused families to about 100 schools with the nation’s highest academic hurdles and lowest acceptance rates.”
This pseudoscience is the belief that there is an objective set of criteria against which to evaluate the overall quality of a college or university, or its suitability for a given student.
So how does the magazine arrive at these rankings? It’s complicated. And it’s a secret. Malcolm Gladwell’s recent podcasts, “Lord of the Rankings” and “Project Dillard,” attempt to get to the bottom of things, but ultimately, all he reveals is that they rely on colleges’ self-reported data and on the subjective opinions of college presidents and provosts.
In Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, Jeffrey Selingo explains a bit more about how the rankings have “signaled to students and parents what to emphasize when looking for a college--mostly the quality of incoming students rather than what undergraduates actually learned or what they did after graduation. Over decades, the rankings narrowed the view of seniors to focus on just a handful of schools.”
Scrolling through the U.S. News and World Report rankings is going to lead you to the same set of selective schools over and over again. But consider this:
The top 10 best value schools have an average acceptance rate of 11%.
The schools with the top 10 best 4-year graduation rates have an acceptance rate of 14%.
Top 10 colleges that offer the best return on investment (ROI) have an average acceptance rate of 14.8%.
There are 4,000 colleges in the United States. If U.S. News and World Report is focused on the same 100 mostly elite and difficult to get into colleges over and over again, then what about the other 3900? The truth is, many are doing some really interesting things, offering innovative academic opportunities, and one of them might just be the right price and fit for you.
Just as Esquire’s list of the 100 best movies of all time should be taken with a grain of salt (I mean, Paddington 2 is on it), so too should college rankings. And just like the movies, the right fit will be determined by your own interests, values, and budget.
We’d love to help you sort through and narrow the list of colleges that are best for you. Email us at info@yourmayfirst.com or give us a call (617.851.9975) and let’s chat.
