The Long Reach of College Rankings
Are you trying to put a list of colleges together to which you plan to apply? Or maybe you’ve already been accepted to multiple schools and you’re trying to figure out which to attend. If this is the case, then you are probably familiar with college rankings.
Ivy Link’s founder, Adam Nguyen, recently sat down with TIME magazine to discuss the state of U.S. college rankings and their significance.
For the past few decades, college rankings have been used by both parents and students to help them make tough decisions:
High school seniors, especially those who have no other resources by which to judge a college, may use the rankings to figure out which college they should attend after being accepted by multiple colleges.
High school juniors tend to use them to figure out which colleges they may want to apply to.
High school sophomores and freshmen tend to use the stats reported by the rankings to help them build an ideal profile for schools to which they may want to apply.
The most famous publication to publish the rankings is US News & World Report. However, the Wall Street Journal, Princeton Review, and Financial Times all publish their own rankings as well. So, it seems as though ranking colleges has become quite a lucrative business. But over the past few years, the ranking system has come under scrutiny.
The main criticism of the college rankings is that they don’t provide a realistic or accurate account of the college as a whole or the education quality a student might receive. The rankings rely on unaudited data submitted by the colleges, which as we’ve seen recently, isn’t always trustworthy – e.g., the Columbia University situation. And you might have heard about the Dean of Temple University’s business school, who was sentenced to prison for falsifying data to boost Temple’s rankings.
In the past year alone, we’ve seen several colleges, ranging from undergraduate programs to notable law schools to medical schools, all pull out of the rankings and release statements criticizing the ways in which the data is evaluated or interpreted. (It’s important to note that these colleges are still ranked by the various publications, but the colleges no longer submit their own data. Instead, the various publications rely on third-party data to rank the colleges).
No, the ranking system isn’t perfect. There are plenty of problems that could, and should, be addressed. However, the truth of the matter is that college rankings do matter to a lot of people, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Ivy Link’s Advice
When planning for college (which should start by the end of 8th grade!) it is crucial that students consider academic offerings and fit, campus culture, geography, size of class/campus, cost, and a variety of other factors. Rankings and prestige are also important, but students and parents shouldn’t consider them exclusively while ignoring everything else.
Interested in ongoing guidance on preparing for and applying to college? Contact Ivy Link below to schedule a consultation. Ivy Link works with students starting as early as 8th grade to achieve their college and lifelong goals.
