TIME Features Ivy Link Founder to Discuss College Rankings
If you’ve been keeping up with the Ivy Link blog, you’ll know that this has been a tumultuous year for the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Recently, Ivy Link’s founder, Adam Nguyen, sat down with TIME to talk about the importance of rankings and how they are used.
Adam, who formerly reviewed applications for Columbia University, points out that while schools often say they don’t care about the rankings, behind the scenes they celebrate when they move up the list. Don’t be fooled, colleges and universities are as fixated on the rankings as everyone else.
There is a good reason for that. Brand recognition still means a lot in the real world. When a student applies to a graduate program, the school they are applying to takes their undergraduate college into consideration. The same goes for employers. Adam gave this advice in TIME: “[I]n the real world, there’s always going to be a set of schools that is better than another set of schools.You can’t have everything being equal. So that’s the reality that we have to live with.”
Of course, there are other factors that employers and graduate schools take into account when assessing applicants, which is why, for example, interviews exist. But the truth of the matter is that the name of your college is one of the first credentials employers and graduate schools consider when reviewing your application, and the ranking of your college can open doors.
So even if the rankings have been the center of a lot of drama recently, one thing is for sure: the rankings aren’t going anywhere. At the end of the day, they matter to many people.
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