College Rankings

U.S. News and World Report's annual college ranking guide, "America's Best Colleges" has shown up and a new group of prospective college students are wondering what to do about it. While U.S. News' guide is probably the most well known, there are many, including the Princeton Review and others. As a student, how should you approach these guides? The answer to this question depends on your priorities and the reason you want an education.

As someone who has spent his career helping students determine what college is right for them, I know that these ranking schemes play an important role to a subsection of students. The reason rankings are so important to many students is because they think that going to a top ranked college is going to get them a number of things, including a good job, internship opportunities, access to graduate school, and other unforseen benefits. However, it is not clear that going to a top ranked school will actually do all of these things for you. A degree from an Ivy League institution, while attractive on paper, is not enough to get you a job. Jobs require interviews. Employers not only look at where an applicant went to school, they also look at your grades, social skills, prior experience, references, and personality. The same is true of graduate school. You are not chosen for a job or graduate school based solely on the U.S. News' ranking of your college. It may play a factor, but it is not nearly as important as some would like to believe.

We live in a society that places value on name recognition. Did you buy those clothes at Nordstrom or Target? Is the brand Nike or Payless? You get the idea. Therefore it should come as no surprise that colleges face the same problem. The desire of a college to increase its rankings has led to a number of strategies (as well as consultants) aimed at doing so. Such strategies include manipulating the amount of financial aid given to students based on grades and income, creating early decision and action programs, all-out alumni fundraising, and others. See the November 2005 Atlantic Monthly section "College 2005" for an enlightening look at college rankings. I write this post not to dissuade you from looking at rankings, but merely to inform you of the reality behind them. I believe they can serve of some value, just not the sole determinant of where one should apply to and attend college.

This is a topic that I will return to. It is an important issue facing not only students, but the entire field of education.