Here's an insider's insight: Colleges hate these rankings too, including the shit eating grin they have to plaster on their face when they go out in public and say things like "We're one of the top 10 small public non-land grant research institutions in the upper middle pacific northwest region!"
But too many families have been convinced that rankings like this are useful so now the institutions have little choice but to become complicit in the ridiculous system or have their enrollment decimated and be unable to pay its bills.
I dunno, my community college didn't seem to care about rankings (although they were proud of their transfer statistics), but my 4 year school seemed really proud to be in the top 10 of small private engineering schools where doctorates are not offered in the upper midwest that nobody two states away has heard of. Looking now, they've got actually some good looking rankings in some other categories.
Community colleges care much less because the students that go there are choosing those schools for very different reasons. In some cases it’s financial, in some cases lack of options, in some cases for very specific certifications, etc. Community colleges also have less ability to chase rankings through lack of $ to plow into marketing budgets or other fluff used to inflate rankings so there’s no reason to care all that much. The issue also isn’t something a student will be too aware of after the few months of college search prior to enrolling.
Agreed on the skepticism. Feels safe to say that anyone not in the top 10 don't care about the ratings that heavily, but I question whether it is meaningless.
Not safe to say— I have first hand experience.
Modern US society seems to be layers upon layers of gamified results with little coherent vision. We blame other countries for having "stifling" regulation, "burdensome" oversight and "top-down" planning, but honestly - it seems we simply let problems precipitate for decades on end and in many cases think it's some sort of achievement.
Don't think you need to single out the US here. Gamification is effective against most human beings.
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It's the inevitable conclusion of American meritocracy.
In a world where you can achieve anything, someone without achievements must be incapable or, worse, apathetic. Pair that with routine measurement, and it creates a real compounding effect.
So parents correctly try to accumulate achievements as early as possible. To get into HFT, you must go an Ivy, for which you need a recommendation at a top high school, etc, etc....and so you need to impress the pre-K director.
Even (so-called) failure must be managed strategically. Spend 6 months as a freshman at MIT before dropping out, so everyone knows you're better than the best.
Other nations don't do much better. It's a pick your poison situation. But, other nations seem more willing to accept the poison as a necessary evil. The US (systems, not individuals) refuses to see its quirks as anything but a universal good.
Still the least bad system out there.
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>The real problem with American universities is that in one generation they have gone from best in the world to completely lost and directionless, having jettisoned their entire curricula in favor of counterintuitive and vapid intellectual fashion, but enough about that, I'm sure you're thinking you need to know my pronouns
Like? I'm sure you're deeply familiar with these fashions.
And nobody asked for your pronouns, even if I cared we're on an internet forum.
> And nobody asked for your pronouns, even if I cared we're on an internet forum.
I know, I wasn't mocking you, I was mocking American universities which is where that idea came from
In terms of daily usage it came first from LGBTQ+ communities. It then gained more mainstream attention when colleges and universities, having to work with the emerging generation where acceptance of different sexualities or identities was more common, began to accommodate this. That was helped along of course by the fact that people who systematically study the constantly changing landscape of language use skew towards researchers in linguistics through colleges and universities. So there were two "vectors" of transfer to that community: from both students and linguists.
You have no idea, it probably came from tumblr. I'm familiar with those "fashions" to which you refer and not a single professor I know ever teaches about pronouns or anything else which you're probably alluding to.
any time I get an email from a .edu, it announces pronouns. where it really drives me crazy is dating apps: i spelled out my my preferences, why are you telling me your pronouns? shouldn't I know them by now, unless I clicked "takes all comers" in which case, why would I care? :)
It is frequently policy to do this in an email signature, with the desire to use non-traditional pronouns driven (from what I saw) initially by students themselves. I'm guessing dating apps probably have check boxes or something? If so then it could be necessary or useful if wanting to be exposed or find the broadest group of people that you might click with.
99+% of the people on dating apps are not looking for the broadest group of people that they might click with. They are looking for the site to actually provide them with some filtering and selection to narrow down the possibilities to good candidates. Pronouns are provided to make a fractional percentage feel "included" (and that fraction is not the population you might be thinking of, but the smaller populations of activists in same category), and (using politics as a guide) another 50% to feel good about their virtue, though they have no intention of swiping right on anything but a guy in finance. trust fund. 6'5". blue eyes. citations: the okcupid and tinder studies of who gets swiped when all the votes and chads are counted.
Putting aside pronouns in particular and given hypotheticals were a user doesn't care one way or the other about specific pronouns as long as they know the person they swipe on is identity-compatible as a dating partner:
Wouldn't it be beneficial, prior to fine-grained filtering, to start with the widest group that meets minimally sufficient criteria? That way the end group of people who meet a very aggressive and specific filtering has more options. Sure, beyond a certain size it's too unwieldy, but each user may want to min/max for different values of wieldy(ness?).
Keep in mind I know absolutely nothing about modern dating or dating apps, and it seems things move too fast for even a person coming out of a 5+ year relationship to look at the current crop of temporary/permanent mate-finding tools and really know what they're getting into.
College rankings are a bit like corruption rankings: they are measurements of perceptions. Not only that, perceptions are heavily influenced by previous rankings.
If your ranking doesn't show Harvard and MIT near the top, it is wrong. If your corruption index doesn't show Scandinavia and Western Europe above Africa and South America, it is wrong.
If it's wrong, people will not want to read it. If you do an "objective" ranking and it doesn't quite say what you expected, you need to weight things differently, so that your ranking has credibility.
At best you can do a bit of massage to show that you are actually doing something when compiling these rankings, and you might be able to highlight a few trends. But in the end, if you are not showing the usual suspects in the usual places, people will not believe you.
Reputation, at the end of the day, moves slowly.
Show me an LLM ranking that doesn’t put an OpenAI or Anthropic product at the top.
My favorite thing I've ever heard said by the principal of our kids' elementary school: "Our test scores are down, which is great, maybe that will keep some of the school shoppers away this year."
Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, and, much like ill-contained liquid cargo in ships, all that motion tends to destabilize and capsize schools.
Sadly, I don't think smaller higher education institutions can afford to take such a relaxed attitude about it. They don't get to have an enrollment backstop in the form of a semi-captive audience of parents who live nearby and aren't hyperactive enough to commit to spending upwards of an hour every weekday trucking their kids back and forth across town.
It's such a strange way to evaluate schools.
My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics.
It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school.
And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
>And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
The probability of that happening is greater if average test scores are higher. The "tiger parents" aren't just looking for schools that offer the best programs, they're also looking for schools that have less problematic students that disrupt the learning environment and would be bad influences on their kids.
You make friends with those that you're in class with.
The entire school isn't the friend pool, but your proximity of classmates.
If the class room sizes are roughly the same, probability of meeting two smart friends will be roughly the same.
My high school offered a nice selection of impressive advanced classes. The course catalog was amazing.
I took those classes, and they were all milquetoast.
It was all just a potemkin village.
In contrast, the Caltech course catalog had classes blandly labeled "introductory" when they were well known for being brutal.
I agree mostly with the article, but this stuck out to me
>Measure the proportion of graduates who pursue and are accepted into advanced degree programs. (adjusted for field of study so acceptance into medical school > masters in art history)
The only reason, however, that medical school is more competitive than an art history masters (to be fair, most paid masters programs aren't super competitive) is because the medical board has set up the system of accreditation to limit the number of practising doctors in the US in order to artificially inflate the salaries of doctors. The UK, for instance, has the opposite problem, where becoming a doctor is much easier, but for that very reason their pay is relatively low and the job is increasingly undesirable (not to mention cuts to the NHS).
This is all to say that, in just this instance, the author falls prey to precisely the same mystification that he is criticizing, by seeing something as "better" just because its more exclusive.
> The UK, for instance, has the opposite problem, where becoming a doctor is much easier
According to a friend who qualified in the UK and now practices in the US the _process_ of becoming a doctor is much harder in the UK: medical schools in the UK test students holistically (i.e. big exams which test all the topics) whereas American students are tested one module at a time (so lots of cramming).
I agree that gaining acceptance is probably harder though (ish: the UK government subsidises the provision of medical teaching so places are also capped in the UK for financial and capacity reasons).
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> medical schools in the UK test students holistically (i.e. big exams which test all the topics)
For reference, "holistic" is the opposite of "objective", not of "specific".
It's not the opposite of objective. It is a POV that says that something can best be understood and addressed as a whole rather than by its parts individually. Basically a "greater than sum of parts" thing.
From webster - relating to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts
So it is more the opposite of specific than objective. I think your confusion comes from colleges using holistic to mean they looks at things beyond beyond objective measurements like test scores and GPA
I know what it's supposed to mean. I also know that it is never used in that sense. That meaning is gone.
I don't know why you think this but you are incorrect.
Especially in health, wellness, and nutrition, holistic is used to mean 'concerning the whole' all the time.
The OG listicle.
I do think it's a bit difficult to separate reputation from educational quality. Educational quality is affected by professors, facilities, research opportunities, etc, but these factors are saturated at a lot of research universities. Another factor of educational quality is the peer group, and in this sense reputation matters a lot. There's an "if you build it, they will come" circularity here, where if you have a good reputation, you will attract students who will burnish your reputation. Conversely institutions can get stuck in a loop of low reputation and marginal students.
If however, you are armed with the knowledge that the non-circular components of education quality are saturated at, say, the top 50 universities in the US, well that opens some doors. You can rest easy that your flagship land grant university honors program is giving you the same education you'd receive at an Ivy League school.
Personally I think student debt load and chosen major matter way more than which school you go to.
Here is a relevant tool that ranks colleges (and degrees) by ROI/EV: https://www.collegenpv.com/programrankings/?pcip=11&page=1&s.... Not perfect, but better.
As someone who just played the college admissions game last year, these (US News) rankings pretty accurately reflect the *perceptions* of the general, college applying, public (or maybe they are the source of those perceptions). They aren't really even good at that outside the T10.
Ha, pretty funny article. Well written for sure, but it's got major "if only they let ME run things, everything would be fixed in day!" vibes. College rankings aren't broken because some data scientist made a bad decision, they're broken because they're an essential part in the contemporary American class system: sending your kid to SAT bootcamp and then a "prestigious" university is one of the few ways the top 10% can separate their children from their poorer peers. Private high school doesn't really go that far these days, other than for social conditioning and getting them into a good university where the real networking is unlocked.
All of the above applies tenfold for foreign students coming to prestigious US universities, as they pay exorbitant sums to get the name recognition, creating all sorts of weird incentives.
As someone who went to a somewhat prestigious university (Vanderbilt), fingers crossed we nationalize the whole system sometime soon... I think we can all agree that focusing on football, campus amenities, and marketing aren't where these billions should be going. Vanderbilt, to their credit, gamed the rankings a ~decade ago by offering to meet 100% of student's government-determined financial need with grants, which is probably the best outcome possible of this weird system.
Supplying free rides results in students who don't have "skin in the game". If one works to pay the tuition, one is incentivized to get the most value out of their classes.
Without such skin in the game, a student is more likely to do as little as possible and focus on having fun instead.
My parents paid for my college tuition. This was also the case for many of my peers. They turned out just fine. Honestly they seem to have done better than those who took out loans purely because they don't have loans.
Maybe! Not sure I've seen data that supports that, but it's a sound hypothesis among some populations. That said, the students who do the very least work and learn absolutely nothing are the ones too poor to ever become undergraduate students in the first place ;)
I see it all the time. Money is a very effective motivator. Working to get money is very much going to influence what you choose to buy with it - and you're going to want to get your money's worth.
Money is an effective motivator until it isn't. I quit an extremely lucrative job because I hated the person I was turning in to and haven't looked back.
I would be wary of making generalizations on motivation which is highly variable person to person.
Even if no one published ratings, people have a general intuitive idea what the top 20 colleges are, which are fixed even if the order changes. MIT will always be top 10 for example. Harvard will always be top, too. The acceptance rate isa a good proxy for the ranking. Or success at the job market when applying.
I wish someone would measure the bang-for-the-buck without considering politically correct metrics.
Viewing college through this lens is part of the problem. It's college as job training, not education.
Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
> Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
I'm curious what real education would be that does not impart a skill that others are willing to pay for?
I speak as someone who selected classes based on maximizing skills that would be useful in the career I wanted.
philosophy, fine arts, comparative literature, history, etc.
Those are all quite valuable to have in the workplace, but anyone with a bachelors in one of those topics will likely need to get a masters degree in the same field or something else before they can find a decent career.
Why does that make comparative literature, for example, a "real" education and, say, math not?
BTW, there's no need to go to university to learn history. All that's necessary is to read a history book. I read lots of them. Paying someone to lecture you about history seems a waste of time and money. Just read it. Much more time efficient.
I'd consider math a real education as well.
Going back to the initial comment you were responding to, I'd add that most degrees will cover things that aren't skills and credentials that will help someone get a job. That may explain why people with CS degrees still have to answer fizzbuzz questions in job interviews.
Whether reading history is more time efficient than taking a class depends a lot on the topic, the writing about it, and the knowledge and abilities of the professor. It's been my experience that a knowledgeable professor can add important context to a topic that will save the student a lot of time and energy.
You could do the same for math. Or any subject, really. There's a reason people go to college for that, and it's not because they want to sit with a book to learn the subject.
Bang for the buck exists if you get into a top 10 or 20 school where admission standards are so high that people are impressed simply by the fact that you were admitted and/or you get to network with resourceful people.
Otherwise, any state university should suffice. A few states have some state schools with very low acceptance rates and difficulty to get in that might serve to advertise/network you better than another state school.
If it’s not hard to get admitted, then just buy the education with the lower price.
You also network with old money, the politically connected, and the global elite. The “top” universities don’t really need to be better, they just need to have the correct names and the prestige to attract those names. You may have the best professor teaching all the most useful knowledge in the middle of no where state university, but the folks attending won’t have as much opportunity despite their education because they won’t get connected to money or to power.
An obscure university offering a first class education isn't going to be obscure for long.
Too few people know about the US government’s own attempt to offer a better not-exactly-a-ranking system. It’s pretty good. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/