Searching for colleges…

Many criteria factor into a college search….location, size, majors, Greek life, clubs, the list goes on and on.  One thing most people put far too  much emphasis on is rankings.  Every year we see the new US News and World Report rankings, and  Forbes has started to rank schools with their own methodology, which differs quite a bit from US News.  Even though Forbes is using student input, the students they are taking the data from are a very “self-selected” bunch, certainly not a cross section or a general college population..

In other words, rankings are still extremely subjective and based on much self-reporting.  In my practice, I always advise students and families not to pay much attention to the rankings.  Why?  For many good solid reasons, many of which were detailed in the book COLLEGE UNRANKED, edited by Lloyd Thacker.

Several years ago the Wall Street Journal reported discrepancies between the data submitted to the major bond rating agencies and the data reported to the US News and World Report.  Please remember, submitting false data to bond rating agencies is illegal (pg 69) but it is not illegal to submit false data to the US News.  Some of the false data would be funny if it wasn’t so blatantly misleading.  Here are some examples:  counting janitorial staff in the student to staff/faculty ratio; submitting class profile data that does NOT include students who were admitted for “development reasons” (you know, students admitted because of family financial gifts to the college); excluding new students of color from profile data (because scores are generally lower); excluding student athletes from class profile data because of lower scores and grades; excluding from the class profile students who got in off of the waitlist (again, their scores tend to be lower) (pages 69, 70).

Another practice is that of “test optional” colleges who submit test score averages from those students who did submit scores.  This is misleading because students with lower scores don’t submit those scores to test optional schools!  Therefore, the test averages are skewed to the higher end.

Ah, well.  My point is:  college rankings need to be evaluated carefully, and with a grain of ….skepticism!