Oh those terrible rankings!

Oh those terrible college rankings!  The US News and World Report came out with their yearly diatribe on the “best colleges”. As Mark H Sklarow, the executive director of the Independent Educational Consultants Association says in his blog: “Worst of all, students add colleges to their ‘wish lists’ not understanding that much of the criteria that put a school on the list has no consequence to their particular needs, interests, or desires.” Well said.

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! Wait, a grain? Maybe an ocean?