For many years, the conventional wisdom for college-bound students has been, “Go to the most prestigious school you can.” And how do you tell which ones are more prestigious? You look at college rankings, of course.
But are those rankings worth anything? In today’s Martin Center article, Walt Gardner of UCLA argues that college rankings are a game and students are being played.
Gardner writes that, “The rankings themselves are questionable because of the way they are determined. They are inordinately connected to the marketing efforts conducted by virtually all institutions of higher learning. Putting aside the scandal at Temple’s business school, whose dean received a 14-month sentence in federal court for sending bogus information to U.S. News & World Report, or USC’s withdrawing its education school after determining that it had provided inaccurate data for at least five years, two measures stand out: selectivity and yield. Although the two are closely related, they are not the same.”
Colleges want to look very selective (which supposedly shows that the education they offer is good; a badly mistaken assumption) so they try to lure in as many applicants as possible, only to reject most of them. Yield, Gardner explains, is the ratio of students who are accepted who decide to enroll and most schools would rather hide that, so they’ve come up with the trick of “early admission.” It works against students from poorer backgrounds, but the schools don’t care.
Another thing the rankings won’t tell you is how satisfied graduates are with their institutions. Do students find employment without having gone off the deep end in debt? That would be good to know.
Gardner concludes: “In the final analysis, a lesser-known college can be a better choice if it offers a major in line with a student’s individual interests. Harvard, for example, has no undergraduate business degree, but many second-tier colleges do. With employers demanding evidence of an applicant’s skills, majoring in accounting at, say, the University of Mississippi provides a leg up over majoring in gender studies at one of the Ivies. With the cost of a bachelor’s degree soaring, and with no signs of that abating, it’s time to get real about rankings.”