We’re going to give you some specific tools to help you build a balanced college list.
Before we do, for some context, we want to have a brief discussion about (and perhaps debunk) some common college rankings.
Many parents and students look to things like U.S. News and World Report’s rankings to determine where to apply. We’d recommend taking those rankings with a large grain of salt, for several reasons.
One big reason: those rankings don’t really give a student a sense of whether they fit well with a school (unless a student’s criteria happen to match perfectly with U.S. News’ criteria, which seems… unlikely). For example, the current second highest metric in US News’ calculation is the “peer assessment survey”—essentially, college deans submit a survey in which they rank schools based on “perceived academic reputation.” This, obviously, is incredibly subjective, and doesn’t really help you understand if you and a college fit together well. Furthermore, top companies like Google no longer focus on the prestige of a degree, instead focusing more on someone’s knowledge in the field, applied skills developed, and relevant experience.
Another really big reason: those rankings are highly likely to be flawed—if you’d like to read a paper by a Columbia mathematics professor, Michael Thaddeus, debunking Columbia’s own ranking, you can check it out in detail here. The synopsis is that Columbia (and it seems likely that most if not all other ranked schools to some degree) reported numbers in a way that was likely to shift its ranking up, but that didn’t really reflect the school’s internal data (or only did so if heavily massaged. Like deep-tissue style).
But an even bigger reason we’d recommend not building a list simply based on rankings like U.S. News’ is summed up nicely by Colin Driver in The Atlantic: “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.” Or you can read Malcolm Gladwell critiquing rankings in The New Yorker (the gist: “There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution—how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students. So the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best.”).
In short, linear ranking systems are enticing, and appeal to the parts of human nature that want a simple button and values prestige, but we think you can do far better by using other systems and methodologies to develop a balanced college list.
Government sites like College Navigator or College Scorecard allow for more nuanced means of comparison. Washington Monthly offers an alternative to U.S. News, building rankings based on things like social mobility, research, and promoting the public good.
When we work with students, we often use Corsava to help them explore schools through figuring out their must-haves, would be nices, no ways, and don’t cares. Using these tools and a couple others is far more likely, to our minds, to help your teen end up someplace that helps them thrive.
