While visiting the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts this past summer I noticed a large group of young Chinese students gathered on the steps of a building posing for a photo. They held up a banner announcing that they were from a middle school in Hebei, a province in northern China. Watching them pose I couldn’t help but wonder why a middle school would spend significant time and money to send a group of 12-and 13-year-old children to an American college nearly 7,000 miles away?
This sort of collegiate tourism is no doubt driven by name recognition and reputation, which is in turn driven by a highly publicized, annual U.S. News and World Report college rankings report. For some, these rankings are a resource for assessing a school’s worth, which assumes they contain the wisdom to objectively determine which colleges and universities are the “best” ones. And really, what family American or Chinese, does not want their children to go to the world’s best schools?
This notion that it’s possible to determine which colleges are “best” relies on several premises: first, that specific data exists that can fairly and accurately measure the quality of a school, and second, that it is not necessary to factor in the unique abilities and needs of a particular student into that equation. Let’s examine the first premise. The U.S. News and World Report rankings are based on seven factors: graduation rate, peer assessment, faculty resources, financial resources, and alumni giving rate. It’s immediately apparent how narrow the focus of this evaluation is; the last three factors essentially describe financial might, a higher ranking means more dollars, more dollars means a higher ranking.
Even a factor like student selectivity can be deceptive. The single digit acceptance rates that get so much press and fuel so much student anxiety don’t necessarily reflect a recent precipitous drop in available slots for qualified students. The growing reach of The Common Application, and the relative ease of electronic submission, has greatly increased the number of both qualified and unqualified applicants at the top ranked schools. For the unqualified student it’s the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket, for the qualified student it’s a relatively cheap way to attempt to improve the odds. In both cases these practices drive down a school’s acceptance rate, even though the qualified student to slots available ratio may have only marginally changed, if at all.
As for the second premise, can anyone really predict what schools are “best” for an individual without looking at variables such as: academic rigor, course offerings, quality of instruction, social environment, political culture, town-gown relations, size, location, extracurricular activities, and even the weather? Of course not. College admissions counselors almost universally agree that a school must “fit” if a student is going to thrive, both academically and personally. The good news is that there are many great “fit” schools for any given student, and in some cases, those fit schools may even be among those at the top of the rankings heap.
The key takeaway here is not that a school’s ranking is meaningless, but that the meaning often ascribed is much more limited than those profiting from the rankings would have us believe. Ultimately, ranking is just additional information to consider. Much like seeking a match on an Internet dating site, data only takes one so far; it’s not until you actually meet that person, or walk the grounds of that college campus, will you know that you’ve truly found your fit.
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