Point-Counterpoint juxtaposes two opposing perspectives on polarizing issues and debates. The following responses, written by the Daily’s opinion section, address both sides of the conversation on the usefulness of college rankings in the admissions process.
The case for college rankings
While the college search is typically characterized by excitement, growing selectivity in higher education has made the process more stressful and confusing. College rankings are designed to create succinct clarifications on which colleges excel in certain fields. With new sites quickly jumping on board to research and rank universities, the online database of college information is growing rapidly. Although these rankings may not be the best indicator of whether a college is right for a student, they do serve as an advantageous tool to weed through and compare hundreds of universities.
With college tuition skyrocketing across the board, parents and students need to focus now more than ever on "investing" wisely in higher education. PayScale is just one of many sites ranking colleges based on average post-graduate salaries. With rankings like these, prospective college students and their families can quickly gauge which colleges give the best monetary return. While expected salary shouldn't be the sole factor in choosing a college, it's definitely one of growing importance in the pre-professional world.
College rankings can also be financially valuable in other, more indirect ways. For example, some students cannot afford the luxury of visiting prospective colleges in person. Steep travel expenses mean that tours at far-away colleges are out of the question for many families. Rankings are a growing section of online information that educate students about colleges free of charge.
While much of this information is offered on a college's own website, rankings are typically derived from an outside source, which helps to minimize bias. Every college sounds ideal on its own website, but college rankings from independent sites present a much more objective point of view.
Furthermore, college rankings can include high evaluations of somewhat surprising or lesser-known universities. This provides an avenue for overlooked colleges to be recognized as prestigious and profitable — descriptions normally reserved for Ivy Leagues or universities of similar renown. For schools like State University of New York Maritime College, which is ranked number one by PayScale, rankings can be hugely beneficial in terms of "selling" their school. Not only does the university benefit from having their largely unknown name promoted by the media, but they also gain a sense of credibility that is easy to market.
Rankings don't have to focus on projected post-graduation income, either. The Washington Monthly, for example, calculates its scores by looking at a school's "contribution to the public good," quantifying social mobility, research and service.The Heterodox Academy, a group of scholars concerned with what they see as "the loss or lack of 'viewpoint diversity'" in higher education, recently compiled ratings for the top 150 universities (as listed by U.S. News) based on their commitment to free speech and ideological diversity. Although not exhaustively comprehensive, these alternative lists can help prospective students understand what a school's student body and administration are like or what the climate surrounding specific elements of the school's culture is like.
College rankings are a very valuable tool when used with discretion. Although they are not an entirely adequate substitute for seeing a school in person or talking to current students, rankings are an asset in equalizing the college process, starting with the search.
The case against college rankings
It seems that every year, a different website creates a "definitive" college ranking. The ubiquity of these rankings would lead one to believe that they are helpful in the college admissions process. Many students, parents and college counselors, however, have found the opposite to be true. Seemingly, the only beneficiaries are the highly-ranked colleges themselves.
As a result of focusing on different criteria, college rankings are almost never consistent. Tufts University, for example, ranks 444th on The Economist's list, 197th according to Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce and 27th on the U.S. News and World Report ranking. The discrepancy comes from variation in the formula used to determine these rankings. Some focus primarily on post-graduate earnings, while others prioritize selectivity and other factors.
There are now so many rankings that "We’ll soon be ranking the rankings," Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University, said in a recent article in The New York Times. The more rankings that crop up, the more schools can tout their "number one" status. Being first means much less when there are dozens of winners from countless rankings. This creates a false sense of prestige that helps colleges "sell" their school.
Accredited private college counselor Jill Madenberg has found the inaccuracy of college rankings harmful to her clients. "There are so many instances that colleges can tweak data to help their statistics look more selective than they actually are," she said. "I see this all the time."
Many colleges use rankings to distort their image because public attractiveness helps their acceptance yield. Universities rely on rankings to influence the final decisions of students who have been accepted to multiple schools and must compare and contrast to choose the best option. When one school is perceived as being held in higher esteem by the public than another, a student's gut feeling about a school can easily be overshadowed by an impressive ranking.
"Colleges do a lot to protect their yield and to make themselves seem more selective," Madenberg said. "I think rankings misrepresent some of the best things about college, like the social and academic fit."
Focusing heavily on graduates' incomes to determine a college's "worth" can also be perilous. Alumni earnings are often influenced in large part by family wealth, opportunities in early life and other innate talents that universities have no control over. College rankings often ignore this fact, resulting in data that does not necessarily paint an accurate picture of salary potential for graduates of a given university. Moreover, sites like PayScale present self-reported earnings from graduates, so the information is unverified and not necessarily representative of all graduates.
The college search should be an individualized process, and rankings only serve to generalize and market a university. Rankings can be interesting data points, but they should be supplemented by personal inclination. If a student is choosing a school based on its ranking, they're probably not selecting it for the right reasons.
