You’ve decided to apply for admission at various colleges. How do you decide on your initial candidates? And how do you narrow down the field to your top choice?
If you’re like many college applicants, you’re going to base much of your decision on college rankings, like the U.S. News & World Report National University Rankings. And, you might expect that there’s something magical about top ranking colleges. Not necessarily.
There are many who argue that the college rankings game is seriously flawed. In an Atlantic Monthly article a few years ago, Reed College president, Colin Diver, gave three main reasons against college rankings (and under his leadership, Reed College refused to participate in college rankings like those of the U.S. News & World Report).
(1) One-size-fits-all college ranking schemes undermine institutional diversity. As institutions strive to become top ranking colleges, they become more and more alike. Those who try to go their own way get penalized by assessors who don’t know what to make of uniqueness.
(2) The college rankings “reinforce a view of education as strictly instrumental to extrinsic goals such as prestige or wealth.” For Divers, the aim of a college eduction is very different: liberation and self-realization. Top ranking colleges aren’t always able to deliver on this front.
(3) The college rankings create incentives to “manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score.” This is possible since rankings depend a great deal on “unaudited, self-reported data.”
The bottom line, if you’re the sort of person who seeks out the unconventional in life, who doesn’t care primarily about prestige but more about substance, and who is at all suspicious of the way in which college rankings are actually arrived at, then your best bet is to glance at the college rankings – and then quickly move on.
