Wise Like Us

Rank Them Yourself

"In the Pac-10 schools, where does USC stand, academically?"

That's the question my neighbor asked me today.  And he was surprised when I told him there was almost no way to answer it. 

He told me he thought that Stanford had to be "on top," followed by Berkeley and then UCLA.   But he wasn't naming those schools based on the quality of the education or the success of their graduates.  He did what lots of parents and students do; he deduced that the harder it is to get admitted, the better the school must be. 

I disagree.

College Rankings

US News and World Report published its annual "Best Colleges" issue last week.  Once again it has stoked the college admissions fire that is ready to seriously heat up as rising seniors return to the classroom and submit their college applications.

 

U.S. News Rankings= Collegiate Beauty Contest

  Well, if we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times at Collegewise... "don't give much credence to the U.S. News and World Report's survey of top American colleges." It seems that the presidents of some of the nation's top liberal arts colleges are finally in agreement with Collegewise. I guess you could say they're finally wise like us.

In a recent CNN Article, the title alone explains how colleges view the report: Many American Colleges Balk at U.S. News Rankings. A number of collegiate presidents met in Annapolis this week to discuss a possible boycott of the U.S. News and World Report's reputation survey, which asks academic leaders to rate other colleges. Their survey responses then become approximately 25 percent of the school's ranking in the U.S. News' article. But many school presidents agree that the results do not provide any educationally valid research. A director at Sarah Lawrence College called the reputation survey nothing more than a "collegiate beauty contest that is not a valid basis for judging the quality o f education."

Viva la Revolution!

This article is wonderful because it shows that even college presidents are sick of the arbitrary ranking system employed by US News and analyzed by students all over the country.  Hopefully this article will make you wonder why anyone pays attention to these rankings in the first place.  If colleges stop supplying the data and prospective students refuse to craft their college lists based on these numbers, then a real college admissions revolution will be underway...and it will be better for everyone.

A-List B-Schools

BusinessWeek recently put together their list of the Best Undergraduate B-Schools.  Not surprisingly, UPenn's Wharton School ended up at the top.  But what was a pleasant surprise for a Midwesterner like myself was seeing the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University check in at a lofty #9 and the programs at Miami University (Oxford, OH) and Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA) at #17 and #18 respectively.  I've been familiar with the strengths of these schools for years and I was happy to see them receiving the kind of national recognition they've always deserved.   And while the admissions standards at Wharton and MIT's Sloan may appear back-breaking, the Kelley School seems slightly more mortal:

Incoming freshmen can gain automatic entry to Kelley if they scored 1270 on the SAT or 29 on the ACT and ranked in the top 10% of their high school class or earned a 3.5 GPA.

Of course, these kinds of ratings are never near perfect and should serve as nothing more than a starting point for any college search.  Just because USC is ranked #21 doesn't make it any less of a great place for a student than Notre Dame which is ranked #3.  Football teams aside, each institution has its own strengths and weakness.  In fact, the BusinessWeek section on undergraduate business schools features a whole assortment of terrific articles discussing the differences in how top institutions educate their students.  Some focus on theory and classroom work while other encourage their kids to get their hands dirty via internships.  It does an excellent job drawing out what makes different schools stand out.  It even covers reasons to attend a liberal arts college instead of business school.  The entire section is a must-read for any kid seriously considering undergraduate business.

Does Most Selective Equal the Best?

At Collegewise we teach our kids that while the Ivy League schools are certainly the most selective schools in the country, they are by no means the best schools in the country. Attending an Ivy League school does not guarantee success after a student graduates.  We know that.  But we sure wish that high school students would understand this as well.  There's a right college out there for everyone. 

Attending an Ivy league college is certainly an amazing opportunity.  I applaud the students who have been accepted to and attend one of them.  But should that mean then that they are going to be more successful as adults than those of us who didn't attend an Ivy League?  No way.  Success has absolutely no correlation with what kind of college a person attends.  Whether you attend Harvard, Ohio State, Columbia or UC Irvine, success comes from within.

Sure, we all know that Bill Gates went to and then dropped out of Harvard.  But did you know that Michael Dell, CEO of Dell computers, attended and then dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin?  Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Disney Corporation, went to Denison University.  Marc Cuban, entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, went to Indiana University.  Warren Buffet, the billionaire American investor, started out at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school of business as an undergraduate.  Wharton is arguably one of the top, if not the top, business programs in the country.  Buffet didn't stay at Wharton, however.  He didn't like it.  Guess where he transferred to and eventually graduated from?  The University of Nebraska. 

Please, please, please read this article in the Washington post about this very subject. 

And that folks, as they say, is all she wrote.