Global Breaking News - Monday, December 23, 2024

Colleges, by the Numbers

The 2013 edition of the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges hit newsstands this month. Are these rankings given too much weight in the college application and selection process? Are they helpful or a distraction?
* newsstand = (길거리) 신문, 잡지 판매대/ give weight to ~ = ~을 강조하다(중요시하다)/ cringe = (겁이 나서) 움츠리다; 민망하다

 대학 순위를 보여주는 자료들이 도움이 되나요? 아니면 방해가 되나요?

1. I Cringe When I Hear the Word ‘Rankings’
College selection should be more about the best fit for each student, which may not necessarily be a school that is highly ranked.  

2. Insiders Care the Most About These Lists
Rankings aren’t going to go anywhere. But those of us in higher education should admit we’re the ones who care most of all.
 
3. Filling a Void, Providing a Service
U.S. News and others are offering a useful service, giving a bewildered public some idea of who is doing things right.
 
4. The College Search Requires Greater Thought
These lists rely on entering class statistics instead of focusing on what happens between freshman year and graduation, and that's a mistake.
 
5. College Presidents Should Just Say ‘No’ to U.S. News
There is much more that could and should be done to help students and families understand and assess their college options.
 
6. Rankings Can Be Useful, but Also Dangerous
Institutional leaders often pay too much attention to published rankings, and there can be significant pressure to improve a ranking.

Sample Essay

The College Search Requires Greater Thought

One of the biggest flaws in starting the college search process by using ranking lists is that they tout the entering class statistics, rather than focusing on what happens during the four years those students are enrolled. The late Loren Pope, author of "Looking Beyond the Ivy League," said that choosing colleges based on the entering statistics of the freshmen class is like choosing a hospital based on the health of those in the E.R.; it’s the treatment that really matters, in the case of college, it's what happens between the first year and graduation.

Researching colleges based instead on student outcomes, highlights many colleges that outperform the Ivies and the brand names, but don’t have the benefit of name recognition. The research from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium on the undergraduate origins of Ph.D.'s finds lesser known colleges listed in the top 10 in various categories, often ahead of the usual suspects.

If you had to choose a spouse or partner for life, would you use a publication ranking them by income, I.Q. scores and reputation as reported by others who have never met the person? I hope not.

As a culture, we love consulting consumer guidebooks and lists for a shortcut method to choosing electronics and cars; the college search requires a more thoughtful, personal and time-consuming approach. It can’t be reduced to rankings with numerical values when it requires starting with who the individual students are and why they are going to college, and their needs, desires, learning styles and interests. This self-inventory is the start for finding colleges that “fit” for the individual, instead of starting with the assumption that only the “Top 20” on the U.S. News and other rankings lists have any value.

These ranking guides sell big, but their value in the college search process can certainly be diminished if students, parents and counselors look for the right fit, rather than name recognition.

Malcolm Gladwell best captured what college rankings do in a New Yorker article this year on the subject: “A group of magazine analysts in an office building in Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value selectivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small, expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in Manhattan.” Who comes out on top, in any ranking system, is really about who is doing the ranking.

Amen.