| Rankings cut through the marketing. Without third parties, every school would be a bastion of higher learning delivering the highest quality of education to dedicated students destined to go on to great things |
Not really we have too many mediocre schools (close to 4000?), and a lot of students are better off going to trade schools. Marketing is everywhere for anything. Nothing special about college that people spend shit ton of money. |
|
Why we're still fascinated by college rankings ?
How else will you know if your kids are better than theirs ? |
We'll actually really know when they get their first pay check. College is like a midterm. Whoever gets bigger check wins, and it's the final grade. |
| It’s true that recruiters target top schools so opportunities may be easier to come by for those students; however, you have to do well. If you don’t, it won’t matter that you went to that fancy school, so fit is very important. It’s a personal equation each kid needs to figure out and rank may be a variable among others like cost, location, size, programs, etc. |
See the wealth rankings on the other thread. Top schools win again. |
https://thestreet.com/investing/dropping-out-of-harvard-may-be-the-best-path-to-unimagined-wealth 1) Harvard 2) Stanford 3) U Penn 4) Columbia 5) NYU 6) Northwestern 7) MIT 8) Yale 9) USC 10) U Chicago 11) Texas 12) Princeton 13) Cornell 14) UCLA 15) Michigan 16) Notre Dame 17) Virginia 18) Georgetown 19) Boston University 20) U Miami Maybe the only top 20 list of colleges that really matters ? |
That's also a refence you use in choosing a college. Other people's succes is not your kids' success. We'll decide your kids success after you show us the first paycheck. |
This is a much better reference for financial https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ |
Huh? The oversimplification of things makes me wonder about how we teach critical thinking. Why is the first paycheck necessarily the most important? If it’s a career or business with pay compression it’s actually not better. So if student A makes $20,000 more per year than student B for the first 5 years, about the same for the next 5 years, but student A makes $75,000 less for the next 20 years, who is better off? This does happen when too many students enter a particular field. Second, who says the primary criteria for judging an education is the earnings you get? |
better than judging by which colleges attending. It's outcome based. |
That list isn't adjusted for enrollment and it includes both graduate school and undergraduate. Harvard Business School alone is probably near the top. |
And as a gazillion have pointed out on other threads about these lists is that they don't control for family wealth attending--expensive elite schools where wealthy kids attend are more likely to have wealthy kids when they graduate. Their wealthy connected families get them internships, positions. The middle class students at these schools, whose families scrounge to pay, don't do any better than they would elsewhere in terms of pay. There are studies that look at college impact on wealth BUT control for family wealth going into college and none of these schools are on them. |
| If a ranking shows the school you support/promote above a school being compared, that ranking is definitive and unassailable. If another ranking shows the school being compared above the school you support/promote, that ranking is rubbish. It is as simple as that. |
Or, as the article notes, some people and schools (though not all those that are *fascinated*) are moving back from the whole stinking pile of rankings rubbish. |