With US News Being Challenged by Top Schools, Does it Make More Sense to Combine Rankings?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:It makes no sense to rank colleges.

It makes no sense to make rankings the only consideration, but it does make sense for providing a general idea of quality colleges, especially for the vast majority of people who aren’t obsessed and probably don’t know about many colleges. For example, I didn’t really know that Washington University in St. Louis was a good school, if you asked me before I saw any rankings I would’ve thought it was one of many random regional schools.

The rankings permeate public perception pretty quickly. The public never thought much of the bottom ranked Ivies like Columbia and Cornell. A running gag on the Office is that Andy thinks he's special because he went to Cornell.

I mean... Columbia and Cornell are great schools. And Columbia isn't necessarily a "bottom ivy," tons of smart kids go there.

Lots of smart kids go to all T30 schools.

That’s true, but Columbia is one of few schools that actually competes well with HPSM for students. Who knows if that will be true after a few years removed from the scandal though, maybe some will view it differently.

Columbia always gets destroyed by HYPSM in the crossadmit battle.

A — who cares?
B — you may have causation backwards. They might choose HYPSM because they are more highly rated. But winning the cross-admit battle doesn’t make it better.

All this quibbling over whether X university is better than Y university is so counterproductive and wearisome. You can’t possibly know, because these are unknowable things.

Demand and perceived prestige may be proxies for quality, but they absolutely are imperfect (even deeply flawed) ones.

You claimed Columbia “competes well” with HYPMS. When PPs point out that Columbia gets destroyed in cross admits, you try “But how does one really know which school is better?”

Yeah, I claimed no such thing. Nor would I presume to think it matters.

If I could care less about Columbia v Harvard v Yale, it would be extremely far down the list of things I’d care about. Somewhere below which pair of socks I’ll where tomorrow.