Serious Question: Before USNWR Rankinga

[Anonymous]

As people mentioned there were the guides - but also as a 4th generation MoCo - can tell you just the word of mouth and social circles people knew the top schools and then schools would go in and out of being trendy - like Williams or Amherst - in those categories. But it was much less competitive to get into colleges and fewer kids going and hugely fewer international applications and nationwide applications have gone way up …. Lots more families with wealth and privilege… it’s not like it was “easy” to get into Harvard but relatively … and places like wash u and Tulane were considered safeties

[Anonymous]

it was much less competitive to get into colleges and fewer kids going and hugely fewer international applications and nationwide applications have gone way up

In the early 80's -- as the effects of the end of the baby boom in 1964 filtered through to declining college age populations -- Columbia was significantly easier to gain admission to than its academic peers, as was Chicago (in part due to perceptions of urban crime); Northwestern, Tufts and Washington University were tier-below safeties for Ivy applicants; anyone who managed to graduate from an elite prep school was guaranteed admission at Berkeley or Ann Arbor (or any other state flagship); Georgetown was viewed as a peer of lesser Ivies; BU and Tulane were fallbacks for the non-academically inclined; dim guys could write their own ticket to formerly women's colleges like Vassar or Skidmore or Conn College; Vanderbilt and Emory were perceived as regional schools (the latter kept alive through Coca-Cola money); Duke was seen as a beacon of educational excellence in the South but still not on a par with the Ivies; NYU was a commuter school; left-leaning colleges like Oberlin and Sarah Lawrence and Clark and even Hampshire were still seen as offering competitive if second-tier degrees; and Northeastern wasn't a school competitive applicants would even think about (think U Mass Boston).

International students were much fewer at the undergrad level - mostly the offspring of foreign elites.

Yield management wasn't a thing (thanks USNWR). If you were qualified, you got in.

And while I'm sure there's good analytical data out there, it seems like the cost of private colleges for those who couldn't qualify for need-based aid could generally be defrayed by a reasonable mix of loans and work-study. Paying for college didn't seem to be a second-mortgage type of hurdle.

Of course, while the costs were cheaper, the dorms were Dickensian, as my father said when he dropped me off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OMG OP, you're an idiot if you think U.S. News is the only thing people care about - how ridiculous!!

Before this shitty magazine put forth a random rating system, people relied on...wait for it...their OWN RESEARCH and colleges/universities have always sent out targeted mailers to students that they wanted to apply.

The College Board has been around forever (the people who administer the SATs) and they have been selling information to college and universities forever, which means kids have been getting targeted mailers for years and years and many have used those to identify schools that sounded good to start researching options.

This is OP. Perhaps I’m an idiot. I don’t remember claiming otherwise.

To everyone else, thank you for your meaningful input. I enjoyed reading the perspectives.

[Anonymous]

I graduated in 1983 from a Catholic girls high school in California. It wasn't just that the USNWR rankings didn't exist; the entire college application landscape looked completely different -- like comparing Mars to Times Square. Admissions were less competitive, tuition was more reasonable, and parents were way less involved (remember -- there was also no internet, no DCUM or College Confidential, so parents did not have these "opportunities" to become obsessive about their kids' college prospects). Also, coaching for standardized tests, while it existed, wasn't that common and certainly wasn't the intense time and money investment that it is today. I lived in an an affluent community and knew maybe one or two people who did test prep other than on their own. Nobody I knew went to a private college counselor. Yes, there were guidebooks (available in your school counselor's office), and some of them categorized colleges according to how competitive admissions were, but these were pretty broad categories, so people didn't fixate on minor differences among schools.

The broad categories pretty much reflected the sense we had of which schools were hardest to get into, based on where the kids who graduated from our high schools in previous years went to college. So, at my high school, I knew who was in the top track classes, who made honor society, who wrote for the school paper, etc. And, I knew where those girls had gone to college. During the summer before my senior year, I did an east coast college trip with two of my friends. We stayed with relatives and family friends -- one of whom was also hosting a nephew from Kansas, who was doing his own college trip. Our hosts drove us around or we took Amtrak -- we actually had a lot of fun. I loved the SLACs we visited and didn't like any of the bigger schools. When I got home and school started again, I met with my guidance counselor and we made a list of six colleges, all on the east coast, except for Pomona. My parents were shocked that I didn't want to go to UC Berkeley, but they were encouraging and gave me checks for the application fees as well as cash to mail in my applications from the post office. I ended up going to a SLAC in New England, where I was very happy. The whole application experience was so much less complicated and stressful than my kids' experiences. My oldest graduated from my alma mater. I'm not a crier, but when he got in, I went into my bedroom, locked the door, and sobbed just from the tension release. With the younger kids, I knew not to get so caught up in all the craziness.

[Anonymous]

Actually, everyone heading to college did not necessarily know Ivies existed. I remember an assembly in my midwest high school in the early 80s where Ivy reps talked to the top students in the grade. Most of the kids entering the auditorium had no idea what the assembly was about. The kids had never traveled out of state and had never heard of the Ivy league.

The world of information and mobility has changed drastically in the last 40 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with OP in that I’m opposed to the USNWR rankings. I don’t think tweaking the weightings etc would even help. They are a fool’s errand that should never have begun and should be given 0 weight by anyone. Colleges think this too, but because they know their customers do put stock in it, they are bound to play the game or face marginalization. And so they hypocritically play the game, further rigging and skewing the rankings. This won’t stop unless we collectively decide that the rankings are worthless.

The ratings are fine. The problem is people like us misusing them by exaggerating the importance of small differences.

What “small differences” are you referring to?

[Anonymous]

Back then, I heard of Ivy League but was not sure what schools belong in it, other than Harvard and Yale. At the time without internet, one has to check out books in order to find out and I would not bother. Not like these days that students do a lot of research for their applications. That was a good old time.

[Anonymous]

Prestige is an extremely sticky thing. Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, Hopkins et Al have all been pretty entrenched among the top echelon of academia for generations. These schools would also often have high schools that they had relationships with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Back then, I heard of Ivy League but was not sure what schools belong in it, other than Harvard and Yale. At the time without internet, one has to check out books in order to find out and I would not bother. Not like these days that students do a lot of research for their applications. That was a good old time.

People looking at T10 schools back then knew how to use a library/bookstore.

[Anonymous]

I consulted Playboy's list of top party schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back then, I heard of Ivy League but was not sure what schools belong in it, other than Harvard and Yale. At the time without internet, one has to check out books in order to find out and I would not bother. Not like these days that students do a lot of research for their applications. That was a good old time.

People looking at T10 schools back then knew how to use a library/bookstore.

Yeah but people generally didn’t bother unless you were at the top of your class. The rest of us went to the state school (Penn State), the nearby party state school (WVU) or any one of the smaller regional schools or state school satellite campuses

I went out of state to UNC because I wanted to be in a warmer climate and I thought it was pretty. There was nothing about selectivity or ranking that led me there. Very few people left the area. I can think of a couple: someone who went to Rutgers. Another person went to BU. But we were the outliers.

The discussions were all about where we thought we would like. There wasn’t discussion of T10, T20 or debating how being rated 21 was better than 24. Party kids wanted to find fun schools. Serious kids went to what was thought of back then as the serious schools (back then that meant schools like Carnegie Mellon). The jock kids wanted to go to the schools with good sports.

[Anonymous]

Who cares.
Now is important.

USNWR is one of the good tools for initial screening.
There are other good sources as ell you can reference in the age of internet and information.
Every kid and every family is unique.

[Anonymous]

Well, lots of people care because it has created an unhealthy obsession with rank based on artificially manipulated data.

If anything, it would be better to go back some sort or tier rating. The quibbling between #20 and #21 is silly and creates undue stress.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back then, I heard of Ivy League but was not sure what schools belong in it, other than Harvard and Yale. At the time without internet, one has to check out books in order to find out and I would not bother. Not like these days that students do a lot of research for their applications. That was a good old time.

People looking at T10 schools back then knew how to use a library/bookstore.

Yeah but people generally didn’t bother unless you were at the top of your class. The rest of us went to the state school (Penn State), the nearby party state school (WVU) or any one of the smaller regional schools or state school satellite campuses

I went out of state to UNC because I wanted to be in a warmer climate and I thought it was pretty. There was nothing about selectivity or ranking that led me there. Very few people left the area. I can think of a couple: someone who went to Rutgers. Another person went to BU. But we were the outliers.

The discussions were all about where we thought we would like. There wasn’t discussion of T10, T20 or debating how being rated 21 was better than 24. Party kids wanted to find fun schools. Serious kids went to what was thought of back then as the serious schools (back then that meant schools like Carnegie Mellon). The jock kids wanted to go to the schools with good sports.

People weren’t debating #21 vs #24 but among my peers we certainly focused on T10-20 schools and used ratings to help with our search.

Most applied to a few reach, a few solids, and a safety or two.

It was easier to get in back then and we had a bunch go to Ivy/top 10-15.

[Anonymous]

If anything, it would be better to go back some sort or tier rating. The quibbling between #20 and #21 is silly and creates undue stress.

Yes, agree, but these vexed rankings don't merely create more stress but actually mislead students (and their parents) into false assumptions about education quality. The underlying distinctions are minor (bordering on infinitesimal); they may be based on misinformation (eg Columbia), or on shady admissions practices (yield management rejections of qualified students, telling low-score admits to take freshman fall off so they don't bring down the matriculating student GPA, etc); and they may be based on a school boosting its overall ranking by (real) investments in specialty programs that boost their ranking but are of limited interest to most students. General tiers would be much better.