Why we're still fascinated by college rankings
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Anonymous
I agree with you that MBB/BB IB are foolish in ignoring superstars just because of where they studied, but unfortunately for those positions it DOES matter where you went to undergrad. Much more than major, in fact. |
Anonymous
So think about it this way. If you got to certain reputable basketball schools, you have a better chance of making the NBA e.g. UNC, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA etc. The blue bloods as they are called. Same with football-Alabama or other SEC schools, Ohio State, Michigan, etc. Same thing here. Yes once in a while you have a Scottie Pippen from Central Arkansas or Steph Curry from Davidson--but it is a harder path. The blue bloods open doors for you. That's all. |
Anonymous
Give us a few examples, please. |
Anonymous
There are more NBA players from Ohio State and Michigan because most of the best players are recognizable already in high school, and the big basketball universities get first pick. The same is true for those most likely to succeed using their intellect, where colleges highest in the rankings get first pick. If BU and Penn State were to suddenly get all the best engineering and business students, you can bet that every employer would be begging to recruit there. |
Anonymous
Ranking may not matter but its a guarantee you'll get intelligent peers and valuable professors compared to colleges with 100% acceptance rate and basic professors. |
Anonymous
Yes, if that's the comparison you make, then you're mostly right. But what people do with rankings, unfortunately, is assume that there's a huge difference in peers and professors between colleges that accept 10% of applicants and those that accept 40%. There's not. |
Anonymous
USNWR makes no effort to determine how much the faculty resources it factors actually contribute to undergraduate education. At many national universities, they may spend much more time on graduate students and research. They may have very little career incentive to teach undergraduates. Their career progression won't depend on it. |
Anonymous
There was an academic study that showed that people who had the same qualifications as top ranked college students when entering college (i.e. they were accepted to a top school but chose to go elsewhere) had the same average outcomes post college as the kids graduating from the top ranked colleges. |
Anonymous
The bolded phrase is doing A LOT of work in that sentence. That’s exactly the point, colleges are complex ecosystems, and all things are NOT equal. Cost, location, curriculum, prestige, housing, access to internships, gender balance, athletics, faculty ratios, class size, career placement, strength of different departments, etc. That is a lot to sweep under the rug as “all else equal”. The kid who can get into #15 will likely land a fat merit scholarship to #159 or whatever. For someone looking to go to grad or professional school, the latter very likely may be the smarter decision. But ranking are stupid because they take something incredibly complex and they dumb it down to a single reductive number that can’t possibly represent everything, or even most things, that people care about in a college, unless that one thing you care about is how envious your neighbors or co-workers will be of your window sticker. |
Anonymous
+1 It's an important study to be familiar with if you're going to enter a discussion about college ROI. It's a longitudinal study done by Krueger and Dale done over several decades now, and no one has come close to refuting the findings. Here's a link to the abstract..... https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159 |
Anonymous
Yup you can go to GMU CS and have similar outcome as UVA CS, but people pay more and go to UVA. Outcome and ROI is a very important factor especially for middle class, but there are many other factors as well. |
Anonymous
“ We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data..” In 1976, when the Krueger and Dale cohort entered the job market, having any kind of a college degree was a big deal. The value of a college degree has been diluted a great deal since then, making the name brand of the school more important in recruiting. |
Anonymous
The differentiation of just having a college degree has diminished because so many more are college educated. And of course the top colleges are more selective. But among those who are college educated, I think top students are less concentrated at a small number of schools than 50 years ago. And 50 years ago they were less concentrated than 50 years before that. It’s because of a number of factors, but the net result is that people are less inclined to assume a particular school brand on the diploma is either a necessary or sufficient condition for a capable and well prepared individual among the educated, imo. I went to a very selective private high school. Over half that class went to top 10 universities. Decades later, my child went to the same high school. Their class’s test scores are higher and their ECs better. The school itself more selective. Maybe 10% go to those same colleges now. I think today’s students are more likely than those from my era to conclude “there are many great students at many colleges, a lot of the process has to do with things beyond a student’s performance” than the students from my time. |
Anonymous
+1 Thank you for saving my fingers a few keystrokes! Here's some hard data regarding where people in desirable jobs did their studies to support what you say. https://lesshighschoolstress.com/page/12/ |
Anonymous
Sorry PP, but the way you've been spamming this board with a link to a website that is literally titled "Less HS Stress" is annoying as hell. It matters where you go to undergrad. Full stop. No argument there (unless you're pre-med or pre-law). |