Reply to Less Selective College but the right fit?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]  Anyone reading the first line or two of your posts and those of the person you pedantically condescended to will understand why I said what I said.  [/quote]

Not if they can actually, you know, read.

[i]my first post:  College rankings aren't about bragging rights but about more resources, a more capable student body, and greater post graduate prospects.  I don't think it's a reasonable decision to set all that aside - and i think the concept of "fit" is exaggerated (many colleges can fit, and "the right fit" can sometimes be just a euphemism for avoiding character-building challenges.

response post:   The rankings are only a guide and really are bogus in many cases.  For instance: the undergrad engineering rankings for USNWR are "based on surveys of deans and senior faculty members at engineering programs". It's a popularity contest.

my response:   okay, sure, all the different ranking systems are bogus and the products of behind the scenes conspiracies (despite the fact that they explicitly lay out their criteria), a short visit is the best way to gauge what a school will be like for four years, and your 17/18 year old has the best judgment about an institution they have no firsthand experience of.  Or  in the real world: - ranking systems look (in exhaustive detail) at the qualifications of students who attend, the resources available to them, and the post-graduate outcomes for each school[/i]

The first sentences of my two comments explicitly reference "colleges" and "schools" rather than programs, so I don't know how anyone could surmise that either of my comments was about the ranking of individual programs rather than the rankings for entire schools.   You got confused (or were too lazy to read back to the prior page), which isn't a crime, but you also tried to play "gotcha" and rather snarkily accused me of trying to change the subject when in fact it was the person who was responding to me who was trying to change the subject, by picking an isolated example (as a rebuttal) that wasn't even part of the universe i was referencing.  It's probably also worth noting that my initial comment simply provided my thoughts and didn't comment on anyone else's comment -- but when someone tried to explicitly quote and rebut my comment with falsehoods ('college rankings are bogus') and mischaracterizations of what I wrote ("you shouldn't force a kid into a decision") I was certainly entitled to respond in kind.

And your complaints about my messages' tone are pretty amusing given the tone of yours -- but that seems to be how people here on DCUM respond when they realize they've lost the argument on substance, so i assume we're done.  Whatever.   Suggest in the future you read more carefully before trying to show how clever you are at other people's expense.[/quote]

I stand by my comments.[/quote]

I concur!  I also stand by my comments that college rankings are bogus.  Schools know how to game the system. I prefer to do my own research and find the best fit overall for my kids.  
 
Where someone goes does not matter nearly as much as what they do when they get there

[/quote]

I think the rankings are dumb, but the [b]data underlying the rankings is important[/b].  There's just no insight if there is meaningful distance between colleges in the ranking system--and I would expect the distance to be non-linear.  There is also some data I care about and some I don't.  There are also items that are easily "gamed" and others that are not.  I would rather have a body of schools that have been vetted and just an easy way to filter them on different data aspects than a ranking system.[/quote]

SOME of the data may be useful but some of it is bogus, e.g. asking presidents/provost of colleges to rate the quality of schools they know little about other than that college's USNWR ranking, and some of it is manipulated, e.g. who gets counted as "faculty" in faculty-student ratios, how class sizes get reported, etc.

I agree with you that just looking at the data on your own, not distilled into a ranking is a much better approach. Even if the data was perfect the process of ranking schools coveys an idea that there is a meaningful difference in the ordinal placement. I really hope there aren't parents pressuring kids to go to #40 vs. #60 on a list when you have no idea what actually separates those schools.

Given the needs of our budget and what was realistic in selectivity, DD applied to a variety of schools that ranked between 80s-40s on the USNWR list. The ranking had nothing to do with the choices, that just happened to be where they were when I looked later in the process. The data we cared about in building a consideration set were things like retention rate, overall size of the school (she wanted small), where her stats (gpa/rank/sat) fell relative to the student body (needed to be high for merit aid possibilities but didn't want to be too out of profile so she still had a solid peer group). Other data we looked at were the Baccalaureate origins of PhDs, not that she necessarily wants a PhD but it is an indicator of academic preparation and she will at least need a master's degree (this was one of the early places we looked to start generating ideas), and overall ratings in "Rate My Professor", not a perfect metric but at least actual feedback from students at the school. And then the specific details of the specific programs she was interested -- how do students get field experience, what research are faculty working on, where did grads go. What ECs that are important to her are offered and did she like the band director. Did she like the town around it well enough. Was the dining hall going to be fine for her allergies. How do they handle study abroad and what short and longer term programs are offered.

So much of this would be impossible to put into a general ranking and even if you could quantify it, how she might choose to rank things as a girl who wants a small, rural college with a great science program and the arts activities she wants would be totally meaningless to a pre-law focused student who wants to be in a big city and loves big sports. So, why should she pick a college 10 points up on a list, or 20 points lower in selectivity, that doesn't hit all the things she cares about as well as something further down this list/less selective?

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