Reply to Serious Question: Before USNWR Rankinga

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Serious Question: Before USNWR Rankinga"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Agree before USNWR arrived in 1983, colleges hadn't been as aggressively marketed and commoditized as they are today, but there were a few reference guides that ambitious families (esp on the East Coast) who were looking beyond their local schools tended to use.

One principal resource was the voluminous Barron's Guide to College Admissions, which contained objective factual data on every US college's programs and resources and admissions process, and a short (highly scrutinized) chart at the front that listed/compared the competitiveness of admissions of each -- Most Competitive (maybe 30 schools?), Highly Competitive (another 40?), Very Competitive (100 schools?) and Competitive (and I believe Less Competitive too), and an added "+" was also available for schools in all but the "Most Competitive" categories.  Some people monitored these rankings avidly (much like USNWR), and some self-important applicants/parents refused (in an environment of easier college admissions generally) to consider a fallback that would be in a lower category that they felt appropriate to their stature.    But that said, it was only a list of admissions difficulty, not of overall quality (as USNWR pretends to assess) -- Barrons was explicit/honest that it was only ranking the admissions process and not the quality of the educational experience.   The other difference was that since the only metric Barrons measured was difficulty of admissions, Barrons had no problem combining small colleges and large universities into a single list.    USNWR decided to split those up (no doubt for good reasons, since once it started comparing resources, comparing small colleges and large universities was apples and oranges, ) but by doing so set in motion a process that has discriminated against smaller schools and favored larger universities (witness many of the "T20" discussions on this site).   As well as against what USNWR arbitrarily decides are "regional" institutions.

The other widely used guide was the "Insiders Guide to the Colleges" published by I believe Yale Daily News, which was kind of like the Fiske guide only more informal -- 2-3 page narrative summaries on what student life was like at maybe the 125 or so best known colleges in the country, based on Yale Daily News interviews with students there.   There was a brief summary of a few lines of factual data on the school size and admissions profile at the start of each, but no attempt to rank or compare the various schools.

The most notable difference back then was that the directories didn't attempt to number rank the various schools (the most Barron's did was indicate tiers of admissions difficulty).  USNWR was the first to do that -- for which its editors should forever rot in hell -- and once it was generally realized one couldn't put that genie back in the bottle, other ranking systems like WSJ, Forbes and Washington Monthly were developed to correct the perceived shortcomings of the USNWR system.

Don't mean to sound as if things were perfect.   Anxious/obnoxious DCUM-style parents would still disparage some schools for having merely "Very Competitive" or (horrors) "Competitive Plus" admissions in the Barrons book, or endlessly repeat some anecdotal quote in the Insiders Guide ("I hear everyone there is bitter about about not getting into the Ivy League").   But at least one was spared the current silliness of pretending that say a gap of 20 or 25 places in the USNWR number rankings -- generated by just a 5 or 6 point gap in underlying "scores" on USNWR's easily manipulated data -- was a meaningful measure of relative quality of the education available.

If I were to seek a theoretical plus to the current situation, it's that the greater availability of (well-documented) nationwide ranking systems - both USNWR and successors like WSJ and Forbes -- might provide greater encouragement for applicants to consider excellent schools outside their usual frame of reference -- eg, for DCUM, a school like Georgia, or Purdue, or Florida State.   But alas I think at least here on DCUM, you'll find that eager as parents are to swear by the validity of the USNWR's rankings when they reaffirm their own inclinations, longstanding geographic/cultural biases die hard, and continue to limit consideration of superb educational opportunities outside their geographic/cultural comfort zone.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics