Reply to Grinnell ranking drops by 8 places

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]US News can't decide what they want to be. Some time ago, the US News ranking was a rough approximation of prestige for the sake of employment. Social mobility isn't relevant to that, except perhaps very indirectly.

Social mobility would be relevant to fit. [b]Fit is subjective. There is no one-size-fits-all best "fit" ranking[/b].[/quote]

This is the thing. The undergraduate experience is dynamic, a shifting alchemy between what the institution offers (resources, class size, majors, concentration, setting, vibe, cost, mentors, personalities/professional expertise/ life experiences of faculty), and what an individual student — each with their own personality, background, ambitions, interests, skills, insecurities, habits, financial reality, and weird little factors that for whatever reason make them more or less likely to thrive) — brings with them.

And that’s before that student even lands on campus and begins their education, which (hopefully) brings new discoveries about themselves and new insights about the world and what they want from it.

A PP’s comment, about how before US News counselors suggested only schools they knew, was a good one. But I’d still be loathe to take an ordinal ranking too seriously. There’s just too much complexity, far too many factors, to be able to say “Princeton is definitively better than MIT, which is definitively better than Harvard, which is in turn better than Stanford, Yale, and Caltech in exactly that order,” or whatever the equivalent would be on the SLAC side. [/quote]

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