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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]But you folks are mixing together two different things.  A school's reputation, accurate or not, is one thing.  The (close to random) rankings by one particular institution following their particular, manipulable criteria, is something else entirely.  The former existed long before anyone cared about rankings.  Of course an applicant is going to care about a school's reputation, as a starting point before digging deeper.  But the reputations exist separate an apart from that one system of ranking.

Yale would be Yale whether or not US News rankings existed.  But would Washington U be Washington U without the rankings?  And should a school shoot up in reputation solely because it is adept at manipulating the particular criteria used by this outside company?

And its one thing for someone to say "X is a great school for such and such study," or "I keep hearing that the students at X get very little attention and the atmosphere is competitive."  Its another thing to say "X is ranked #4, so I hope my child goes there," or "X is only 26, so even though my child really likes it, I don't want him to go there."[/quote]

Yes, but it's impossible not to conflate the two in this day and age. We all get that "Yale would be Yale" without USNWR. But would Penn be Penn without USNWR? I posted earlier and noted that Penn has enjoyed a huge surge almost solely based on its USNWR ranking. Starting as the bastard stepchild of the Ivies it's now one of the most sought-after schools in the country, with acceptances and yield rates to match. People are choosing Penn routinely over Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, and even Columbia. Another case in point: was anyone beating down the door to get into the University of Chicago 2 decades ago? Yes, Chicago was always a highly reputable school with loads of smart kids, but the masses that were chasing after the Ivies wouldn't have given it two thoughts. Enter USNWR. Now it has a sub-10 percent acceptance rate and is turning away kids that end up going to Columbia and Penn. Seriously, you may pooh-pooh the rankings, and it's certainly generally true that the schools in the top 10-15 (including the two examples I just mentioned) were always considered "elite" and always had solid reps. But the huge up-ending of the schools in this already-elite group -- with some rising to literally the top and others falling -- would not have happened without USNWR. At least that's my view.

I also mentioned in a prior post the NYU phenomenon -- while NYU hasn't been successful with pushing its undergrad into the stratosphere, it has done exactly that with its law school. Its USNWR ranking of #6 puts it among the cream of the crop for would-be law students. Again, inconceivable 2 decades ago. "Reputation" is a slippery thing. It's not assured and it's not forever. USNWR has had a huge hand in shaping the reputation of every school in this country, outside of -- perhaps -- Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. And even for those schools, USNWR has had a significant impact in both solidifying their rep and, ironically, making them slightly *less* desirable because of their peer institutions' concurrent reputational advances. (For ex., see Stanford's rise from "meh" to "holy shit, I'm going to Stanford!," again in the last 2 decades.)

Anyway, bunk or not, the rankings do have a huge influence over generations of applicants. USNWR rankings, along with the rise of the common app, that allowed top students to apply to that many more schools (and simultaneously allow said schools to drastically increase application rates) have to be the biggest game changers in school reputation in quite a long time.[/quote]

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