What matters? Usually more mundane or subjective concerns. One student who went to MacGowan’s office last week for a college planning meeting, junior Bridget Gillis, said she’d yet to even see a college ranking guide. Her criteria: “If they have my major, if it’s a nice campus, how big it is, if they have the sport I want to play in college (field hockey).”
The latest version of a huge national survey of college freshman conducted annually by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute asked students to list various factors affecting their choice of college. Rankings in national magazines were No. 11 for current college freshmen, with roughly one in six calling them very important, well behind factors such as cost, size and location.
Those findings may be somewhat misleading. The leading factor cited, by almost two-thirds of students, was their college’s “academic reputation,” which can be hard to disentangle from its ranking.
A reputational survey ranking accounts for 25 percent of a college’s score in US News, and fame from a high US News rankings contributes to reputation, even if students say the ranking itself wasn’t a factor. Such circularity is one of many things critics dislike about the US News methodology.
But the survey data do suggest students generally heed the magazine’s advice not to use the rankings to make fine-grained distinctions between schools.
“As someone who is asked every year to comment on the rankings, it seems to me that who cares most is the media,” John Pryor, who directs the UCLA survey, wrote in a blog post last year. “Second would be college presidents and development officers. Way down the list seem to be those who are actually trying to decide where to go to college.”
Thacker says the rankings do have negative psychological effects on students, though usually only the top 10 to 15 percent who are applying to competitive colleges. But it has affected a much broader swath of colleges that have been unable to suppress their competitive urges for the educational common good.
“It has more an impact on colleges, presidents and trustees than it does on students,” Thacker said. “The colleges have shifted resources and changed practices and policies that were once governed by educational values to serve prestige and rank and status.”
That effect, he says, is dishonorable, even if some colleges at least feel guilty about it. More than 80 percent of college admissions officers surveyed for a report last fall by the National Association for College Admission Counseling felt the US News rankings offered students misleading conclusions, and roughly the same proportion agreed they caused counter-productive behavior by colleges.
Yet more than 70 percent said their schools promoted their ranking in marketing materials.
- Extron AV Switching, Streaming, and Control Systems Aid Higher Learning at Idaho’s First Medical School - June 1, 2021
- Extron XTP, Streaming, and Control Systems Empower Point Park University’s Varsity Esports Program - June 1, 2021
- Extron NAV Series Delivers AVoIP Throughout Allied Health Veterans Hall at UNC Wilmington - June 1, 2021