How to Use College Rankings Wisely

The Applerouth Team
October 12, 2017
#
min read

What good are college rankings? Every year, articles abound explaining, justifying, and deriding rankings systems like the US News and World Report’s best colleges and universities list. On the one hand, college rankings take into account much hard data that is difficult to explain away or tweak. On the other hand, the college admissions process is such a personal one; how could one “best colleges” list (or even a dozen!) possibly help an individual student make a meaningful decision on which college to attend?

There are many ways not to use a college rankings list. The first is to draw a line below a certain arbitrary number and to consider only the colleges in the top 10, 20, or 50 range. At the level of detail required to tease apart the 15th best college from the 16th best college, you are dealing with very small differences related to alumni giving amounts and endowment, unlikely factors to matter tremendously in a student’s college experience. The first rule of thumb, then, is to recognize that college rankings are a relatively blunt instrument, helpful in developing a college list or learning about options, less valuable if trying to compare colleges in close proximity to one another on the list.

That being said, college rankings do serve several important purposes. First, the rankings lists can serve as important gate-keepers of your time and energy. You will be awash with brochures, flyers, pamphlets, and emails asking you to consider dozens, if not hundreds, of schools. If one such college does not show up on one of the rankings pages, that should raise a red flag as to whether or not the college deserves your time. There may be worthy colleges that are not ranked for whatever reason, but the vast majority should have a ranking.

Second, the rankings lists can help expand a student’s horizons. If a student is interested in a particular college or university, the list can help identify peer schools at a similar ranking for liberal arts colleges, overall value, or graduation rates. By examining lists, you might learn about similarly-ranked schools previously unknown to you simply because you had never done the research. A good exercise is to think about some colleges with which you, friends, or family have a personal and positive connection and then use the rankings to uncover a few colleges within the same ranking bandwidth to research further.

Third, if you know a bit more about what you’d like in a college or university – if you know that you want to study nursing or are looking to get a solid education on a tight budget – you might check out the other rankings generated besides best universities and best colleges. You can find lists of “best value” schools, “most innovative” schools, best business programs, best schools for marketing, accounting, real estate, aerospace engineering, you name it. For those more extracurricular-interested, you can find lists of schools with most students in fraternities/sororities.

Alternatively, US News & World Report also has a search filter where you can input your desired major, location, price range, and selectivity and generate your own personal list of colleges that match your description. Why not let an algorithm do the heavy lifting and create your own college rankings based on your particular criteria?

The upshot is that college rankings can be extremely useful, but you shouldn’t expect too much of them. No single “best college” ranking can tell you where your best college experience will take place; however, rankings do incorporate many valuable data points that you can use to broaden your college search and add more colleges to your list, or to narrow your overloaded list. With great power comes great responsibility, so make sure to use college rankings wisely.

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