An Essay Example On College Ranking

The landscape of college admissions is rife with dishonesty. It is common practice to pad volunteering hours, exaggerate club commitments, and take credit for tutoring one too many students. Most egregiously, many parents were convicted of rigging SAT results or bribing sports coaches in the Varsity Blues Scandal to get their children a spot at the most coveted universities in the country. The mania surrounding the process forces children to view high school as a video game,  their friends as competition, the SAT as a side quest, and admissions officers as the final boss they must overcome to reach their dream.

Yet, these coveted colleges are starting to feel the pressure to attract the best students. The same colleges that espouse the value of honesty and integrity have allegedly misrepresented or even falsified the data they provided U.S. News, the go-to list for students and parents alike to determine the best college.  Dr. Michael Thaddeus, a math professor from Columbia, alleges that his university provided U.S. News data that was  “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading" and inflated  its ranking by misrepresenting data around class sizes, instructional spending, and graduation rates. These misrepresentations are far from innocuous. If it included transfers in its reported 6-year graduation rate, its 6 year graduation rate rankings would drop from its current 6th place all the way to 26th place: a huge drop that would certainly be accompanied by a drop in rankings.

However, the most glaring problem in the U.S. news rankings isn't its flawed data, but its flawed evaluation system. U.S. News not only fails to accurately evaluate its existing metrics, but also omits many other important metrics including return on investment, career outcomes after graduation, and top universities for a specific majors. All of which are more important than selectivity, "academic reputation", and "average alumni giving rate", which combined account for a staggering 30% of the ranking. These factors have little bearing on the quality of the education and  serve to  perpetuate the reputation of a select class of rich colleges, focusing more on ideas of prestige than the tangible value that these colleges provide. The richest colleges have the richest, and most generous alumni, are the most well known in academia, and have the most applicants, and selectivity. Students should move away from these rankings, analyzing colleges for their fit by themselves- instead of outsourcing the task to a company and blindly following the result.

The idea of "objectively" ranking colleges imposes crushing levels of stress on students to get into the "best college" rather than the best college for them. Rankings have warped the admissions process into a cutthroat competition for both students and colleges. As the final boss and the main character savage each other beyond repair, the only winner is the game developer, U.S. News, which can sit atop its perch and enjoy the chaos it inflicted.