Essay Sample on College Rankings

📌Category: Education, Higher Education
📌Words: 437
📌Pages: 2
📌Published: 10 April 2022

Every year ,millions of high school students apply to college. These high schoolers are all fixated on one goal- getting into the highest ranked college they can. For so many, getting into a good college is seen as a golden ticket to a good job and a successful life. 

From time immemorial, U.S. News and World Report has been the gold standard of all college rankings. Millions of students rely on those rankings to determine the best, and most desirable, colleges. U.S. News purports to base its rankings on the best combination of many factors including faculty qualifications, class sizes, peer reputation, and many more.

Yet, Dr. Michael Thaddeus, a math professor from Columbia has his doubts. In a scathing critique on his website, Dr. Thaddeus dismantles the U.S. News rankings and reignited debates on the accuracy and importance of college rankings. Dr. Thaddeus proves that Columbia has inflated its ranking by misrepresenting data around class sizes, instructional spending, faculty qualifications, and graduation rates. At best, Columbia has misrepresented the data: at worst, it falsified it. Dr. Thaddeus called the data "inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.” These misrepresentations are far from innocuous. For example, Columbia excludes transfers from its 6 year graduation rate. If it included them, 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 to no 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 thus the most 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. 

As long as the U.S. news rankings are considered the gospel of college selection, the cycle will perpetuate. Students will compete to get in and colleges will compete to improve their rank to attract these students. Students and colleges will work tirelessly for the mirage of prestige. Yet what they all fail to see, is the only winner of this suicidal game is the scorekeeper-U.S. News.

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