Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students | Hacker News Reader

Why U.S. News' college rankings hurt students

cbsnews.com

36 pointsjamesbritt32 comments

Wow, those metrics are dismal. Here in Canada we have a similar report that Maclean's does, but it's focused on things like first-year class sizes, student satisfaction surveys, and other, more academically-focused metrics. Of course, the winning schools are usually tiny - 2013 looks to be Mt. Allison, where my brother is studying right now. He's had some pretty dismal experiences with the faculty there, but they do well because they have so few students, and the cost of living in a small town on the east coast is tiny. It's tough to say that any university ranking will be good, because there's a lot of complexity, but I think Maclean's is at least not completely toxic.

"On the other hand, U.S. News put more weight on ACT and SAT scores, which are correlated by family income."

Nit pick - but I didn't like this line because of how irrelevant it was. They shouldn't throw around words like 'correlates' if they don't understand them. Knowledge also correlates with income - whoopdydoo.

There are a variety of college ranking schemes. I documented some of the other sources of rankings and recommendations of colleges in a thread on College Confidential,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection...

a place where I've used this screen name I use here for a long time. But even better than my online list (which is alphabetical, removing the implication of a strict rank order of colleges) is the free website by Education Trust called College Results

http://collegeresults.org/

which lets applicants or their parents dig into lots of data-based comparisons among colleges.

http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027

You can decide what outcome measure is important to you, and use that criterion to compare the colleges you are most interested in. People who are smart about shopping for colleges don't limit themselves to the U.S. News rankings, and you don't have to either.

AFTER EDIT: Another source of information for informed shoppers is the website of a consulting firm that advises colleges,

http://www.maguireassoc.com/

telling colleges how to improve their financials and their rankings with tricks like raising list price and then offering phony "merit scholarships" that just bring out-of-pocket cost down to somewhat above the actual spending by the college on student instruction.

> At private schools, the percentage of students receiving need-based aid has actually declined!

..from 43% to 42%. This is not a significant amount. If the trend holds, we have something to worry about.

Considering most private schools are going to be significantly smaller than state schools, that 1% difference is quite likely a few dozen people tops.

1% at my private undergrad would be 18-20 people now.

The number of students attending private and public universities are actually pretty close (for 4-year schools): "Nearly 7.5 million students will attend public 2-year institutions (source), and 0.5 million will attend private 2-year colleges (source). Some 8.2 million students are expected to attend public 4-year institutions (source), and about 5.6 million will attend private 4-year institutions (source)."

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

Rankings systems are a necessary evil. If the US News didn't create them, someone else would. And they have flaws, as do all single measurements. (Stock price, imperfect. Page clicks, imperfect. IQ, imperfect.)

That said, the article can be misleading. They claim that merit scholarships are crowding out need due to the rankings. According to their charts, public school aid is increasing very much and private school aid is flat as a % of students. What isn't included is the quantity of aid. Most top ranked schools (call it top 15?) have increased the amount of aid for people falling below a certain threshold such that they can graduate near debt free. This helps at Cornell and Chicago more than George Washington, but it's the winners who are leading on need based aid.

The comments on reputation are a little strange too. They claim "High reputation schools do well because they are high reputation." This misses the virtuous circle of "Good reputation improves rankings" -> "High Rankings draw better students" -> "Better students get better jobs and donate more money" -> "More money enables investments in improving reputation"

Despite all of this, the rankings only go so far. That's why it's good to have a lot of them, and other data points for choosing a school.

Can you elaborate on the "vulirtuous circle"?

The good students will go somewhere. Why is it good that they go to the same school as other good students? Is that good for the good students, or good for everyone?

Good for the schools that rank high and students that go there. It's a reinforcing cycle. (As opposed to being static, "You're ranked high based on an old reputation)

Certainly one can take a step back and say that employers should look for the most talented people, not the highest ranked school, but that's another story.

My personal (though admittedly not dire) experience with college rankings hurting students was with artificially constricted class sizes that were strictly enforced in order to impress the rankings by having classes numbering fewer than 19 students.

It seems that this is yet another consequence of the bizarre split responsibilities universities hold—balancing the long-term goals of a large institution with the needs of its students, for whom the experience is much more ephemeral.

I think that the general US News College Rankings are useless. The rankings more specific to the major are more useful.

College is what you make of it. Learning should not stop after college - it should be an ongoing quest.

Normal FUD.

> 2. The rankings ignore job prospects.

I think says it all. I certainly didn't go to university for job prospects, McDonalds would have taken me I'm sure.

I did it to learn but also so I'd get a job that I enjoy and was a valuable member of the community in.

This particular ranking list might suck compared to others, but this article certainly didn't show it.

There are maybe 20 million students in the US and the top 10 schools in the rankings have maybe 50000 or 60000 students. That's less than 0.3%, just sayin'.

I agree with the general proposition that the rankings hurt college students, particularly because schools raise tuition in order to be able to afford more merit aid, but I find some of the comments to be tropes:

"1. College rankings hurt low and middle-income students. "

It's hard to argue why offering aid on the basis of merit as opposed to need is a bad thing.

"2. The rankings ignore job prospects."

True, but mostly irrelevant. The rankings are broadly correlated with job prospects.

"3. The rankings don't care about learning outcomes."

College isn't about learning, and it's not clear there is much difference between colleges in this regard anyway. You don't go to Harvard because you think it'll teach you better than Penn State. You do it to associate with the other people who got into Harvard.

"4. U.S. News runs a beauty pageant."

The side-effect of the beauty pageant is that it tends to echo preconceived notions hiring managers already have. Arguably it does a huge disservice to say drive students away from Yale on the basis of a bunch of things like "learning outcomes" that nobody else cares about.

"5. College rankings fuel ever greater college costs.'

This is the real takeaway point. Overhead per student is a major component of the rankings, and it helps fuel the ridiculous construction craze that's happening with universities right now.

Although I agree with the initial premise that college rankings are flawed, I still believe they serve a purpose: to inform students and parents of the schools that are the most popular. Brand recognition plays a paramount role in getting hired at certain companies, and the HR/hiring departments definitely keep an eye out for lists like this. It would be in someone's best interets to find the school that is most compatible with their future goals, but also keep in mind that going to a "top 20" school can impact their future signficantly.

I agree with everything in the article, U.S. News' rankings are terrible and have hugely bad effects. There are better lists. For example, Affordable Colleges Online has a list of the best return-on-investment CS degrees [1]. It has it's own questionable methodological choices but it's a much better start for anyone thinking about getting a degree.

[1]: http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-rankings-onl...

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I agree, and I started a website to address this: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/.

Great site. Good resource!!

http://www.collegeanswerz.com/colleges is returning the Heroku error page.

Yea, I'm working on something (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18681232/trouble-with-fix...). It should be better in a day or two. If you want to see colleges, just use the search bar.

My college president, Bill Destler of Rochester Institute of Technology, has decried these rankings too. But he knows it's going to be promoted heavily by all the colleges that are not in the top 50 or so.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-destler/the-ultimate-absu...

The author doesn't think that reputation is just an academic number with no significance? Regardless of any metrics used by ranking agencies, if you go to a school that people hold in high regard, that's going to open doors for you.

The first point makes no sense... Universities should be motivated to recruit students with better test scores. Rewarding students based on merit seems like the logical approach. Not to mention, the difference in the two is a couple percent?

College rankings are bullshit, and anyone who doesn't realize that the difference between the #1 and #10 schools is negligible is an idiot.

I'd say, they're not bullshit, but presenting them in such a finely graduated ranking is harmful

There is a huge difference between the top 100 schools and the 201st-300th best schools.

There's probably a difference in the students at every level on average. if not strictly by intelligence, then by how hard they try and how much work they put in during high school. But I don't think the quality of teachers is going to change from top 100 to a community college. There are bad teachers at every school and good teachers. Some are famous in their field, and they don't teach or they can't teach well. And then you can go to a community college and find some really great teachers and small class sizes.

However, if you only have solid B students, you end up teaching less material than if you have a class of A+ students (looking at HS grades).

The depth of coursework is reduced the less esteemed the student body goes.

The problem is that it seems to matter in terms job prospects. I'm a biomedical engineering undergrad, so I thought I made the right decision turning down Harvard to come to Hopkins.

However, our recruitment is abysmal compared to Harvard even for biotech and I'm seeing peers who went to a much less rigorous undergraduate engineering program that also has grade inflation getting the jobs I want simply because those companies are not hiring from Hopkins.

There are lots of kids at harvard saying the same thing. They think (understandably) just graduating from harvard should get them some decent job in their field of choice somehow. I don't think it's completely a matter of hopkins vs harvard.

We should decide why we are above it all though, shouldn't we?

Is it because all of the top-ranked colleges are essentially the same, or is it because the top-ranked colleges are different in ways that are not captured by a single number.

Furthermore, if we are going to distinguish between, prestige, selectivity, learning outcomes, jobs out of college, careers 10, 20, 30 years out of college, or whether we measure that by income, or influence, etc, before even moving on to distinguishing between the paths chosen by graduates of Yale, Juilliard, or CalTech, shouldn't we at least identify which is the one true metric, and why it is better than this magazine's?

In dismissing rankings as but one take on the distinctions, I don't think prospective students are better served by the contention that the schools are largely interchangeable.

Not idiocy, limited experience. The target audience for these rankings is high school seniors and their parents. When you're 17/18 years old you don't have a lot of experience with judging the merits of higher education. This is a major decision that is (generally) only made once & few people will bother switching to another school after enrolling.

Compare this to any other purchasing decision that is made in life. If you buy the wrong cellphone, you've got 30 days to return it and, worst case, you need to wait 2 years before you can upgrade. Even a car, which is a 4-6 year purchase, will be done multiple times so you can learn from the experience. Even houses, with 20-30 loan repayments, can be sold.

The only other things you can do at this age that are as significant are joining the military & having a child. Both of which, arguably, have far more transparent and well understood pros & cons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com