From Myth to Measurement: Rethinking US News and World Report College Rankings
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But too many families have been convinced that rankings like this are useful so now the institutions have little choice but to become complicit in the ridiculous system or have their enrollment decimated and be unable to pay its bills.
Not at all surprised to know a lot of people care about this. I'd be surprised to know that there wasn't more money tied to these than makes sense.
If your ranking doesn't show Harvard and MIT near the top, it is wrong. If your corruption index doesn't show Scandinavia and Western Europe above Africa and South America, it is wrong.
If it's wrong, people will not want to read it. If you do an "objective" ranking and it doesn't quite say what you expected, you need to weight things differently, so that your ranking has credibility.
At best you can do a bit of massage to show that you are actually doing something when compiling these rankings, and you might be able to highlight a few trends. But in the end, if you are not showing the usual suspects in the usual places, people will not believe you.
Reputation, at the end of the day, moves slowly.
In a world where you can achieve anything, someone without achievements must be incapable or, worse, apathetic. Pair that with routine measurement, and it creates a real compounding effect.
So parents correctly try to accumulate achievements as early as possible. To get into HFT, you must go an Ivy, for which you need a recommendation at a top high school, etc, etc....and so you need to impress the pre-K director.
Even (so-called) failure must be managed strategically. Spend 6 months as a freshman at MIT before dropping out, so everyone knows you're better than the best.
Other nations don't do much better. It's a pick your poison situation. But, other nations seem more willing to accept the poison as a necessary evil. The US (systems, not individuals) refuses to see its quirks as anything but a universal good.
Still the least bad system out there.
All of the above applies tenfold for foreign students coming to prestigious US universities, as they pay exorbitant sums to get the name recognition, creating all sorts of weird incentives.
As someone who went to a somewhat prestigious university (Vanderbilt), fingers crossed we nationalize the whole system sometime soon... I think we can all agree that focusing on football, campus amenities, and marketing aren't where these billions should be going. Vanderbilt, to their credit, gamed the rankings a ~decade ago by offering to meet 100% of student's government-determined financial need with grants, which is probably the best outcome possible of this weird system.
Without such skin in the game, a student is more likely to do as little as possible and focus on having fun instead.
I would be wary of making generalizations on motivation which is highly variable person to person.
I bet you still do things for money, even if you'd rather have fun instead.
My parents gave me the necessities of life for free, but if I wanted more than that, I had to work for it. For example, I bought my first car at 15 from proceeds of a paper route I had for years.
My parents made a deal with me that they'd pay half of my tuition, and I had to come up with the other half. By the time I was a junior, I was making enough on the side I could afford the rest myself, and phoned my parents and said don't send me any more money. It felt really really good to do that.
Yes, I know that college is considerably more expensive these days.
Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, and, much like ill-contained liquid cargo in ships, all that motion tends to destabilize and capsize schools.
Sadly, I don't think smaller higher education institutions can afford to take such a relaxed attitude about it. They don't get to have an enrollment backstop in the form of a semi-captive audience of parents who live nearby and aren't hyperactive enough to commit to spending upwards of an hour every weekday trucking their kids back and forth across town.
My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics.
It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school.
And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
The probability of that happening is greater if average test scores are higher. The "tiger parents" aren't just looking for schools that offer the best programs, they're also looking for schools that have less problematic students that disrupt the learning environment and would be bad influences on their kids.
The entire school isn't the friend pool, but your proximity of classmates.
If the class room sizes are roughly the same, probability of meeting two smart friends will be roughly the same.
Why must both schools have the same proportion of potential "smart friends"? Even if the school with better test grades somehow had the same proportion as all the other schools, all the tiger parents flocking to that school is going to change the proportion.
As a kid, to light the spark of a topic, i would say its more important that the other kids are genuinely passionate about something. Otherwise its just more homework.
Also you forget that the mean usually doesn't tell you a lot if you, like the poster mentioned, are mainly influenced by the immediate surroundings. If your kid is academically interested and already has good, smart friends, the gain of switching a better on average school might be negative.
I took those classes, and they were all milquetoast.
It was all just a potemkin village.
In contrast, the Caltech course catalog had classes blandly labeled "introductory" when they were well known for being brutal.
The ones where classes were a breeze and barely challenging at all were the private college prep school and the not-quite-as-rich-but-still-pretty-wealthy high school in the suburban white flight community. My read on the situation was that teachers had figured out that every single parent believed their kid deserved a constant stream of gold stars, and had the leisure time and resources to make their lives miserable until it started happening. Also the white flight school cared a lot about its football team so you better make for damn sure that the classes aren't so challenging that the quarterback has trouble balancing their time spent on homework, practice, and partying.
I do think it's a bit difficult to separate reputation from educational quality. Educational quality is affected by professors, facilities, research opportunities, etc, but these factors are saturated at a lot of research universities. Another factor of educational quality is the peer group, and in this sense reputation matters a lot. There's an "if you build it, they will come" circularity here, where if you have a good reputation, you will attract students who will burnish your reputation. Conversely institutions can get stuck in a loop of low reputation and marginal students.
If however, you are armed with the knowledge that the non-circular components of education quality are saturated at, say, the top 50 universities in the US, well that opens some doors. You can rest easy that your flagship land grant university honors program is giving you the same education you'd receive at an Ivy League school.
Personally I think student debt load and chosen major matter way more than which school you go to.
>Measure the proportion of graduates who pursue and are accepted into advanced degree programs. (adjusted for field of study so acceptance into medical school > masters in art history)
The only reason, however, that medical school is more competitive than an art history masters (to be fair, most paid masters programs aren't super competitive) is because the medical board has set up the system of accreditation to limit the number of practising doctors in the US in order to artificially inflate the salaries of doctors. The UK, for instance, has the opposite problem, where becoming a doctor is much easier, but for that very reason their pay is relatively low and the job is increasingly undesirable (not to mention cuts to the NHS).
This is all to say that, in just this instance, the author falls prey to precisely the same mystification that he is criticizing, by seeing something as "better" just because its more exclusive.
According to a friend who qualified in the UK and now practices in the US the _process_ of becoming a doctor is much harder in the UK: medical schools in the UK test students holistically (i.e. big exams which test all the topics) whereas American students are tested one module at a time (so lots of cramming).
I agree that gaining acceptance is probably harder though (ish: the UK government subsidises the provision of medical teaching so places are also capped in the UK for financial and capacity reasons).
For reference, "holistic" is the opposite of "objective", not of "specific".
So it is more the opposite of specific than objective. I think your confusion comes from colleges using holistic to mean they looks at things beyond beyond objective measurements like test scores and GPA
Especially in health, wellness, and nutrition, holistic is used to mean 'concerning the whole' all the time.
> Employment Rates: Track the percentage of graduates employed in their field of study within six months to a year after graduation.
> Earnings Data: Use data on median salaries adjusted for regional cost of living and industry to assess economic outcomes.
This is a toxic way of looking at education, in my opinion, like it's some kind of vocational training. By this metric, two-month training programs in high-demand fields would be the highest ranked, by far. But often, the subjects which have the deepest impact on one's thinking—and on one's curiosity, intellectual abilities, and life in general—are the ones which have no easy one-to-one mapping to a job. I've taken philosophy courses, and anthropology courses, which have changed my life completely, but I didn't get employment as a philosopher or anthropologist within six months after graduation. The value of education is in how much it can change your thinking, satisfy your curiosity, and make you into a well-rounded person. It's not just whether it can prepare you for some job. And if you reduce education to "median salaries adjusted for regional cost of living" then you're measuring education purely on a sell-out basis.
As someone who just played the college admissions game last year, these (US News) rankings pretty accurately reflect the *perceptions* of the general, college applying, public (or maybe they are the source of those perceptions). They aren't really even good at that outside the T10.
Otherwise, any state university should suffice. A few states have some state schools with very low acceptance rates and difficulty to get in that might serve to advertise/network you better than another state school.
If it’s not hard to get admitted, then just buy the education with the lower price.
Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
I'm curious what real education would be that does not impart a skill that others are willing to pay for?
I speak as someone who selected classes based on maximizing skills that would be useful in the career I wanted.
Those are all quite valuable to have in the workplace, but anyone with a bachelors in one of those topics will likely need to get a masters degree in the same field or something else before they can find a decent career.
BTW, there's no need to go to university to learn history. All that's necessary is to read a history book. I read lots of them. Paying someone to lecture you about history seems a waste of time and money. Just read it. Much more time efficient.
Going back to the initial comment you were responding to, I'd add that most degrees will cover things that aren't skills and credentials that will help someone get a job. That may explain why people with CS degrees still have to answer fizzbuzz questions in job interviews.
Whether reading history is more time efficient than taking a class depends a lot on the topic, the writing about it, and the knowledge and abilities of the professor. It's been my experience that a knowledgeable professor can add important context to a topic that will save the student a lot of time and energy.
It isn't equivalent. Very, very few people manage to self-educate advanced math. But it's a lot easier with liberal arts.
Allow me to pose this question - does a literature degree enable one to write best selling books? Does JK Rowling have a degree in literature? In contrast, learning math and engineering enables one to use that knowledge to create great things. One has zero chance of building a successful liquid fuel rocket engine without that training.
I recall reading a lament by a literature professor who said he knew everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet. He said he'd throw all that knowledge away for the joy of reading it for the first time.
To put it another way: a lot of people actually do recreational math, which is largely self-taught. Maybe less than those who fancy themselves authors but it's still a lot of people. The aren't many people who study to make rockets, but there also aren't many people who end up as journalists or literary critics or copywriters but those people do actually get a degree in liberal arts to do that. Writing best-selling books is akin to being Martin Gardner.
Given what the major newspapers write and the major news networks broadcast, it's quite an indictment of their liberal arts educations.
Reading reviews of the books helps a lot in finding one worth the time reading, as well as looking at lists and reviews of what other books they've written.
Reading multiple books of the same event gives one a lot of perspective, too. I'm currently reading my 4th history book on the D-Day invasion - all quite different.
1. College educated people smoke less on average. This is true regardless of income even though typically less income correlates to more smoking.
2. In poor neighborhoods, when the number of residents without college drops below a certain threshold (like 4 percent maybe), crime skyrockets. The neighborhood stops being merely poor and becomes a dangerous slum.
A liberal arts education is widely scoffed at. There's some joke about what kind of careers different majors lead to and the punchline is that liberal arts major say "Would you like fries with that?" which is shorthand in this day and age for "You will probably be drowning in college debt and a wage slave working to pay off your student loans while living in Mom's basement if you are lucky enough to have supportive parents."
But they are called liberal arts because they are supposed to be liberating. They are supposed to free and empower you to live well and know how to cope effectively with crap life throws at you.
The Clemente Course is intended to be a free liberal arts college education for people living with terrible circumstances like generational poverty or in prison and has been taught in prison. It was founded on the theory that the right kind of education is the antidote to these kinds of intractable problems that routinely fail to be resolved by throwing money at them.
https://www.clementecourse.org/
I homeschooled my twice exceptional sons and a primary goal of mine was making sure my extremely bright but socially challenged children didn't wind up in jail. I provided them a humanities education defined as "learning how to live effectively with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of their own humanity and that of other people."
I'm a huge fan of liberal arts education and my AA is in Humanities. Yes, I'm very well aware it doesn't give you a lot of marketable skills to make bank promptly upon graduation.
I also have a Certificate in GIS from probably the most prestigious GIS program in the world and it promised everyone good salaries in short order which never materialized for me.
I don't regret it and it wasn't a waste of time or money but the historic tendency for college to correlate to good salaries is probably rooted in the fact that until they decided to milk poor people for student loans interest and turn a generation of college graduates into over educated wage slaves, a college degree was a proxy for "Someone with adequate resources and mojo and drive who knows what they want to do."
It wasn't the degree per se that made them successful. They had what it took to get the degree and that correlated strongly to having what it took to establish a serious career that paid well.
A sheepskin is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for some careers. It's not a guarantee you will succeed though and someone somewhere along the way imagined it was and many people are suffering horribly because of it.
Do any of them even teach free market economics?
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
Try to not throw the baby out with the bath water while sorting this out for your personal edification.
I wasn't rude to you, and rudeness won't bolster your case.
> Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
The difference is that, with a STEM degree, if you design an airplane and it doesn't fly then you're wrong. There's no way to delude oneself into thinking one's design works.
There's no such corrective force with liberal arts.
There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena. It's just not easy.
It's not easy with science either. Plane crashes killed people like some Cthulhu horror tearing planes out of the sky before they realized square windows create stress points when flying at jet speeds which eventually destroy the plane.
People died because of that design flaw and it wasn't immediately obvious why.
I quoted the line you used. Show it to your friends and ask them if they think it is rude or not, without saying you wrote it.
> There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena ... it's not easy with science either
Liberal arts majors are particularly bad at it. I doubt they are even aware of what the scientific method is, or how to implement it. We all know that a survey can get wildly varying results depending on exactly how the questions are worded. I also see plenty of liberal arts surveys that use too few samples to get statistical validity, along with clearly wrong interpretations of the statistics. The lack of statistics being a required course for a liberal arts degree is just another glaring problem with liberal arts programs.
As for the DeHaviland Comet crashes, allow me to clarify. The problem with finding the cause was the airplane would disintegrate at high altitude with no warning, and all there was was a rain of debris. Once they gathered up all the pieces, and reconstructed the airplane from the debris, it was immediately obvious that the fault originated in the window corners, and any structural engineer knew why. They then conducted experiments to confirm it.
The problem was not "jet speeds". It was the pressurization/depressurization cycles from flying up to 30,000 feet and then down, resulting in fatigue damage. Square corners are "stress risers" meaning the stress in a square corner is 3x the stress in the rest of the material. The problem did not occur with propeller airliners because they flew at lower altitudes either unpressurized or with little pressurization.
A fix was devised - make the corners round, and a forged doubler was riveted over it. Then this was also tested, and proved sound. And it works because sound methods of design, analysis, and testing was done.
There is simply no comparison with how these things are done in aviation engineering vs liberal arts.
P.S. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aeronautical/Aerospace, and I did design work on the 757, and have a particular interest in crashes and their causes.