This is an article on Raw again with lesson number 24 college rankings. So far we have learned about what to study in college based on our interests or strengths and what colleges look for. Now we need to start choosing colleges. But we learned that there are over 4700 post secondary institutions to pick from which one do we choose? In lesson three, we discussed various kinds of colleges, private public two year and so on. By now, we should have a good idea of which kind of college to pursue.
Suppose we decide on a four year college. Now we have to choose from all 3000 options. So how do we even begin? We could use a college ranking website. There are so many of them that you almost need to rank the ranking organizations before you start using them. Ranking schools and colleges is big business in the United States.
For that matter, ranking anything in the US is big business, cars, hospitals, phone companies, home builders, are all ranked by various media outlets, and customer satisfaction companies. We like rankings because it makes it easy to sift out good products and services from bad without having to do a lot of research ourselves. But there are problems with rankings. Each ranking outfit uses its own methodology to arrive at a college track US News largest and most popular college ranking website gathers and weights data from each college on some 15 indicators of academic excellence. Further, it also ranks various kinds of colleges defining many more college classifications than we did. It let's national universities, liberal arts colleges, regional universities, over 50, different classifications and all.
A different outfit may choose a different set of indicators, or award different ways to each or do both, or may classify institutions differently. Regional College in one list may be classified as a National College in another. So your favorite college in the US News rankings may rank much differently from the rank of another outfit, such as a Princeton Review. Very soon, this can become confusing reasonable people could even question the methodologies that racking up fits us. For example, most college rankings measure inputs such as class size and faculty salaries, but failed to consider outputs such as placement, statistics, internships, and details about how many and kinds of jobs students get after graduation. One would think that rankings based on student outcomes would be a lot more relevant than how much research money a college guests.
We will learn about this in the next lesson. But the main complaint about commercial school rankings is exactly that. That is these rankings are produced by commercial for profit companies. The ultimate goal of these outfits is to sell the rankings or build a brand around them. This is why many media outlets criticized college rankings. There are plenty of free world class resources to search for colleges, including the college navigator, and big future.
These resources are operated by reputed organizations such as the US Department of Education, or the College Board. Summary. The brand name or reputation of your target school matters a lot because you can carry that brand with you for the rest of your career. is important not to confuse reputation with rankings. School rankings may ever flow with the tide and are dependent upon the outfit that publishes them. But school reputation is earned over generations and decades of hard work and accomplishment.
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