Good article on the college rankings. Enough mediorce schools have gamed the system so badly that the rankings get more and more meaningless each year.
www.forbes.com
The brand is taking a hit. I mean we're all to a degree ego maniacs and want our degrees to mean more than when we got them. If I was confronted with a Syracuse University in the 70s in the early 90s and rated BELOW Northeastern and Umass (my brother went to NU and i think he's illiterate) I would not have applied there (I went to Newhouse which is still ~10% admission rate which is good)
Hamstrung by the price tag
I think that's a fools errand. Most of the kids at my son's school went to Ivy league schools with minimal scores because they are playing sports. Same with the NESCAC. If you can play a sport (any sport) the admissions policy is baseline vs premium.
(why don't we game the system).Good article on the college rankings. Enough mediorce schools have gamed the system so badly that the rankings get more and more meaningless each year.
Race To The Top Or The Middle? The Slow Death Of College Rankings
Have college rankings mattered? Have they moved they dial? What has been their actual value, not to publishers but to students and families, or to colleges/universities?
The rankings are flawed. Some of the inputs on college rankings are spending per student (which drives up tuition prices), endowment per student, number of Pell eligible students, selectivity, debt load and what other college presidents think of you (just a bunch of cronies rewarding each other). It doesn't tell you where you will get the best education.
That's just one component though.
There aren't thaat many spots. I have a nephew who skis at Dartmouth, he's doing very well academically but didn't have quite the grades as his cousins but it was because he was busting his a training. I didn't know how I feel about it because all those kids (wife's side) are brilliant
Do you remember me complaining about him or do we just kind of know each other this well at this point despite not knowing each other at all really? I will listen
It's expensive.
Ha, I just figured that Gladwell's research-by-anecdote approach is not something you'd like. I've soured on him a LOT over the years as well. But every once in a while he does good work. His books are mostly trash but his podcast is entertaining.
He lost me with the ten thousand hours stuff
Yeah, Maxwell and Newhouse are pretty prestigious, but the business school, engineering school, and performing arts school are meh, and you're way better off majoring in a traditional "education path" subject (history, English, language, math) at a SUNY or Le Moyne than you are with the price tag that comes with SU - the programs are nothing special and there are no big names in academia to bolster anything. The music school is also far inferior to Potsdam, Fredonia, and Ithaca, let alone Eastman at U of R.
The rankings slide started under Buzz. The rot started with him for football and academics. Nancy gets attacked, but this isn't Nancy's fault at this point. She hasn't been on campus in 10+ years. This is all Kent and the trustees for allowing the academic hit.
