Why Has College Admissions Become So Competitive? : Why Are Rankings So Popular?

Buy this book »

It is not surprising that students and parents will turn to rankings like those in U.S. News when they are thinking about colleges. Deciding where to apply isn’t easy, and having supposed experts do the evaluating is an attractive alternative to figuring things out on your own, especially if you have no experience. As a society, we are obsessed with rating consumer goods in the quest for the best. We accept ratings that assess washing machines, restaurants, football teams, hospitals, and movies, so why not include colleges as well?

College rankings, though, are very different. The rankings simply don’t measure what they are supposed to assess—the educational experience for an individual student. Doing that requires a personalized look at a college through the eyes of the student who might potentially enroll. Although you no doubt have much in common with your friends and classmates, you also differ in important ways. There is simply no easy substitute for investing the time and effort to determine which colleges will be a good fit for you. Merely knowing which ones are the most selective or enjoy the highest reputations among college presidents (which, in large measure, is what the U.S. News rankings are telling you) doesn’t get you very far toward finding a good match for you, a place where you will be happy and learn what you want to know.

Students may have a better sense of their potential ability than college admissions committees. To cite one prominent example, Steven Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California and UCLA film schools.  -  Stacey Dale and Alan Krueger, researchers who studied the  long-term effects of attending different types of colleges

Another Myth: “I’ll Make More Money If I Graduate from an Elite College”

But let’s return now to the basic question of why there is so much interest in the group of the most selective hundred or so colleges. OK, you say, you now see that name recognition and rankings do not necessarily indicate educational quality. But maybe that is irrelevant. Isn’t the real value of an elite college education the contacts you make while there? Everyone knows that the rich, the famous, and the well-connected attend these colleges. Wouldn’t attending one of them increase your chances of making the right contacts, getting into a prestigious graduate school, or getting an important career-enhancing break—all eventually leading to fortune if not fame?

Several studies have actually been interpreted as supporting this conclusion. Years after graduation, graduates of elite institutions have a higher income than that of graduates of less well-known colleges, just as the income of college graduates is higher than that of those with a high school education. The simple interpretation is that the experience of going to a selective college is responsible for the income difference. But researchers Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger considered another possibility. Perhaps, they hypothesized, the students who applied to and were accepted by elite colleges had personal qualities to begin with that led in some way to the income differences later in life. Maybe the kind of college which students attended wasn’t as important as who they were as people.