New York Times Op-Ed: There’s Only One College Rankings List That Matters, by Frank Bruni:
Within a few months of joining the faculty at Duke University in 2021, I could spot them: the high school seniors, juniors and even sophomores on their pilgrimages to our verdant and coveted wonderland, with its Gothic Revival spires, ecstatic basketball fans and acceptance rate of 6 percent.
They stood out less for their youth than for their yearning. Sometimes they walked alongside parents every bit as rapt as they were. Sometimes they wandered alone, in a trance. Sometimes they showed up at my office door, not because they were looking for me but because they were looking around, and they liked to peek in on the professors in their path.
We were diamonds, rubies and sapphires in a Cartier display case.
Did they plan to study specifically with one of us? Was our institution particularly strong in the academic disciplines that interested them? Most of them couldn’t really tell me why they wanted Duke. They just knew that they should want it. It would validate them. It would impress their friends. Translation: It was highly ranked — currently tied for the 10th-best university in the country, ahead of half of the Ivy League, according to the justly embattled but perversely enduring bible for such matters, U.S. News & World Report.
To many anxious teenagers making what feels like the most important decision of their lives, that marker must mean something, so they let it mean almost everything. They come to believe that the luster of the institution they attend, as established by its ranking and its exclusivity, will not only define their place in the world but also determine their professional success and contentment. And they minimize other, better criteria for choosing a college. …
[T]he process too often fails to do precisely what a new tool that Times Opinion is introducing today does: encourage college-bound students to pause, reflect deeply on what sort of experience they truly want, factor in what’s logistically and financially realistic for them and consider a list of colleges assembled along those lines, with fuzzy and subjective metrics like prestige eliminated from the equation.
New York Times Op-Ed: Build Your Own College Rankings, by Quoctrung Bui & Jessia Ma:
What’s the best way to choose the right college? And is there one “right” college for anyone? Most published rankings are one-size-fits-all, based on formulas that don’t factor in your priorities, goals and needs.
So we’ve created a tool to help find the best American colleges — for you. Do you care most about making money after graduating? Low college costs? Diversity? Academics or athletics? Staying close to home? Use our tool’s sliders and filters to tell us what you value, and we’ll give you college rankings that fit.
Interestingly, I used the New York Times’ tool to produce the right college for me, and Georgetown, my alma mater, was #2. The full list was:
- Duke
- Georgetown
- Notre Dame
- Boston College
- Emory
My only quibble is the model allows users to give varying weights to ten priorities (e.g., academics, high earnings 10 years after graduation, diversity), but various filters only give users a binary choice. In my case, it would be more helpful to be able to give greater weight to a college’s commitment to its religious mission than the religious affiliation yes/no allows.
New York Times Op-Ed: We Talked to 10 Graduates About Their College Regrets, by Gus Wezerek:
More than a thousand people wrote in after Times Opinion asked readers to share their college regrets. Some put too much stock in college rankings, applying to top schools rather than ones that matched their personalities. Others felt they went to college before they were ready. And many, many readers regretted taking on enormous student loans that weighed them down for decades after graduating. Below, we’ve published interviews with 10 of the readers who shared their stories.
As part of Times Opinion’s close look at the college selection process, we’re also inaugurating a tool that we hope will help students avoid college regret. The tool encourages students to reflect on their interests and desires. Then it generates college rankings that better fit those priorities.
I hope that high schoolers find the tool and the following interviews helpful. There is hard-earned wisdom in the hindsight of the graduates who shared their stories.
Most of all, I hope that today’s high school seniors don’t brood over dream schools that they didn’t get into. And that unhappy graduates don’t let life become an elegy to what-ifs, as I admit I sometimes do. College is just one of many forks in the road. There’s a lot more life after you graduate.
