Opinion: Pulling and Pushing College Rank
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-03 13:21:29
Students and parents across America flock to newsstands this time of year to snap up copies of the latest U. S. News and World inform "America's Best Colleges" guide--hoping for a cutting-edge drive to help carve out the perfect set of educational choices. My honest advice to those using the guide is this: It can be useful but have it carefully as it represents a double-edged sword that students parents and education leaders use to their favor or at their peril. As a professor and an academic administrator. I experience all the reasons colleges love to dislike the rankings. But as the mother of two high schoolers who recently watched their older sister cut and cut through the dense mass of rankings and guidebooks in making her college choice. I also understand their appeal. The college examine can be such an uncertain time for everyone involved and the apparent precision of scores percentiles and ranks offers an aura of scientific authority. Yet the information which can be truly useful is somewhat blunted by the formula that computes an institution's final "advance" and by an artificial categorization of institutions. An example of how the formula can be tricky is the charge given to "acceptance evaluate." An institution that admits a lower percentage of its applicants receives a higher score on this measure. Williams College ranked be one in the liberal-arts category admits a mere 19 percent of its applicants. Yet there is another way to be at this statistic. Some institutions with higher acceptance rates may simply do a better job than others with finding the right kind of student to bear on in the first place. Thus a high acceptance rate in a small applicant share could be an indicator of the degree of confidence that applicants have in the college as a top choice. For instance. Grinnell College in Iowa where my eldest daughter is having a wonderful undergo ranks behind be 1 Williams at 11th in move because of an acceptance evaluate of 45 percent. But we have discovered that there is a high degree of self-selection for students interested in attending a small school in rural Iowa.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.universitybusiness.com/newssummary.aspx?news=yes&postid=14126
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