Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in the New Yorker on how US News and World Reports ranks colleges and universities should be an eye-opener for both parents and high school seniors whose anxiety levels are climbing as the Ides of March approach. Those whose choices of where to apply and, soon, where to enroll, were made on the basis of the magazine’s rankings may want to rethink their options; as Gladwell points out, the rationale for those rankings is neither rational nor scientific. Although a small private religious college in New York City and a large public Pennsylvania university may share some characteristics, they are as unlike each other as the elephant and the hyrax, who both happen to be members of the same “family,” scientifically speaking. Yet they are ranked and compared the same way. The magazine’s rankings have an outsized effect on applications and enrollment;l popularity and excellence are assumed to be the same thing. In fact, “personal fit” – how a particular campus or university “feels” to prospective students – is more important to student satisfaction than any other criteria, while the statistic that should be the most important to both students and parents – the one with the most influence on future success – isn’t how many freshmen enroll in a particular college but how many seniors graduate from it.
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