Craft Your Own College Rankings!

By Katie Ryan, Director of College Admissions at Charles Wright Academy

College admissions has been top of mind thanks to the publication of the 2014 edition of U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings of America's best college last week. Charles Wright Academic Dean and Director of College Counseling Katie Ryan underscores the arbitrary nature of such rankings and invites Upper Schoolers to craft their own customized college ranking system to best suit their goals.

As director of college counseling at Charles Wright, one of my primary goals is for students to view the college admission process as an exciting next step in their educational journeys and their college search as an effort to match their interests, goals, and unique personalities with one of the many excellent institutions of higher learning available to them.

I want students to focus less on the prestige and reputations of the colleges they choose and more on what they will do when they get to college. These goals are made challenging by the constant media attention on the small number of colleges where admission is ultra-competitive and by the resulting unfortunate hype that portrays college admission as a high-stakes contest with winners and losers. The U.S. News and World Report rankings of “America’s Best Colleges,” published last week, represent, for me, the epitome of unhelpful, anxiety-producing media hype, so I anticipate their release each year with a sense of frustration and dread.

A number of terrific articles have been written about the misleading and harmful nature of the rankings. The audacity and absurdity of U.S. News editors’ annual attempts to quantify the overall quality of a college education and compare institutions with vastly different missions and structures are addressed brilliantly by Malcolm Gladwell in his article “The Order of Things,” published in the New Yorker last year. Many others have written about the harmful effects of college rankings on students and the many ways that college officials’ efforts to rise in the rankings negatively impact our system of higher education.

I won’t add to all of the literature out there on the subject of why the U.S. News rankings are bad. Instead, I’d like to give Charles Wright students and parents an alternative: Come up with your own rankings. There’s no such thing as “best colleges,” but there are a group of best colleges for you. Devising a personal system by which you will compare colleges first requires you to identify the college characteristics that are most important to you—and that just happens to be the very best way to approach your college search. After a thorough and thoughtful self-assessment, make a list of the factors you believe will most influence your success and happiness in college. Your criteria might include the quality of the department in which you plan to major as well as more frivolous considerations such as beauty of the campus or the quality of the food.

Some of your criteria may be quantifiable—graduation rates, average class sizes, and percentage of graduates who get jobs are all valid measures of an institution’s quality (some of which I will admit are part of U.S. News’s methodology.) Some factors—such as quality of teaching or desirability of location—might require a campus visit and some in-depth conversations with students and alumni to assess, and perhaps a 1-10 rating to quantify.
Consider designing a rating system and using a spreadsheet to rank your colleges according to how well they scored in various categories, with more weight given to the criteria that are most important to you. You could also try out a new website called College Factual, which allows you to customize your own rankings with data on outcomes and costs right there at your fingertips.

The bottom line is this: Don’t let someone else’s arbitrary measures of quality determine your college choice, and don’t let anyone cast judgment on the college you choose to attend. If you’ve been clear about what you want out of your college experience and conscientious about your research, you’ll surely find a college about which you can be proud and where you will be successful, regardless of where it ranks in U.S. News and World Report. Enjoy the process of finding that college. It will require some hard work, but it’s worth it!

What's your most important criterion when considering a college or university?