The Truth about College Rankings

In our kickoff episode, Brennan and Rick discuss the annual college rankings. What factors go into creating them? What do they and do they not indicate about the quality of a college? To what extent should students and families consider rankings in their admission experience?

They also provide a few resources for further consideration:
Listen: Revisionist History, "Lord of the Rankings" Malcolm Gladwell
College Guidance Network, Best Rankings Webinar EVER!
Read: Top Three Reasons NOT to Trust Rankings, 5 Best Tips For Responsibly Using College Rankings
Try This: Create Your Own Rankings System


More about your co-hosts:
Brennan Barnard, Director of College Counseling, Khan Lab School
Rick Clark, AVP and Executive Director of Undergraduate Admission- Georgia Tech

Transcript

Rick Clark
Welcome to the Truth About College Admissions Podcast. My name is Rick Clark. I am the AVP and Executive Director of Undergrad Admission at Georgia Tech.

Brennan Barnard
And I am Brennan Barnard. I am the Director of College Counseling at the Khan Lab High School in Mountain View, California. And together we are the authors of The Truth About College Admission, A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together. And as we kick things off here, we can give some background on us and who we are and why we're here and what we're doing.

Rick Clark
Yeah, absolutely.

Brennan Barnard
Yeah. So I'll just kind of give a little bit of the lowdown on my background, like I said, I'm the director of College Counseling at Khan Lab School and I've been doing college counseling and independent high schools for over two decades, done some college admissions, some high school admission, worked in college administration. And, you know, I think I have the best job in the world.

I get to work one on one with families and students and people who support them to think about kind of the next step and to ask critical questions about what they want and who they want to be and how they're going to get there. So just really excited that we're taking this on and going to try to bring some really good quality information to families to meet them where they are and help them kind of navigate the college admission experience.


Rick Clark
Yeah, well, and I'm looking forward to this as well. So again, I work at Georgia Tech now and basically run our undergrad admissions here. Prior to Georgia Tech, I've also been at Georgia State University, Wake Forest University, and then also on the high school side, the McCallie School, which is in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But Brennan, when we wrote the book, obviously so much of that is about family, like you just said.


Rick Clark
And as we're gearing up here for another year, we're starting to read applications. I was just over earlier giving a welcome to families who are here for an open house program. And it's exciting. And also, there's a lot of emotions across the board, right? And there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think that that's really our goal as we think about this podcast, trying to just deliver real information, honest information, actionable information, hopefully a little bit of levity and solace.

One thing I'm really excited about is that we're going to be able to bring on some of our friends and colleagues from around the country every episode to just either talk about something that they've written recently or something maybe we see them quoted in so that we can give like timely and relevant information because that's the thing, right? This is a cycle and it's a lot about what's happening now. So I'm really looking forward to that part too.


Brennan Barnard
As am I. And yeah, like you said, I mean, there's there's a lot of noise out there and so hopefully we can kind of cut through the noise, cut through the information overload and bring some truth.


Rick Clark
And that's going to be the theme, right, is that idea of, look, we can't speak for every college in the country, nor can any of our guests when they come on. But there are some real themes and there's some truth. There's some pieces to what is applicable to every family and to every college. Even if we can't give guarantees of admission or exact ranges of how people are going to be looking at things just cutting through.

Rick Clark
As you said, a lot of the noise to just be helpful as people are, you know, approaching this.  And so that's what I'm excited about with you, is being able to talk really broadly and give people like landscape perspective because that sometimes is one of the best things people need and don't get a lot of time.

Brennan Barnard
Yeah, what I didn't mention is a massive the college admission program advisor for the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education. And it's something we talk a lot about is democratizing quality information about college admissions. How can we bring information to folks who might not have regular access to it. And so I think hopefully we can approach this with an equity lens and really look at how we can get information out on a large scale.

So, you know, let's jump into it. Let's talk about some of the noise that's out there right now. And that's about some of the rankings that have come out in the past month. And you and I, I think we see pretty eye to eye on rankings and commercial rankings, especially like U.S. News and World Report and all these places coming out with their, quote unquote, best college rankings.

Brennan Barnard
And you and I both wrote about this a lot recently. I'm going to start with your blog because in your blog you talk about this idea of what I'm going to call kind of the golden rule of college rankings. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. You said applicants, you don't want to be reduced to a number, right?

You don't want colleges when they're reviewing your application just to look at you in this kind of myopic way. One or two numbers, and you invite applicants and their parents and their families to do the same, not to just reduce colleges to a single ranking or evaluate them in that way. Can you say more about that?

Rick Clark
Yeah, for sure. I mean, and that's really it, right. Is as we're out on the road talking with families or welcoming people here to campus to speak with them, there's always a well, this is a strong part of my application and I'm a little bit concerned about this or I'm looking at your ranges of test scores or your ranges of GPA.

Well, this is sort of where I am, but let me tell you, X, Y and Z, there's always this sort of next thing they want to add in, which is why on applications, you end up with sections like special circumstances or additional information. So that context, right, which when we get into talking about holistic admission is really what it's all about is what students want.

They want you to understand who they are, where they are from, why they've made some of the choices they are, why perhaps their grades are here or their test score is here, or hoping that you're going to see that even though this part of their application, at least by their estimation, is weaker than what they would have liked, or they don't think it's representative of who they are as a student or their potential, you know, they want to know that that's going to be taken into consideration.

And it's just to your point, like ironic or like almost hypocritical. And that sounds a little harsh, though, on the other side, because then when rankings come out, it's like, well, well dismissed. Like it's not in the top, right? It's not in the top 50 or not in the top hundred or who knows, whatever the arbitrary kind of draconian line is that they draw. And there's other reasons, but like that just doesn't sync up with the exact expectation they have for the way it's going to go in reverse. Yeah, you know, it's so true.

Brennan Barnard
Yeah. And I think this idea of a ranking kind of indicating quality, just like the idea of a test score indicating quality of you as a student and your potential. Right.

Rick Clark
Right. Well, and I mean, especially as you read into the methodology for how rankings are formed or frankly, as you look at how the tests are created, I mean, the more you know about those two things, the less you correlate directly to quality. Like you just say, well, and actually that kind of leads into this idea of sticking on the theme of rankings and your piece in Forbes, and we'll include both of these in the show notes for folks to reference.

But you talk about like this responsible approach to ranking. And so I guess what I'm curious about is sort of what is that and why is that versus just ahh dismiss. There's no value at all. Let's just not even regard.

Brennan Barnard
That's where I want to come from, right, like just down with the rankings. I mean, I wrote a kind of an open letter to the editors of U.S. News and World Report, kind of a cease and desist letter. And so I'd love for people just tune out rankings, but, you know, I'm also a realist and I think it's kind of Pollyannish to say nobody's going to look at rankings, right?

Because I think we are hardwired to want the best. And I guess what I'm suggesting in this piece is if you want the best and you want to think about rankings, then think about it in terms of what's best for you, what somebody else is telling you is best, right? Right. So a couple of the things I encourage people to do are to first, really understand what the methodology is, how are they arriving at those rankings?

And is that important to you? I mean, you write about this in the book, too, right? Is important to you what another college president thinks about the school year. Sure. And that's part of the methodology at U.S. News. So there's that piece and also developing your own ranking system for sure. We can put this in the show notes, too, but we have an exercise in the book of, okay, develop your own ranking system and identify the criteria.

That's important to you in your college experience. And that could be graduation rate. That could be percentage of students who have internships. But identify what is important to you. Why it's important, right? Go ahead and rank each school based on how you assessed that school, not on what you know, your neighbor or some editor or somebody else is telling you is right.

Rick Clark
And even as you were saying the beginning part of that, at the end of the day, in so many ways, these are more opinions than necessarily, like statistics. People want to believe that there's all of this purely quantifiable information that's gone into formulating rankings. But the truth is, a fifth of them are geared towards what you referenced, which is opinions.

And in the blog that I wrote I was kiddingly like what if your final grade in your class was what other people just thought of you, how terrible that would be because you're looking around the room and thinking, Oh man, that guy didn't even know me and like she hates me and what's how is that going to hold any water, right?

Rick Clark
Or should it at all?

Brennan Barnard
It might change how people get along in class. The teacher might appreciate that. You know, when you talk about statistics, one of the things you talk about in your piece is how gameable rankings are. That talk a little bit about that. Talk about the ways that colleges game rankings.

Rick Clark
Oh, man. I mean, it's a long, long list, some of which is relatively reasonable and maybe has some actual value in the long term. And then others that's just like got zero implications for the quality of a student's experience. So I'll give you you one or two examples. You know, one of these has to do with the course sizes, the number of students in a class and whether or not they are hinged to a particular academic department.

So if you have a class that's just purely because of the naming convention, the way that it's categorized, and how many students that has in it, it can implicate or influence your rankings one way or the other. Right? This is just about letters in front of a title of a class in the syllabus or on that. And like there are schools that are going to take a lot of time to go back and recategorized and have recategorized these.

That's one obviously there's other things that I guess you could argue have some bearing on the students, but faculty pay if you're just barely off of like the ratio, you could give slight raises around the margins in very strategic areas in order to influence the ranking. And so, yeah, maybe that faculty member feels more valued or sticks around or yeah, you could argue, puts it in a little more effort to be getting paid more.

But like, is that really like nothing? Actually, fundamentally. And we do reference and again, can reference this in the show notes, but Malcolm Gladwell, of course, in revisionist history, did a real deep dive into some of the work that statisticians that Reed College did. And I think everybody should listen to that as well, because it just reinforces a little of what I was referencing.

Brennan Barnard
Yeah. And I'm actually to be having a conversation with the former president of Reed on a webinar in the coming weeks, and we'll put that in the show notes, too, because that's going to be a really interesting conversation.

Rick Clark
Oh, man, that's great.

Brennan Barnard
So, Rick, we could go on for days about rankings and I'm sure in time we will come back to visit this topic. And have other people on to get their thoughts. As always, I appreciate the writing you do and the truth you bring to this experience. So I think this is going to be a fun endeavor.

Rick Clark
Yeah, looking forward to it. And we will be back soon with a couple new episodes, so please be on the lookout for that as we get this started. I did want to just acknowledge that this podcast is brought to you by Johns Hopkins University Press. Hopkins Press connects a global audience of readers to trusted knowledge from leading researcher scholars and educators.

And you can learn more about the press at their website, which is Press.JHU.edu and I know so many great books that are out there. I know we're going to have some of the authors who Johns Hopkins has helped get off the ground as well in the weeks ahead, too. So looking forward to that. But Brendan, thanks for your time today.

Brennan Barnard
You too. Be well.

Rick Clark
All right. We'll be back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening.