THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
Who Is NO. 1?
By Robert A.G. LeVine
It’s a non-stop crusade: people rely on rankings in making their educational decisions.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stop doing this! Rankings are unreliable. Worse than that, they are pure marketing by the colleges, and the results are always manipulated.
Companies create rankings to make money. It’s not about truth; it’s all about business.
In the United States, the unofficial “king” of rankings is U.S. News and World Report. It used to be a magazine. Now, go to its website and the first thing you will see is a self-created ranking. Today, it’s the best bed and breakfast. On billboards and airline magazines, it’s the best doctors and hospitals. Every September, it’s the supposedly best colleges and graduate schools.
Supposedly.
Ranking services use formulae – known as “algorithms” – to decide who ends up where. The companies change their algorithms every year. The colleges respond by changing their admissions strategies to rise up in the rankings. In 2017, the University of Florida was ranked number 50 in national universities. Four years later, they had moved up 22 spots. Do you really think that UF “improved” that much in such a short period of time? No. Our friends who volunteer inside of UF told us that the move was a conscious effort by UF to gain notoriety.
This began most (in)famously with Northeastern University in 1996. In 20 years, they went from No. 162 to No. 39. Read all about how they manipulated the U.S. News ranking in my “Beware the Rankings!” article in the February 2017 issue of Khaas Baat (just click the “archives” at the top right of this page).
The University of Washington in Seattle is another example. Today, UDub is ranked No. 46 in national universities, but U.S. News also ranks UDub as No. 7 in the world! How does that happen? Different algorithms for different rankings. Note that UDub lost 6 places between last year and this year … causing some different admissions results for applicants all around the world.
Sure, but maybe you think it’s not really that bad. You’d be wrong.
U.S. News has built into its algorithm an entirely subjective factor called “peer assessment.” This is voting by college deans about other colleges, and it’s 20 percent of each school’s rankings result. How do you influence a dean to give you a better review? This year, a common strategy has been to manipulate Regular Decision statistics. First, push more people from Early into the Regular pool, thereby changing the RD admissions percentage. Second, push more people onto the waiting list, then grab them after the RD statistics are published. By showing more competitive admissions statistics, schools influence each other to gain votes. “They were hard to get, so they must be good!”
Still don’t believe me? One of all-time my favorite case studies is that of Rowan University. Maybe you’ve never heard of Rowan, which could spell trouble for its ranking (and thus for the alumni donations that follow positive rankings). In 2023, Rowan found a way to boost its ranking 30 places in one year …
The strategy actually started a few years before. Rowan President Ali Houshmand used his name – literally – to gain notoriety. How? Rowan sent bottles of Houshmand’s Hazardous Hot Sauce to college and university presidents around the country. Seriously, they used free hot sauce to improve their reputation! However, for hot sauce afficionados like myself, note that you can get three varieties: Ali’s Nasty, Nastylicious and Nastyvicious. They also sell swag if that’s your thing.
I like hot sauce, but not for influencing how you pick a college.
If you want to read more about the problems with rankings, do an Internet search for Malcolm Gladwell, who has written on the issue many times. If you want to see what other educators think of rankings, search how liberal arts colleges have openly rejected U.S. News for almost 20 years (and some for longer). Now, even the Ivy League is opting out of U.S. News’ graduate school rankings.
I get it: I have Harvard on my resume, so I know what that name can do (and what it cannot do). Nevertheless, in picking a school, we always recommend focusing on the four factors of fit: institutional design, curricular design, on-campus culture and off-campus opportunities.
After all, your No. 1 consideration should be you, not some made-for-money ranking.
Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.