Is your kid vulnerable to social anxiety and mental pressure? They would be better off being a bigger fish in a smaller state pond than developing suicidal ideation at a big name institution. You can come up with solid criteria based on knowledge of the world and intuition.

None of the criteria you cite are truly that arbitrary if you inspect them a bit more closely.

For this reason, rankings (unfortunately) have more value that OP suggests. The "best" students will cluster around the "best" institutions. Does the average student differ muchst between #1 and #5? Probably not much. But the difference between 10 and 100 does, by a lot, and the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.

If you're measuring is "how good is my peer group", rankings are often a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not so much at fine granularity, but more so if you measure in terms of "20-50 position overlap equivalence classes". This is particularly true in fields like CS, where there are huge differences in curriculum between the top schools and the not-so-top schools.

I was rank 8/432 and applied to: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Pomona, Rice, and UW. Got rejected from everywhere except UW so that's where I ended up going. I think only one other person in the top 10 went to UW with me, and he had plans to be a CS major. Funnily enough over 50% of my graduating class just went to UW because it was: good enough, close to home, and relatively affordable.

You stand out by being a top performer, and will attract other top performers as long as you search them out. Also, in those scenarios, professors will give you more attention, because you are a better student and more enthusiastic than most of your peers.

Perhaps if you are a true prodigy, you might need a top-tier program to reach your full potential... at that point your peers are the professors and high-performing graduate students, but for most students, I think there are pros and cons for being in a top 5 vs a top 50 program.

Yes. That's why I used the top 50 CS programs as an equivalence class in my post:

>> the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.

The US has 5,000 colleges and universities. Not 500. 5,000.

You are absolutely not going to find more than one top performer every half decade or two at a small non-selective LAC or the branch campus of a university system. If ever. I spoke with on faculty member at a branch campus who said that he's never had a single student who is as good as the average undergrad he taught at <top 5 program>. He's been teaching for 20 years. Those types of institutions comprise the vast majority of US colleges and universities.

I think the "rankings are just noise" attitude is mostly held by people who don't even think about the existence of 90% of US colleges and universities. If you consider Stevens Institute of Technology a "backup" as opposed to a "reach", then I guess the attitude has merit. But if you're one of the 50% of college students who get rejected from Stevens -- or the even larger percentage who don't even apply because they know they can't get in -- then the world looks different.

(Also, he didn't state this as a negative or a positive. Just as a fact. "Different institutions serve different clientelle". You don't have to be a hotel snob to say that the Holiday Inn you manage isn't as nice as the Ritz, or a elitist that the youth swim team you coach has nothing on the US olympic program... some people -- particularly educators -- aren't obsessed with being "the best".)

This is entirely compatible with the idea that top tier schools are overselling the quality of their students.

1- get a good-paying job post-graduation? : you want a school with a good reputation within your target industry (and here's where rankings play a big part)

2- actually get a good education? I'd look at the professors, curriculum, what student-learning opportunities are offered, etc.

3- enjoy the college experience as a young person? That will depend a lot on what appeals to you personally (i.e., big state school vs LAC)

4- study abroad / other opportunities?

5- an affordable option that doesn't put you in debt? This There's usually a trade-off there even if you get accepted into the school of your choice.

6- close to home (usually goes with affordability / i.e., you might be able to keep living at home)

I'd imagine that for most people it's ideally a combination of these, but knowing which is the highest priority for you personally is very important. And rankings don't really play a part in any of those except maybe for #1 -- and even then it's hard to know. Example, my D went to what might be a "tier 2" ranked U (top 50, but not top 20) which most people have never heard of but was well respected among employers in certain industries (engineering in this case), so your target major is a big factor with that. Also, she turned down a top-20 U because it would have put her into debt; often lower ranked U's, i.e., the next tier down, will provide more scholarship money to attract top students (based on SAT/GPA) away from the very top-ranked colleges.

Some of those institutions also signal (e.g., Williams, Harvey-Mudd, etc.) but most of them are relatively unknown and really do just compete on educational quality.

The caliber of student going into MIT is a lot different than UOP but the net ADD from MIT is probably not as big as you expect especially compared to any other accredited institution which UOP was not.

the net add of being surrounded by high caliber students is immeasurable in a positive way. The professors are experts, if the students can handle it, the professors deliver more material, faster. It's a huge add, there is no substitute for it.

Everyone I know who was going through their program had a structured pay scale where a graduate degree got them more money regardless of the degree. It was effective for signalling you wanted to get more money without learning much.

Class size is also a proxy metric for quality of teaching. If all your classes are auditorium lectures vs 20 student groups, it makes a difference. Of course, small classes with terrible instructors and awful lesson plans aren't better than competent lectures.

Of course, community colleges fill a lot of roles, and aren't just for transfer students, and they need to compete on those other things too.

seems like it would be useful to have available a "nutrition" label for colleges, which has to be based on facts.

Also there isn’t really much difference between Cornell, brown, or pen graduates from Any of the decent state schools. Except they are full of themselves more.

Honestly the graduates from 2nd tier state schools seem to have gotten the best education but they had adverse selection coming in because their more competitive peers went to higher ranked/named schools.

Another thing one can do is, instead of picking a school, pick professors. Consider what majors the student might study, look at what professors are there, and look at things like what books they've written, have they written any interesting blog posts about their teaching, and that sort of thing.

Both of these approaches take more time than scanning a rankings, but it actually resembles much more closely how other decisions we make in life operate.

> some arbitrary evaluation function...

I think "wanting an Ivy" is a bit arbitrary, but wanting a small vs. a large school, or a school a certain distance from home, can lead to a very different experience over the course of 4 years.

I wish I did this. I basically applied to Universities ranked highly for my degree at the city I wanted to be in (London) before realizing these rankings are near arbitrary. It was only in my first or second year as I read more papers that I realized I should look into what Professors there publish and was largely unimpressed or didn't care for their subfields but it was too late by then.

So much this. The biggest value of a prestigious university is the name, not the education. Prestigious universities crank out top-notch graduates (and the occasional complete incompetent) because they accept only top-tier students (and the occasional complete incompetent).

As a parent, know that if you get your child into a 'good' school you've probably done all you can. The outcome has more to do with your child than the stultifying, enervating, curriculum to which they'll be subjected.

Education from -1 to 24 is horribly broken (at least in the U.S.).

I strongly agree that it doesn't matter much where you go to get your education if your goal is to get educated. But if in addition to that education you want a promising career, rankings do matter.

For undergrad, this might be a good place to start: https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ How good are the staff at actually teaching the subjects of interest?

Yes it asks about quality, but if faculty are friendly and funny, students will score you high. If you are quality but not friendly, students will score you low. It's a popularity contest for college faculty, not exactly a great way to make a decision about your college choice.

If a student doesn't get what they want, even if they get what they need, they will score low. For example: the institution I am currently working with is scored pretty low. They're a science and technology focused institution with a niche related to electrical and mechanical engineering. The first year is general education, then you get into your specific major.

The scores are low, because the schools inside the university are VERY selective. There are a large number of freshmen who do not get into their first choice major their sophomore year. This is because they don't have the necessary achievement to be competitive, not because the school sucks.

But, if you look at the rating on rate my professor, the school looks like it's full of sociopaths bent on destroying children's futures.

My gut is that is may be very good for the university reputation if the university is already pretty selective on admissions. But pretty bad for even a better than average, but not top %, student who has their heart set on a specific major.

I have taught as an adjunct and was impressed by the average undergraduate at a large state school. As a person who very much doesn't like an entirely "winner takes all" mindset in life, I'm curious about in the extra pressure of getting into your preferred program.

Mind sharing your thoughts on how that extra internal selectivity works out for students? I mean, clearly students complain about the process if it doesn't work for them individually, but what do those students mostly do? "Settle" for another program? Transfer?

I'm going to pile on here and agree that while the school may not suck academically, this is a pretty shitty academic plan for students who may not have realised they might need to make a choice of taking a major they don't want or leaving to another institution to study what they want. Transfering between institutions is possible, but it comes with a lot of barriers --- transfer admission is usually secondary to direct admission; credits may not transfer well, especially between quarter and semester systems; sequencing differences may make scheduling difficult, etc. It's unusual to get a 4 year degree in 4 years total when transferring, unless there's a specific transfer program between the two institutions; if, after one year spent working towards their chosen degree, your students are told they can't get it there and they would have to spend four years somewhere else to do it, it looks like a wasted year.

Of course, maybe your institution does accept some students directly into their major and counsels the rest that most of them won't get their choice and they still accept your bargain. And it doesn't sound like a terrible place for an undesigned engineering and technology major, who would presumably be wooed into whatever specific major would accept them after the first year.

EDIT to add: from my experience as a student at an engineering school, almost all the students capable of succeeding in one engineering major would have been able to succeed in the others too, with the exception of biomedical engineering --- you needed to have a hell of a lot more drive to succeed in that. There was a popular belief that mechanical engineering was easier, but I don't think it really was; just it was a lot easier to get excited about it and being excited about your major is an important factor.

I wholly disagree. Sounds like the school sucks to me. If I had a choice between entrance into my chosen major at a different institution, and your school, I would choose my major. As students are often applying for 5+ schools, they may not understand the nuances of each schools admissions process, and the admissions departments may intentionally obscure unpleasant details like this.

If this practice is bad enough to drag down scores across the whole institution on RMP, it sounds like a lot of kids are getting suckered into thinking they got into a great engineering program, but then get shoveled into whatever department needs them to fill their quota.

It's _hard_ for undergraduates to transfer schools after freshman year, at least in USA.

https://www.bananacharts.com/rank.html

Library was my favorite place at college, probably the most important place too since I tended to skip class and learn the material myself. A good library should be comfy and have ample working space.

It's also mostly free access to the public.

As far as I could tell the content was basically identical & the exercises or papers weren't that different, but two things stood out:

1) The students at Yale were way more engaged, and

2) They had more guest lecturers or speakers, and it was always someone really important & impressive.