Do you think Cornell will ever break top 10

qwer0987
Sun, 08 Sep 2013 18:20:16 +0000

This whole thread is absurd. You guys are arguing with a high school student with little perspective and even less real-world experience over something that’s unmeasurable in the first place. Who cares about rankings - they’re based on arbitrary criteria that have almost no real-world relevance. Do graduate school admissions officers care that Cornell’s acceptance rate is higher than Yale’s? Of course not. The Cornell student with the higher grades and LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, etc. will get in over the Yale student every time (and let’s not play the “all else being equal” scenario, because it doesn’t exist. If two applicants have the same numbers, one will have better essays, or stronger letters of recommendation, or life experiences that the school looks for, etc.).

Is Yale better than Cornell? No. It might have a stronger history department but it’s weaker in engineering. That’s one example, but there are many. The point is that schools have strengths and weaknesses, and it’s fruitless to try to sum them up and organize them into a numerical ranking system. A wise applicant will choose the school that is most appropriate for his or her needs, and not the one that is artificially assigned a smaller number in a ranking system designed to sell magazines.

It’s telling that the majority of people who argue over rankings - and the ones who feel most strongly about them - are high school students. With the benefit of hindsight and experience, most college graduates clearly see that the utility of such rankings is extraordinarily limited, at best. They also understand that to compare two schools and label one as “better” is to make a sweeping generalization that is both untrue and that does a disservice to both schools by ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of each.

I used to care about rankings. I thought they were important. But I’m wiser now than I once was. Grover will get there too, someday. Until then, for the love of God, ignore him.