<p>I suspect the director of admissions at Yale is well aware of the challenges of first generation and immigrant students, even though he may well not be one.</p>
<p>Why is it so hard to accept: for 30 years, scholarly, peer-reviewed studies have been looking for a correlation between academic quality - as measured by student outcomes for students with equivalent entry-level abilities - and the very factors that the ratings providers use to rank colleges (whether within the so-called “tiers” or between them). They have been unable to find any such correlation. All the anecdotal reports, “don’t you think thats,” and statements that “rankings ARE good [for anything]” can’t trump that.</p>