Maybe things have changed while I wasn’t regularly on the board (life got super busy!), but I don’t sense that many folks think that wealthy people only care about rankings. Not only do the wealthy have access to lots of expert advice, but they also have the knowledge or resources to understand that there are many roads to success for their child.
I think that the concern people have for folks who are very focused on rankings are for families that aren’t super wealthy (and are looking at Top X schools that aren’t as well-funded as the Top X schools that are very generous in defining need). The, “we’ll figure out a way to make it work” families even if it means mortgaging our house to the hilt, tapping every relative we know for gifts and loans, and emptying our savings accounts because it’s a Top X school. This is especially common for immigrant families where the home country’s culture around higher education is much different than in the U.S. Perhaps in the home country individuals couldn’t achieve a “successful” life without going to the country’s Top X schools, but that is not the case in the U.S.
Additionally, I think that it can often put a ton of undue pressure on students. When a family is willing to pay $90k/year for a Top X school (out of cash on hand) but then says it’s an in-state public if you don’t get in, that’s a ton of pressure for kids. They’re not being told, check out a Holy Cross or a Providence or even a St. Joe’s or Xavier (the latter of two which could end up being competitive in price with a state’s flagship cost). And it doesn’t matter if their state flagship is UVA or UNC or Flagship-of-State-with-Little-Educational-Respect…I suspect that the message that comes across to these children is Make it big or you’re a bust. And I find that very problematic.
But, this is pretty far from the thread topic of the WSJ’s college rankings. So to bring this back to relevance, I don’t agree with the WSJ’s methodology, or at least not with how it names their list as combined with the methodology. But I do like that they highlight different schools than just the “typical” ones.
For some families, seeing that a Bentley or Loyola Maryland is doing well on metrics that count for a number of families (i.e economic ROI), then I think that it helps to equalize things a little bit between the wealthy families with the resources to understand this information (whether from the high school guidance counselors or private college counselors or their own connections/background) and the families that don’t have those same resources. It doesn’t fill in the whole picture, but it helps families to know that there is a broader picture and path to financial success than they thought there was.
Because The Wall Street Journal is a respected, known publication, then its rankings hold a certain weight because of that (even if their methodology is…suboptimal). So if the WSJ helps less-resourced families to see additional routes to success or to help well-resourced kids feel better about attending schools with less cachet, then I’m definitely not opposed to them.