Penn State news

soozievt
Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:54:20 +0000

With my first kid, she was able to use Fiske and Princeton Review guidebooks as they contain several hundred colleges each. We used a third directory as well, The Insider’s guide to Colleges. I bought my D these books as I think she could pick from hundreds of schools. No, she didn’t look at Plymouth State or Central Conn State, not because of rankings but because her qualifications and learning needs were in range for the hundreds upon hundreds of colleges in the guidebooks. There were plenty from which to pick. For a kid, for example, like her, who was valedictorian, had straight As, took the hardest classes and had very good SAT scores, I knew there were plenty of schools in the directories. She didn’t NEED to find schools like the ones you named, because there were enough schools that fit her qualifications in the directories. Had she not been able to find ones that did, we’d have to do a greater search online. I still would not have needed a list of college rankings by US News and World Report.

Truth be told, I HAVE had clients with 950 or 1000 SATs…quite a number…and GPAs of 2 point something. Again, I have not had to consult a ranking list. If I couldn’t find schools in a directory, I searched for schools online. There are college search engines, in fact. I can search by major, location, SAT scores, etc. Again, I don’t need to know where a school “ranks” in numerical order from best on down, as US News does when ranking schools. Rank is NOT the same as examining schools that fit a students’ qualifications. Rank is an ordering of schools by criteria that USNews has chosen to go by. I don’t consult rankings to find colleges. I do searches through directories and online and just happen to also know about a lot of colleges as that is my job. It isn’t about rankings. It is about being qualified for the stats required to get into a school. That is NOT the same as rankings. Rankings have to do with rating schools and ordering them as to which are considered “best”, etc. by the criteria of the organization doing the ranking. Selectivity and stats don’t entirely correlate with that either. One still needs to examine the academic profile of admitted students at each college to determine one’s chances. That is not a ranking but merely examining a school. One can find LISTS of schools either by buying a directory, searching online, etc. and those lists are not RANKED. For instance, you can use the CollegeBoard’s site to search for schools by various criteria…size, location, SAT range, majors offered, etc. and it spits out a list of schools but doesn’t RANK them. USNEWS’ ranking is a different thing. And THAT is a list I don’t need to see. I don’t need to see how a school is ranked by USNews in order to search for appropriate schools for a candidate, be it a top student or a student with low stats. I just need to research schools that fit their criteria, along with their qualifications. I have never consulted a ranked list, ever, in doing a college search with my own kids, or for many clients. And I have suggested schools to clients that are NOT in the directories I mentioned…ie) McDaniel, West Chester U, University of Hartford, Marymount Manhattan, Roosevelt, Manhattanville, University of Southern Maine, and many more. By the way, I have had a student who applied to Plymouth State. He ended up at Emerson.