<p>My, my. Condescending meets acerbic. Very entertaining.</p>
<p>It’s my understanding that the admissions rate only counts for 1.5% of the USNWR ranking, so all this about “improving the admissions rate is a way to game the ratings system” seems like an awfully long run for a short slide. </p>
<p>Anyway, who are the elite schools who have made the most strides in ranking jumps in the last 20, 30, 40 years? Off the top of my head, you’ve got U of Chicago, Duke, Vanderbilt, USC and WashU on that list. What have they all done? They’ve all gone about it in different ways. Differentiated / unique positioning, letting some rich and connected families buy their way in, making their school more well known with explicit outreach to other parts of the country, providing generous scholarships / merit aid to woo kids away from Ivy League schools. You can match up who has done what :-)</p>
<p>MirabileDictu, mirabiliter dicis. Thank you for a well thought-out post that refers to a lot of the reality of education, like low faculty turnover and school’s efforts to improve their ranks.</p>
<p>Now that I think about the issue in light of what you’ve said, it seems much more difficult for schools to improve themselves, and even if they do, there’s a nastiness to the thought of going to a “school for Harvard rejects” that can’t be dispelled from public perception even though there are individuals who aren’t bothered by rejection from their first choice because their second choice is also a good fit. A college can’t just improve itself and advertise its objective improvements to the market (because there aren’t really objective improvements in the first place like there are to a computer); it has to wait for the market to recognize its improvements, which takes a long time. Unless it goes the quick route by inflating its applicant pool to claim higher selectivity, which is the route that is being taken via the common app and aggressive advertisement.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that, in terms of selectivity, the growing population causes its options to grow simply by overloading its options and causing more of them to be overloaded (in turn selective, in turn more attractive). But there are still only so many names people are willing to consider on ranking lists. If there are 100 colleges in the nation with single digit acceptance rates, is it really such an advantage to go from a rate of 80% to a rate of 30%? Relative to the rest of the nation, that still counts as falling behind.</p>
<p>I think a counterexample to the importance of rankings is Reed. Yes, they do have a long history. But USNWR ranks them #75 in national LACs even though I usually hear that it commands at least the same respect from applicants and cognoscenti as the top ten. It would make me happy to know that there could be other Reeds out there, offering a superior product and being recognized for it without needing the support of a ranking that is subject to the attention span of people who only look through so many entries in a list before getting bored.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, thank you as well for bringing up some schools that are making real efforts, successfully, to make themselves more competitive. It at least makes me doubt that supply is falling behind demand, and it piques my interest in proven ways for a college to compete for the applicants of a college that is historically considered better.</p>
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<p>Correct. Admissions rate is 10% of the “Student Selectivity” measure used by US News. “Student Selectivity” is 15% of their overall formula. My argument is that “Student Selectivity” is the area in which a college’s efforts can have the most immediate measurable impact on ranking. I certainly don’t think that colleges limit their efforts to increasing the number of applicants. I also mentioned the use of merit aid and free applications for high stat students, which are huge parts of the strategy. The increase in numbers is not only helpful for the 1.5% of the score driven by admissions rate. It is also part of bringing in more applications from competitive students (with free, low effort applications there is little reason not to apply) who can be wooed with merit aid oce they apply.</p>
<p>So maybe instead of there being resources that limit the potential of colleges to become good options for good students and those resources growing more slowly than the population, colleges can and do improve themselves but it takes a lot of time, money, and adaptation, resulting in a very slow response to the market in comparison to how quickly dispensable product creators can respond to the market.</p>
<p>Halogen-</p>
<p>You’re correct to isolate Reed as a very interesting example (and excellent school). It is fascinating that US News even ranks it, given Reed’s refusal to cooperate with the ranking organizations, and its disdain for the entire ranking endeavor and industry. </p>
<p>Reed is just different, and it does a very good job of marketing how it is different. As a result, it attracts students who are different and who actually prefer it to many more selective and highly ranked schools. Reed is among the top colleges in the nation for percentage of graduates earning doctorates. It is far easier to get in to than to get out of. There is little grade inflation to speak of. Reed has an unusually high tolerance for applicants with high test scores and less than stellar grades (it seems to “get” the idea that there may be brilliant students out there whose love of learning was discouraged by high school).</p>
<p>I don’t think, however, that this image (and reality) is a recent reaction by Reed to the current educational marketplace. Over the past thirty years most of my students have returned from college with tales of how much easier it is than high school. This has never, however, been true of Reed. Even thirty years ago students returning from Reed would tell me how their professors knew them well enough to keep pushing them when they are capable of doing better. The Reed culture doesn’t seem to accept the idea that once you reach 100% you can let up. </p>
<p>Reed’s quirkiness works for Reed, but I’m not sure it’s an answer for many other schools. For students and families who are drawn to the most selective and well regarded schools, I don’t think that a school that rejects the entire ranking enterprise would prove satisfactory. Consider the recent thread from a foreign student who was having second thoughts about Brown because so few of her friends and family had heard of it (imagine!). Reed’s product, regardless of its high quality, is just not going to meet this student’s needs.</p>
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<p>You keep saying “school for Harvard rejects” as though students everywhere all line up their desires with Ivies at top, other good schools beneath that, and so forth. I don’t think you’re truly getting that there are plenty of kids applying to Michigan and Duke and Northwestern and Vanderbilt and so on and so forth who are MORE interested in those schools than Harvard or other Ivies – that these are their FIRST choices, not their “settle if I have to” choices. Again, the regional bias is just stunning at times.</p>
<p>No I get it; “school for Harvard rejects” is an idiom for a school that an applicant perceives as an inferior alternative to his top choice, as can be inferred from the last part of the sentence.</p>