Tiers and Rankings

nadk01
Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:54:30 +0000

Please, let us not do this.

Absolute, tiered rankings do not exist as a real thing any more than HADES exists. Please do not try to rank schools as if it is some ordained natural order. Data and various lists are out there and exist so intelligent people can then use them to glean information and build their own list, but where some school lands on a given list is really not that helpful, and actually bad in the sense that it excludes other equally good schools and shuts down the whole process. Loomis is “worse” than Taft? Hardly. St. George’s is “better” than NMH? Nope. I can, without even using my forebrain, come up with at least 2 unmentioned schools which easily “surpass” most on your 2nd & 3rd tiers.

Trying to submit the final word in rankings in order “to clear some minds” does anything but.

Look at the top 30 school on Find the Best (boarding-schools.findthebest.com). I do not particularly agree with that site all the time, but find it less biased than many lists. Groton is #30 on that list. Loomis is #13. Accurate? Not exactly. Helpful? Yes, if you go beyond the ranking and look into what got it into that position. Loomis suffer because its endowment is not quite as high, its SSAT scores are slightly lower, and its admission rate is higher. So what? How much of this becomes a self fulfilling cycle?

My advice is to take all these lists with a grain of salt, but then go to Find the Best or Boarding School Review or TABS and sort for the characteristics that are important to you. Then you will have a ranking that is truly helpful to you. This is partially how my family came to focus on Proctor, which is tied with Taft on Find the Best for reasons that become clear only after you actually start engaging the forebrain.

As a full disclosure, much as it pains me to recognize the fact, the first 5 schools on Find the Best are ASDEH, so there is maybe a little bit of something hidden in all the data after all that the HADES junkies can cling to.

Wait a minute…why am I even on this thread?