It’s that time of year. College applications and essays are being written and submitted. Students and parents are inundated with an overwhelming number of e-mails and informational brochures from colleges and universities. E-mails with catchy subject lines and four-color glossy brochures in inboxes and mailboxes. Information overload!

University selection can be overwhelming as it is hard to discern which selection criteria to consider. To that end, I invite you to reflect on (1)  trends in college and university student recruitment; (2) information on tuition, student debt, and employment prospects;  and (3)  why college rankings should not be a major consideration in college or university selection.

 Ranking Prospective Students Before They Apply

An increasing number of colleges and universities install cookies on students’ computers while they are browsing their admission pages to track students’ online browsing habits including family income. According to this review by The Washington Post “at least 44 public and private universities in the United States work with outside consulting companies to collect and analyze data on prospective students, by tracking their Web activity or formulating predictive scores to measure each student’s likelihood of enrolling.”

Data collected includes high school transcripts, test scores, zip codes, ethnic backgrounds, web browsing histories and household income. The data is then used to rank prospective applicants with the scores from 1-100 indicating how much attention a particular candidate will receive in the application process.

In times of high operating costs and reduced government funding as colleges/universities struggle financially to stay afloat, college admission offices are now tasked more than ever with recruiting consumers who can pay full tuition. Among the institutions that track data of prospective students and/or use predictive analysis to score students are Illinois Wesleyan University, Indiana University, Marquette University, University of Kentucky, University of Mississippi, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech and Western Kentucky University.

Tuition costs, Student loans, Employment prospects

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), annual undergraduate education costs (tuition, fees, room, board) at public four-year institutions rose 31 percent between the 2006-07 and 2016-17 academic year. Student loan debt is at an all-time high, and the “average student borrower will owe about $34,000 upon graduation.”

In addition to ballooning tuition costs, rising student loan debt, graduates experience a diminished return on their investment due to “significant skills mismatches between graduates’ abilities and jobs available.”

College Rankings

In considering colleges and universities, evidence suggests that a student’s successful college experience is based more on engagement within the college than on where one attends.* Rankings do not provide  prospective students and their parents with valuable information. As a matter for fact, college rankings are problematic because they measure and arbitrarily weight criteria that have little or no bearing on academic quality or student learning outcomes.

This article outlines the problems associated with the rankings designed to measure ‘academic quality’ well. Among the problematic measures and their respective weights are alumni giving (5 %), smaller class size (8%), SAT & ACT scores (7.75%), faculty salary (7%) and academic reputation (20%).

Academic quality is not only a completely subjective measure but it is surprising to find out how U.S. News measures the “reputation through a survey it sends out to more than 4,000 college presidents, provosts and admission officers.” How do you ask do the chief academic officers have any idea about the quality of other institutions or the ability to objectively rate them? They don’t.

Faculty salaries have no bearing on the quality of an instructor’s teaching ability. And more often than not, high-paid faculty will not be actually the ones teaching undergraduates.

SAT/ACT scores are used by colleges to bump up their “student excellence” ratings. Students get rejected based on their test scores, “turning the rejection of students into an institutional asset.”

And while smaller class size might make initial sense in affecting academic quality, colleges often manipulate average class size by “capping initial class size only to allow more students to enroll later” when the college’s initial class size numbers have been submitted.

And finally, alumni giving is another problematic criterion in determining academic quality. U.S. News says the measure “indicates student satisfaction and continued engagement with the school.” Just this year, the University of California-Berkeley was dropped from the rankings because they had submitted incorrect data. And interestingly enough, no one would have discovered this if it had not been for the university informing U.S .News.

Character

Throughout the college application process, we need to keep in mind that colleges and universities are businesses that are focused on their bottom line. We need to acknowledge that college rankings provide little usable information and carefully weigh tuition costs and the impact of loan commitments on our kids.

We need to know that engagement in college is much more critical than the college  or university our kids attend. *

We need to ensure that our kids know deep in their hearts that we-their parents and caregivers-love them regardless of where they attend college. I invite you to read the letter that these parents wrote to their son, which is included in this article, How to Survive the College Admissions Madness by Frank Bruni.

And finally, we are wise to remember to love our kids for who they are. Our kids’ worthiness and character are not determined by their choice of college. And neither is ours.

References

 * Challenge Success. (2018) . A ”Fit” Over Rankings. Why College Engagement Matters More Than Selectivity. White Paper. http://www.challengesuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Challenge-Success-White-Paper-on-College-Admissions-October-2018.pdf