Anyone who’s gone through the process of applying to college has inevitably spent some time looking through lists of “best” colleges. We’re aware that these lists are far from objective; that they can’t possibly condense everything a college has to offer into a series of numbers; but their simplicity and air of authority are alluring. These lists are pervasive; we all judge schools to some extent by how they are ranked on U.S. News and World Report. Harvard and Stanford are, in the back of our minds, synonymous with greatness and success. And they are extraordinarily good schools, but the fact that a college is prestigious or highly ranked does not necessarily mean that it is the best place for any particular individual.
The University of California at Berkeley, for example, was at the top of my list at the beginning of last year. It had great environmental science and linguistics programs—my two main interests—placed a heavy emphasis on research, and was generally very highly ranked. After visiting the school, however, I decided not to apply there. Having grown up in a village of 1200 people, the city of Berkeley seemed both large and unusually sketchy. The campus, which was very open and connected to the city, did not strike me as an especially safe or comfortable environment. The university looked perfect on paper, but it turned out not to be an ideal place for me.
Rankings are certainly a good place to start, because they give the reader a sense of how well a school fulfills certain criteria. And those criteria, such as tuition and retention rate, tend to be rather important. But they are not the only aspects of a college that matter.
This type of thinking appears to have become more common recently, but it might also be a little hypocritical. I can come up with all of these reasons as to why a school’s ranking is not incredibly important, but the schools I ended up applying to are all very highly ranked. They all have very good programs and seem to fulfill all of the criteria that I found important. I can’t help but wonder how much I was influenced by college rankings when I was making the decision whether or not to apply.
I think college rankings are a bit like Wikipedia pages: they can be great sources of information, especially when beginning a search, but they tend not to include every detail, and the author’s motives are not always entirely transparent. And no one wants to admit how often they rely on them.