A student can spend months building a college list without making many decisions about college.
There are rankings to consult, acceptance rates to compare and familiar names that seem to belong automatically. A school ranked number 12 generally survives the first cut. One ranked #42 may need a reason to stay. By the end, a list can look carefully researched even when much of the underlying judgment has been borrowed from somewhere else.
This is partly why rankings are so durable. They answer a question that is much harder than it appears: compared with what? A teenager may have no idea whether she would prefer an urban university with 30,000 students or a small college where professors know who skipped class. But she understands that 8 is ranked higher than 17.
The colleges themselves are often more skeptical of this hierarchy. MIT recently used its own rise to No. 1 to ask the obvious question: No. 1 for whom? Yale admissions officers recommend that students identify their personal non-negotiables before researching colleges.
Stanford talks about students who are genuinely excited about learning. None of these ideas fits particularly well into an ordinal list.
What I have noticed, over and over, is that “fit” is often treated as the softer part of college selection, something considered after academics, selectivity and prestige. The order may be backwards. The measurable things are useful precisely because the important things are difficult to measure.
This produces an odd result. Families will spend considerable time debating whether a 1520 should be retaken, how many AP courses are enough or whether a school qualifies as a reach or target. Those questions can be answered, at least approximately. It is harder to determine whether a student wants professors who teach undergraduates, a campus where weekends matter, freedom to change majors, intense school spirit or classmates who mostly care about the same things she does.
Rankings don’t create this problem. They provide an elegant way to avoid it.
That matters when building what college counselors call a balanced list. Usually the term refers to admissions probability: enough reaches, targets and likely schools that a student should have choices in April. But there is another imbalance I see surprisingly often. Every school on the list occupies roughly the same rung of prestige, while offering very different versions of four years.
Remove the rankings and something happens. Some colleges become easier to explain. Their size, culture, programs, location or way of educating students gives them a clear reason to be there. Other names become difficult to defend.
Perhaps that is because a ranking can tell a student how desirable a college is supposed to be. It cannot tell her what she desires.
And those are not quite the same question.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
