College Rankings Matter

Do College Rankings Matter? April 23 Do college rankings matter? Our Founder, Bev Taylor, has an answer for you, as quoted in Teen Vogue. Do college rankings matter? Bev Taylor, Founder of Ivy Coach, was recently featured in an article of Teen Vogue entitled Do College Rankings Really Matter? by Sarah Devlin. In the piece, Bev is quoted as saying that she makes great efforts to try to get students and their parents from looking at more than just the rankings, but just as you cant lead a horse to water, its very difficult for students and parents to not be strongly influenced by the US News rankings. As written in the piece, I try very hard to get students and parents past the rankings, she says. It doesnt always work. Its so ingrained in the culture that its got to be an Ivy League school or an MIT or a Stanford. Taylor cites an example of a student who was accepted to a top liberal arts school but was preoccupied with being waitlisted at Columbia: There are only eight Ivies, but there are so many wonderful schools. She recommends using in-person visits  as the ultimate tool for determining a schools suitability, s ince they allow prospective students to get a real feel for campus life. The article goes on to cite Bev: Not to mention, rankings ultimately benefit the school and not the applicant. This whole waitlist process is designed because colleges hesitate to accept kids they may love for fear that that they wont come if accepted, Taylor says. A denial on the part of a student negatively impacts that schools yield (that is, the number of accepted students who end up enrolling) and therefore its ranking. These colleges are also putting kids on the waitlist who might not have perfect grades or even near-perfect grades, Taylor explains. They figure if these students are proactive about getting off the waitlist and do end up enrolling, their numbers arent going to be factored into the colleges average GPA or SAT scores. This—you guessed it—means rankings dont suffer if a less qualified applicant ultimately gets admitted, further incentivizing colleges to waitlist students. Where do you stand on college rankings? Let us know your thoughts by posting below. And, as a side note, Ivy Coach is a family business and earlier this week, Bevs sons  movie to star Liev Schreiber and Jaden Smith based on the National Book Award Winner in Fiction by James McBride, The Good Lord Bird, was also featured in Teen Vogue. Check out that Teen Vogue article here. College Rankings Matter College Rankings Matter March 25 College rankings matter big time and none more so than the US News World Report ranking. If you didnt think that college rankings matter, youre about to learn otherwise. Theres an article up on The Huffington Post written by Tyler Kingkade entitled Students Dont Actually Care That Much About College Rankings that we wanted to, well, discredit because its absolutely untrue. It is an utterly misleading title that should never have been published. One of the goals of our college admissions blog, after all, is to demystify the highly selective college admissions process and correct common misconceptions especially those misconceptions published in the press. This sure is one of them! Rankings matter big time not only to colleges but to college applicants as well. To buttress his argument that students dont actually care about college rankings, Kingkade cites a report published by The American Council on Education. From this report, Kingkade writes, Twenty-four percent of college freshmen from wealthy backgrounds said that rankings were a very important factor in deciding where to go to school, the highest proportion among any demographic, according to data from the 2013 Higher Education Research Institute Cooperative Institutional Research Program cited in the report. Among low- and middle-income students, the proportion of those who said college rankings were very important was only about 10 percent. First of all, the data from this report is drawn from a number of four-year American colleges not just highly selective colleges or even selective colleges. Students at the University of Buffalo dont care that much about college rankings. No offense to University o f Buffalo students but they didnt matriculate to a top college. It thus fits naturally that they wouldnt care about rankings. The same is not the case at the University of Pennsylvania. But thats just for starters. Heres our question: Do they honestly believe that students would admit to caring about college rankings? Of course not. Just as students dont admit to using private college counselors, we would conjecture based on our experience that few would admit to caring about rankings. Thats like saying you dont care where a girl youre getting romantically involved with went to college. Its the PC thing to say and it makes you look cool but, deep down, you know you care. Whether or not you admit it even to yourself. There are a number of other misconceptions given real estate in this article that well be addressing in the coming days. And we take it that Mr. Kingkade has never met many Asian or Asian American applicants to top colleges. Because if he had, hed know better than to title his article with that misleading headline.