| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 24 2008, 04:39 PM |
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WHO'S #1? You know summer is winding down when talk picks up about the top ten in the college ranks. No, I’m not alluding to the AP or USA Today football polls and those breathless wonks who have already begun their talmudic analysis on ESPN. I am, instead, speaking of the annual “America’s Best Colleges” issue of U. S. News & World Report. This year will probably see a rise in church attendance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the first time since 1996, Harvard finds itself at the top of the rankings for national universities, just edging out the perennial champ, Princeton. Although not among the starting five, Duke still gets to practice with the first team, as it tied Columbia and the University of Chicago for eighth place. Among the top sixteen schools in the rankings are all eight Ivy League universities—despite their enjoying some of the least pleasant climates and harboring some of the most malevolent professors in the United States. No public university cracked the top twenty, unless one puts an asterisk next to 14th-place Cornell, which somehow manages to enfold its four private undergraduate colleges and its three “contract colleges” funded by the State of New York. For many years, now, I have eagerly awaited the new rankings—but not because they reveal life-changing truths. They don’t. Rather they charge my batteries, and those of other peace-loving parents whose kids have moved beyond the college years, with the mini-amps of schadenfreude. What can be better than imagining the anxieties undergone by the “elite” colleges as they sweat slipping a place or two from last year’s Order of the Anointed? After all, are these not the same schools that in hyping their spurious excellence have every spring tripped the anxiety circuit-breakers of thousands of households across America? Are these not the same schools that while exhorting parents and prospective students not to impute too much significance to the rankings don’t hesitate to point their alumni to them when good old alma mater “moves ahead” of one or more of its rivals? U. S. News & World Report unfailingly acknowledges the limitations of its rankings. How could it do otherwise? There cannot be playoffs of the March Madness variety. But although the magazine cannot deny a certain arbitrariness in the ratings criteria it employs and the weightings it gives them, it is less willing to confront the deeper problems imbedded in some of them. For example, a high mark in “Retention,” which counts for 20% of a school’s score, it deems very good: The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services students need to succeed. This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and freshman retention rate (20 percent). Yet many of us, much to our benefit, got pushed into adulthood sooner rather than later partly because the colleges we attended just a few decades ago never apologized for low retention ratios and could not have imagined being diminished by them. Recalling his undergraduate days in the late 1950s at the University of Chicago, Joseph Epstein, for example, notes the grudging pride his classmates took in saying that although Harvard was tougher to get into, Chicago was tougher to get out of (with a degree, that is). Other criticisms of the U. S. News rankings abound. Not uncommon is the charge that the rankings simply feed a peculiarly American brand of snobbery—a notion that rings true especially to those parents who have come down with shingles after enduring one or more admissions-sweepstakes seasons. Almost two-hundred years ago and long before our colleges evolved into the engines of hubris we tolerate today, Tocqueville predicted that the ostensibly equal citizens of large democracies, precisely because they were not constrained by birth to preordained places in the social order, would succumb to an irresistible urge for “distinction,” for any and every way to elevate themselves and their own above the common ruck. Harvard, the oldest and richest of America’s colleges, plays to this weakness in our natures better than any other school. The letter of acceptance Harvard sent to its prospective freshman class of a few years ago was accompanied by a “Certificate of Admission to Harvard College” that that paragon of humility noted was “suitable for framing.” The competition among the colleges stoked by the U. S. News annual rankings has engendered a different kind of competition as byproduct. Other publications are now jumping into the game, touting their own rankings of the schools as more useful and less arbitrary. Forbes, the latest entrant, argues that “for too many years, information about the quality of American higher education has been monopolized by one publication, U.S. News & World Report.” Adopting methods developed by economist Richard Vedder and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Forbes released its own (and its first) list of the best colleges only days before U. S. News unveiled its latest rankings on the Internet. The discrepancies are many and bold. For example, Duke falls to #80 in the Forbes study. Yes, that is fur you see flying by your window. If you are a parent whose children have yet to subject you to the sclerosis-inducing joy inseparable from getting them into the “best” colleges you can afford and they can survive, relax. The more rankings that are thrown your way, the less significant they will, and ought to, become. Relying on rankings should never supplant using your own judgment and taking into account practical considerations. My own parents gave me an early lesson in how to apply the practical. While attending high school in the 1960s in upstate New York, I announced to them one day that my guidance counselor wanted me to apply to his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, but that the counselor’s wife, from whom I was then taking American history, was pushing me to apply to Allegheny College (Meadville, PA), from which she had graduated. My father immediately relieved my anxiety. Because he had six children to educate (I was the second in line) and because I had won a New York State Regents Scholarship, which in those days paid the entire tuition at all the state schools and even at many of the private colleges in the Empire State, I would attend a college, as would his other children if comparably qualified, within our state. All six of his children eventually won the Regents Scholarship, all six used that scholarship at one or another college within the state, and all six still revere their father. For those young parents among you unwilling to kowtow to today’s snobbery rankings or to resort to force majeure, keep smiling. There are many roads to success. As almost all of them are more easily traveled when illuminated by enthusiasm, trash nothing vital, not even this perspective of a poster at the on-line site of the U. S. News best-colleges story: The rankings of the top schools should include the football polls and "Party Schools" as that is where the real electricity of a campus life can be found...and obviously Georgia is #1! Suck it Gators Tigers and Vols...GOOOOOOO Dawgs!  Edited by Duke parent 2004, Sep 27 2008, 03:18 PM.
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
12:47 AM Dec 2
