Recently, a senior administrator at Claremont McKenna, a highly regarded liberal arts college, admitted to falsifying college entrance exam scores for years just to boost the rank of their college. Now a days, colleges spend billions of dollars on financial aid for high-scoring students who don't even need it.
I think that it is wrong that colleges are care so much about their "ranking" that they don't give a chance to kids who really deserve it. They are making it more difficult and accepting more academic students, and not as many students who are creative and different. I don't it is fair. There are plenty of students who maybe don't have the best grades that will never get into the college of their dreams because colleges only want smart kids who will boost their ranking.
"It was a college, Baylor University, that paid students it had already accepted to retake the SAT exam in a transparent ploy to boost the average scores it could report. It's colleges that have awarded bonuses to presidents who lift their school a few slots." I think that is absurd
This article is full of absurdities.
How do the Aragon Hitchhikers feel about this?
How do the Aragon Hitchhikers feel about this?
6 comments:
I definitely think that the way colleges accept isn't necessarily the fairest way. However, despite Claremont Mckenna's recent mishap I think that they try their best. Some schools such as most private accept on more of a holistic spectrum versus other schools that look more or so on solely grades. I do agree with Thomas, that students need to be equally accepted not solely based on one thing or another. For one person grades may help to define who they are showing that they are smart academically and may be the next person to create something innovative there is someone else who may be more street smart, yet just as good of a person with different defining qualities.
I really don't care about these rankings. When I chose colleges, I looked into everything each college offers individually. I didn't look at some list and picked the ones that were ranked the highest based on a few components the US News people deemed extremely important. Sure, financial aid, student to staff ratios, and student merit are major factors, but there's much, much more to a college than just that. The matter of fact is that US News, nor any other ranking or news source for that matter, can't just simply deduce the quality of a college down to numbers, run it through an algorithm, and rank the colleges based on that.
Moreover, I feel like having a "best" list makes colleges waste money on improving their rankings rather than improving the quality of education they're offering. Plus, ranking all the schools in one list takes out the diverse component of the colleges. A small liberal arts college in upstate NY will definitely have countless differences from a large university located in a busy urban city. It's just too hard to compile a thorough and reliable rank list because every college is unique in their own way, there's no real baseline for comparison.
I agree with all the points above stating that college rankings are absurd. However, to play a bit of devil's advocate, college rankings do help with name recognition and give colleges bragging rights. For students who don't really do their college research, seeing that this particular college has the number one ranked program in this particular field (despite the fact that rankings are paid for) may help them make their decision about what college appeals to them. Personally, I m horrified to think that someone could make a college decision based on the above logic, but I'm sure it happens nonetheless.
Despite the fact that college rankings might in paid for in part, the rankings still let students know in what stratum the college is ranked. And while I agree that college rankings may be taken for more than there are worth, I believe that it is not completely absurd to check them just to see what types of colleges you are applying to, especially if you don't have a firm desire to go somewhere at the time of application. Thus, having colleges falsifying their records is a major concern especially when Claremont McKenna could have dropped to #11 from #9 without the falsified records. Although it is absurd, not being within the top ten could actually change things for some people, and I believe that everyone should have correct information to base their judgement on, even if it is rather misguided judgement.
I believe that college rankings are important and I took them into consideration when I was applying. I believe that the majority of people who graduated from some of the best schools want the rankings to stay the same. According to colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com, Stanford is number five. This makes people that graduated from Stanford at any point in history look like very knowledgeable scholars. Now if Davis, which is number 38, was to miraculously tie with Stanford at number five for whatever reason, then everyone who ever went to Stanford and Davis would be regarded as equally educated when in reality this would be untrue.
I think that colleges are too concerned with how they look. They seem like self-conscious teenagers who are worried about what everyone thinks. I have never looked at where the colleges I've applied to are ranked because to me, that doesn't make a difference. Most of the "high ranked" schools tend to be extremely hard to get into and only care about their students as a part of a statistic. The only think that seems to make these schools "great" is how smart their students are. I would rather focus on a school that cares how great I am, not how great my test scores are.
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