A Few Thoughts From the Dean of Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel

Every year, U.S. News & World Report, Money, and a few other national magazines publish college rankings. And every year, Yale is at or near the top of the lists. I am writing to tell you that there are many excellent reasons to apply to Yale, but Yale’s position in the rankings is not one of them.

Make no mistake: the publication of college rankings is a business enterprise that capitalizes on anxiety about college admissions. Ranking lists do not provide very useful information for making decisions about where you should apply. Their main flaw is obvious but worth stating: rankings employ a one-size-fits-all approach to a highly personal decision. The particular characteristics that go into the ranking calculations often have very little to do with what will be important to your educational experience.

I do not mean to vilify the magazines that create such lists. They merely respond to consumer demand, and clearly the demand is there. Rather, I would like to illustrate the hazards of relying on the rankings and to make a case for a more personal and holistic approach to deciding what colleges to apply to and which one to attend. To better understand the phenomenon of the rankings, it is important to look at three things: why they are so popular, what is wrong with them, and why they have a bad influence on college decision-making.

What Drives Public Interest in Rankings?

The college search process can be a bewildering task, and the stakes are high. Choosing a school is an important decision, but the number of options and the many ways to compare them can be overwhelming. Ranking systems have an immediate and obvious appeal: they seem to simplify making sense of complicated and confusing information.

We have also become accustomed to relying on rating systems as consumers. When buying a vacuum cleaner or a television set, we can turn to Consumer Reports, which employs testing labs, engineers, surveys, and independent experts. We’ve learned that there are good reasons to trust their advice.     

What’s Wrong with College Rankings?

A college, however, is not a vacuum cleaner. Choosing a school is a far more personal, subjective, and ultimately expensive decision. Yet despite the greater importance and complexity of selecting a college, college rankings systems all take a far less thorough and scientific approach than Consumer Reports does when testing vacuum cleaners.

Another problem with rankings is that they allow the dominant player – U.S. News and World Report  –  to exert undue influence. A former Yale admissions officer, now working in college counseling at a high school, shared this story with me. Each year this counselor helps students who have just completed their junior year create a list of colleges that are a good fit with their interests, personalities, and achievements. Each summer, the students visit those schools with their families to get a first-hand look. When they return to school in the fall, despite what they have seen on their visits and what they know about their prospects, many of the students have created new lists of their college preferences. These new lists always seem to correlate with the rankings in U.S. News. Students tend to discard excellent and appropriate colleges ranked lower in U.S. News and add “stretch” schools that are unlikely to offer them admission.

Why is that Bad?

Rankings promote the notion that the college you attend signifies your place in the world. “I will be seen as ‘better’ if I attend a more highly-ranked school.” Rankings encourage students (and parents) to internalize the myth that where you go to college defines your value and determines your future success in life. 

This country has hundreds of outstanding undergraduate programs, each offering more opportunities than any student could possibly pursue over four years. The truth is this: it is the student who makes something out of those opportunities, and not the school that makes something out of the student. The formulas used to rank schools are based on factors that may be irrelevant to individual students. A composite score reflecting alumni giving rates, student-to-teacher ratios, median SAT scores, and assorted other data tells little about how the resources at a particular school fit the unique needs and interests of a particular student. The clarity that ranking systems seem to offer is a false one. Rankings ignore the very criteria that may be most important to an applicant, such as specific academic offerings, intellectual and social climate, and ease of access to faculty, research, study abroad, or community service.

Rankings are also bad for colleges. They encourage schools to expend resources on things that move their ranking rather than things that serve their students. They diminish the appeal of colleges that serve many students extremely well but do not fit the performance parameters that the rankings measure. At one lower-ranked college, for example, students without strong prior academic records may tend to make tremendous gains, while at a higher-ranked school, better-prepared students may tend to underperform their potential. The ranking systems mask these and other important facts.

A Better Approach

Your high school academic record, teacher recommendations, extracurricular activities, test scores, and personal objectives will determine the range of colleges where you stand a good chance of admission. If your school has a good counseling office, you should certainly work with your college counselor to develop a reasonable sense of the different kinds of schools that lie within that range.

Then simply keep in mind that the “ranking” differences among the schools within that group are likely to matter far less to your college experience than how you yourself decide to explore and engage the opportunities available at those schools. Look at different types of schools. Big schools and small schools. Schools focused on liberal arts and schools focused on technical programs. Schools known best for high academic standards and schools known best for their entrepreneurial spirit, outstanding extracurricular activities or social life. Schools with strong programs in your area of interest. Schools with interesting international opportunities. Decide which of these things is most important to you.

As you examine different types of institutions, your own feelings and thoughts are likely to change. Before zeroing in too quickly on what you think you want, give yourself time to absorb the ways in which colleges differ.

Perhaps you feel absolutely certain of the kind of school you want to attend, and you have a list of such places where you have a reasonable chance of admission. Even so, I urge you to apply to a couple of schools that do not fit the profile, but that you find interesting for one reason or another. Why? I have often seen students respond to a college very differently once they have been admitted in the spring than they did when visiting the prior summer. Students change a lot during their senior year in high school as they look outward to the rest of their lives, and they learn a great deal about colleges along the way. Give yourself the option in the spring of heading in a direction you did not anticipate in the fall.

Finally, once you have finished your applications, relax. You will very probably gain admission to some of your chosen colleges. You will probably have a few campuses to visit as you make your final selection. You will also be prepared to attend college with the understanding that its rank does not correlate with what you are going to do there and how fulfilling the experience will be. What you accomplish in college – and in the years after – will instead be a function of how well you engage the opportunities and challenges that life presents.