Why college rankings are a joke
Shortly before the newest U.S. News & World Report college rankings came out, I got a fresh glimpse of how ridiculous they can be - and of why panicked high school seniors and their status-conscious parents should not spend the next months obsessing over them.
I was reporting a column on how few veterans are admitted to elite colleges and stumbled across a U.S. News subranking of top schools for veterans. Its irrelevance floored me. It merely mirrored the general rankings - same institutions, same order - minus the minority of prominent schools that don't participate in certain federal education benefits for veterans.
It didn't take into account whether there were many - or, for that matter, any - veterans on a given campus. It didn't reflect what support for them did or didn't exist.
It was just another way to package and peddle the overall U.S. News rankings, illustrating the extent to which they're a marketing ploy. No wonder so many college presidents, provosts and deans of admissions express disdain for them. How sad that they participate in them nonetheless.
The rankings nourish the myth that the richest, most selective colleges have some corner on superior education; don't adequately recognize public institutions that prioritize access and affordability; and do insufficient justice to the particular virtues of individual campuses.
Consider a school I visited this month, in conjunction with its 50th birthday: the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
At the Starbucks in the middle of the UMBC campus, I met a senior majoring in film. He has the usual Hollywood dreams but more than the usual optimism about making them come true. After all, a short movie that he wrote and directed as a sophomore got a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.
Later, I spoke with a renowned mathematics professor, Manil Suri, who is also the openly gay author of an acclaimed sequence of novels set in India, where he was born, and who has contributed frequently to the New York Times. His conversations with undergraduates range far beyond algorithms.
I slipped into the arts center, completed just two years ago, where there's a stunning music hall with sumptuous acoustics and a theater of eye-popping technical sophistication.
I dropped in on Michael Summers, a biochemist who has done pioneering research into retroviruses and HIV. He said he'd never trade his faculty position here for one elsewhere, though he has been wooed, because of UMBC's almost unrivaled record for guiding African-American undergraduates toward doctorates and other postgraduate degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
“We're doing something that nobody else is doing,” Summers told me. In a conversation with another journalist years ago, he put it this way: “If you see a group of black students walking together on a college campus, your first thought might be, ‘Oh, there goes the basketball team.' Here you think, ‘There goes the chemistry honors club, or the chess team.' It's just a different attitude.”
The UMBC chess team has won the national college chess championship six times over the last 13 years. But Summers' remarks also reflect something else: In 1988, the school started the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, designed to address the paucity of minorities in STEM fields by giving generous financial aid and extensive mentorship to talented African-American students.
More than 1,100 men and women of all races have been through the program, typically going on to extraordinary careers. Summers and I chatted about one graduate we both knew, Isaac Kinde, who said no to Stanford in order to attend UMBC. He recently completed a combined medical degree and doctorate at Johns Hopkins and is now at a biotech startup.
“He has found a way to detect ovarian cancer with a Pap smear,” Summers said. “That guy is going to revolutionize health care for women.”
Four former Meyerhoff Scholars are on the faculty of Duke University's medical school, including Damon Tweedy, who wrote the 2015 best seller “Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine.”
Duke is where Tweedy himself went to medical school, and he told me that although most of his classmates there were from colleges more selective than UMBC and families with more money than his, “I scored in the top 20 percent of my class during that first year of basic science classes, which are the toughest part of med school.” UMBC had prepared him well, not just academically but also, he said, by making him feel that he was “part of something more than just your individual attainment.”
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