College Rankings are an Illusion

College rankings are an illusion. They were created by a magazine, US World News and Report 40 years ago that was about to go out of business. They made it up. People believe the story and famous colleges benefited from the story, so they reinforced the idea. The top four colleges according to the rankings in its first year, 1983, were Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. 40 years later, they are all still in the top five and have never left the top six. From year to year, the number one college might shift one or two spots to create a little drama in the rankings, but the colleges at the top generally don't move.

Now those are great colleges, don't get me wrong, but you can see how colleges that started at the top benefit from the existing system. They don't want it to change. When a college is ranked high, students perceive higher value, so more of them apply, which makes getting in more scarce, which reinforces those colleges perceived value, which makes more top students apply to them, which makes it harder still to get in, and on and on, it goes. The trouble with this is that it doesn't capture the quality of the education that is provided at a specific college. If all the top students in the country apply to the same school, it's a foregone conclusion that the kids who graduate from that school will be successful.

This is why the college is ranked at the top in 1983, are the same colleges today. It's not going to change because it's a big game. The largest factor to determine rank by far is how they are assessed in a survey by similar colleges. The top colleges get to rank each other. Are they incentivized to help each other out and keep that outsiders? Decide for yourself, are college rankings total bunk? No, I don't think they are. The graduation rate at Stanford is 94% while the graduation rate at Bethesda University, a private college in Anaheim, California, is 24%. So with Stanford, quote unquote, better than Bethesda, I'm going to say yes.

But even then, I'm sure there is an exception where a student is the right fit for Bethesda and is not the right fit for Stanford. And that gets to the heart of the issue for a kid who's applying to college. If you stop to think about it, it's a silly idea to assume that the number one, number two, number three, top colleges, are the same for every single student. On an obvious level, the colleges with the best theater programs in the country are not the same as those with the best engineering programs in the country. So if generic rankings shouldn't be the sole determinant of where kids desire to go to school, what does this mean for families who are applying to college?

Well, if we take this thinking a little further, it's clear that every student should have his or her own list of the top right colleges for him or her. Instead of letting arbitrary website rankings drive your decisions, use fit as your guiding principle. How do you determine fit? Ask these questions. Who are you? Where do you want to go in life? Who do you want to become? And then, which colleges will help me achieve those goals? If you go through this exercise, you might find your list of, let's say, 10 colleges, includes both famous and not so famous colleges. And I use the word famous intentionally because we need to get away from the notion that famous equals better in some grand sense.

One college being better than another is personal to you. It means a particular school is more able to help you become the person you want to become and impact the world the way you want to impact it. A quick story. In 2001, when I graduated from Pitzer College, Pitzer was considered a tier two liberal arts school. In ranking speak, this meant not too good. For a little background, Pitzer is part of the five Claremont colleges. These five separate colleges are all nestled together with each campus running into the next one. But each college has its own admissions department and is ranked separately.

All of the other four Claremont colleges were ranked far above Pitzer. Claremont McKenna College and Pomona College were always in the top five in the liberal arts rankings. And this was a distant dream for a school like Pitzer. Pitzer looked at the rankings game and saw that it was not a game they could win. So Pitzer decided to play a different game. They told a different story. While other colleges were going after students with the highest grades and the highest standardized test scores, Pitzer said, we'll give you the tools to affect the change in the world you want to see. If you're a little different, a divergent thinker, a contrarian, someone who is curious, someone who wants to spend a semester in another country to see what the rest of the world is like, someone who thinks we can and should try to change the world for the better, you can guide your own education here.

If the major you wish we had doesn't exist, you can create it. This message didn't jive with everyone. But for the people that were attracted to this unique story, people like me and my future wife and the many friends that I made there, Pitzer became our top choice college. And then something amazing happened. The campus was filled with curious, iconoclast students and professors. That created a buzz and energy in our classes and our day to day lives. We had a cohort that elevated all of us. We told people about our experience for years and years. And the next thing Pitzer knew, the idea spread, suddenly students from all over the country wanted to go there.

Many of them with the strong grades and scores that all the other colleges had been fighting over over the next 10 to 15 years, Pitzer flew up the rankings and joined the top 5% of the toughest colleges to get into. This is nice for me because now everyone assumes that it was always hard to get into Pitzer. And so they assume I was a much better student than I actually was. But that's not the point of the story. The point is Pitzer won the rankings game by not playing it. They played their own game and they stuck to it. And eventually success found them. You can do the same thing when you apply to college.

If you focus on your personal journey of growth and how you want to affect the world in the future, you'll end up at the right college, a place where you'll find your people. You'll have something in common that goes much deeper than, hey, we both took a bunch of AP classes and didn't get enough sleep in high school. And we both got into this really famous college. Instead, you and the network that you build will be 10x stronger because you'll connect on a fundamental level. As a result, you'll build relationships that will stand the test of time and distance for decades. These will be the people that you grow with.

And someday you'll be working for them or they'll be working for you or you'll start a company or a nonprofit together. Whatever your long-term goals are, these are the people who help you to achieve them. Now, all of this isn't to say that famous colleges aren't great. Most of them are amazing. And if one of them is the right fit for you, if that's where your people are, go for it. Figure out what grades and standardized test scores you'll need to compete at those right fit colleges, then write a great essay that speaks to why that school is the right fit for your journey. Play the game a little bit.

Just don't let the game play you. And as you build your college list and you find yourself tempted to look at the generic rankings online, take a page at a pizzer's book and do your own thing. This is your story. No one else's. Not N-I-C-K-S-T-A-N-D-L-E-A. Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. Be curious.