Dirty Big Secrets, Part 2, Rank and Class and Rankings

The following words are in response to a question asked on quora.com: “To what extent does class rank matter in college admissions?”

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 Class rank, like so much in the world of selective admission, appears transparent in its significance, but isn’t.

Colleges and universities do all they can to enroll students who are ranked in the top 10% of their entering class. This isn’t because the schools have done studies to demonstrate that anyone in the top 15-20 percent would not do as well. (Or if there are such studies I have not seen any.) Instead, the 10% figure is measured and used as a significant rubric in the US News rankings. Since rankings are tied to how many students choose to apply to schools, and since rankings also affect where the students enroll, rankings have become the way the public, the governing boards, and just about everyone else perceives, at least initially, the value of a school.  As costs continue to rise and student debt continues to mount, the pressure to look good in the rankings will only continue to grow. I have mentioned Gladwell’s New Yorker article on the US News methodology before, but the thesis bears repeating: it is anything from scientific.[i]

Some educators argue that rankings push schools to make choices they would not always make if the rankings were not so important.  They argue that schools turn down far more ‘interesting’ students (based on life experiences and activities, for example), so that the rankings will rise. They also argue that looking good in rankings occasionally supersedes the true academic mission of the school and education in the country as a whole. The administrators who do emphasize rank in class in order to improve their image are not stupid or mean. The boards that oversee schools reward stats that look good and students who are ‘interesting’ don’t show up on a school profile-- only in person and in class. Individuals, by definition, can’t be lumped into statistical models that make up PowerPoint slides and percentages published in magazines and websites. In addition, there are places like Texas, where a top 10% rank in class guarantees admission to UT, so again this bar is quite important for many people there and in other states that have cutoffs for automatic admission (California and Florida).

More and more secondary schools do not rank students. This is in part an attempt to lower the cutthroat competition at suburban publics that have great students and at virtually every private and boarding school. But the story does not end there. Schools still ask on recommendation forms to estimate the decile rank of students. Some schools provide this; others don’t. But even for those that don’t, colleges use data from previous years to see where a certain GPA fits in the mix. They can, as a result, estimate the rank or at least the decile. Finally, most schools will never say in public that they won’t take a student out of a specific percentile or rank, but if the schools would open up their data, then the vast majority of applicants would find that there are defacto cutoffs. 

Those admitted who are below the unstated cutoff show up in the profile so they can say, legally, they don’t have cutoffs, but if you had access to the students who are below the threshold you would see that virtually all of them are specials: athletes, under-represented minorities, legacies, faculty kids etc. It would be helpful to the vast majority of students to let people know these sorts of things but the applications would fall and schools are also ranked based on the number of applications they get. As a result, schools rarely discourage applicants of any sort. They need the rise in applications each year to prove how much more selective they are than the year before. It is unfair to many students as they waste time, money, effort and most importantly, emotion. If you are looking at getting in to a top 30 school and you are not ranked quite high in your class, your chances of being admitted without some sort of hook are not good.

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[i] If it appears that I am picking on The US News I am not. The people who developed the rankings care about education. Bob Morse, who still is in charge of the rankings, gathers educational leaders each year to listen to feedback. Their efforts have improved some things but their brand is such that redoing it wholesale would be akin to what Coke did a while back when they changed their formula. That decision did not go well and I doubt dramatically redoing the methodology would help US News. They are a business after all.

The other person largely responsible for the US News ranking was a wonderful journalist named Al Sanoff. He passed away a number of years ago and for those of us who knew him, it was a very sad loss. Al and I travelled around for one week when I was with a university. He got to see me address 400 people in a ballroom in Manhattan and he sat with me in the corner of a cafeteria in a rural school during lunch in which we were either completely ignored or made fun of. He got to see first hand the life that goes with being involved with admission. He got to see the tony kids from the Upper East Side  private schools and the kids whose chances of climbing up the educational and economic ladder were slim to none. During all those hours together we talked a great deal about the inequities of education and the ways that rankings worked. (His own background as an immigrant's son made him committed to getting students of low means great opportunities if they worked hard and had schools that could teach them.) He would have been (and did) be the first to admit that every methodology has its limitations. On the other hand, he felt he and the US News provided a service to those overwhelmed by the number of schools to choose from. Rankings are not inherently bad, but the way people often use them—from families to the schools to politicians—are often problematic. But I do believe that there are some schools that are better than others in ways that will help students decide where to apply and enroll, but that a skeptic’s approach, as with almost any data, should accompany the interpretative frame.