The College Solutions Blog

October 6, 2008

I’ve always been a nag about college rankings. It’s unfortunate that the first yardstick that many families grab when they are measuring schools is the annual US college rankings by U.S. News & World Reports. Simply whining about college rankings, however, isn’t very helpful, which is why I’m excited about a new report that was released today by the Association...

September 21, 2008

Finally, there’s a new way to evaluate colleges. No longer will you have to rely heavily on those monster guide books from such corporate types as The Princeton Review, Fiske and Kaplan. Nor will you have to become a slave to U.S. News & World Report’s stupid ranking system. A whiz kid, who graduated four years ago from Wesleyan College,...

September 6, 2008

I read a story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the flood of students from the Northeast who have been heading west to attend Indiana University. Among Indiana’s newest crop of freshmen, there are roughly 260 kids from the New York City area alone. With the snootiest schools on the East Coast continuing to reject nearly all comers, more...

August 22, 2008

Whooppeee!!! U.S. News & World Report released its latest college rankings today. This marks the 25th time that the magazine has issued its numerical rankings on the best colleges and universities in the country. I’d say that is 25 times too many. As I mention in my book, The College Solution, and elsewhere on my blog, the rankings are horribly...

August 15, 2008

I’ve only run across two or three people out here in California, who have heard of my daughter’s college. Even when Caitlin tells people the name of her school-–Juniata College–they stumble on the pronunciation. I used to do the same thing before we visited the college that’s nestled in the Allegheny Mountains in rural Pennsylvania. It’s obviously easier on the...

August 3, 2008

Last week, The Princeton Review released its annual publication, The Best 368 Colleges. Inevitably the book generates tremendous press coverage each year and lots of sales. I just checked the book’s rank on Amazon.com and it was the online book seller’s 400th most popular title. To put this number in perspective, Amazon.com sells well over 1 million different books. This...

July 21, 2008

Perhaps the biggest problem with college rankings is that millions of people believe them. When U.S. News & World Reports declares that Notre Dame is the nation’s 19th best university, rarely will anybody dispute that number. When the magazine ranks the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia as 9th and 23rd among the nation’s universities, what parent or...