As president of Defiance College, I want to encourage prospective students and their families to look beyond the numbers. Just as colleges should look beyond the first impressions that high school grades and ACT or SAT scores provide; students should look beyond the college rankings to find the right college for their individual needs.
I have seen students, and sometimes their parents, become far too focused on (and sometimes obsessed with) various statistics and college rankings, most particularly the rankings issued by US News and World Report. While my school, Defiance College, has gone up pretty dramatically in the US News rankings over the past two years, I still think they are a bad way to go about choosing a college.
There are many reasons why the different measures used in college rankings make little sense when searching for the right school. One measure in particular that students focus on but should not is college selectivity.
Selectivity proposes that the fewer the percent of applicants that are admitted, the higher quality the college must be. Colleges can easily game this system. If a school wants to move up in the rankings by appearing more selective, they simply decrease the acceptance rate by encouraging more applications from precisely those students they know they will not admit.
Another element of selectivity looks at the test scores and GPAs of the incoming students. Looking at a college’s selectivity this way proposes to measure how good a college is NOT by what happens at the college, but by the “quality” of the students who go to the college before they even get there. So, even if people believe that test scores and GPA reflect that “quality,” it still tells us nothing about what actually happens to the students at the college.
Based on the selectivity measure, it doesn’t matter what a college actually does with the students once they get there! It doesn’t matter whether the college adds value to those students’ lives over the next four years. It is a simple equation - the better the students coming in, the better the college. It is as if car companies were measured not by the quality of the cars they produce, but rather by the strength of the steel that they bring into their factories.
Prospective students should stop looking at colleges in terms of numbers and colleges should stop looking at students in terms of numbers. Instead of prospective students scrambling to find the highest ranked college, students need to find the BEST college for their needs, interests, career aspirations and lifestyle.
Since we at Defiance College don’t care about the rankings, we are able to create a different kind of non-rankings-driven environment and experience for our students. Students who come to Defiance get genuine individual attention. As president, I get to know our students by having them over to my house, playing ping pong with them, and taking them for ice cream. At Defiance we have study tables at the President’s House four nights a week for any student on campus who wants to come to the house to study and for free food!
Before classes even start, every new student sits down with a team of people– including a faculty member, a coach (if the student is a student-athlete), a member of our career services/student life staff, an admissions counselor, an alum, and a vice-president or dean of the college to create the student’s own Personal Success Plan.
Incoming students are asked a series of questions about what the student wants to accomplish academically; what skills the student hopes to gain to get a leg-up in the marketplace; what internships and contacts he/she wants to make; how the student wants to grow personally, spiritually, ethically; and what diverse and other cultural experiences the student wants to be exposed to in order to grow as a global citizen. And then we work with the student – both before classes start and through the Freshman Seminar during the first semester, to figure out how to answer those questions. The goal is to produce a joint plan, based on the student’s interests and dreams, of how to create the greatest experience possible for that student while at Defiance College.
There is a host of other experiences and activities on the Defiance College campus designed to ensure that students enjoy the most productive and enjoyable four years they can imagine. From running and operating a unique student run non-profit to investigating cold cases for the Wayne County prosecutor’s office in Detroit; from traveling on service trips to Latin America, Asia and elsewhere to linking the theory in the classroom to real world experiences outside - none of these experiences can be quantified by any of the college rankings in the marketplace.
The measure of an educational institution should not be related to the extent to which it admits only the few, but rather to the extent to which it broadens opportunity for those who attend. Excellence should be measured by how a college helps students, challenges students, draws connections for students and opens doors for students while they are in college, not by rankings that often ignore the most important benefits that colleges provide.
