Yep, and it’s still true that those schools, and every other school I know of, have what are called “developmental admits.” This is a fancy term meaning for saying that daddy has a lot of money, and is willing to donate a lot of it to the school. So, there will always be people of W’s modest gifts coming from those schools, as well as every other school.

Yeah. I’ve heard that argument before. And then I’ve had working faculty members tell me they dumb down their curricula and inflate their grades based on the average academic skills in the classroom. What that says to me is that the bar is being lowered, and I haven’t observed a whole lot of superior performance in my life, anywhere I’ve ever been or worked, when bars have been lowered.

Is it true that a university education is “what you make of it”? In a sense,. It’s also true, I suppose, that one can get a great education just by visiting a good library, or even a bunch of rather poor libraries the way Abraham Lincoln did. But that doesn’t mean the local library has any business charging you a tuition to hang out there.

And i’m not just saying that because my alma mater didn’t make the list. After declining an invitation from a University that always makes those lists, i ended up at a mediocre state university, which happened to have one of the top three comparative religion departments in the country…which also happened to be what stoked my intellectual fire. None-the-less, what was important was that there was a fire to be stoked.

Many studies have found that respondents claim to pay little attention to college rankings when making a college choice. Having said that:

1. The US News ranking issue is by far the most popular issue of the year. If no one is paying attention, why do they buy the magazine?

2. One study has found that financial resources at public institutions increased as the US News ranking increased http://www.nber.org/digest/septoct07/w12941.html

3. A Cornell study found that, as ranking decreased, a school had to accept a greater percentage of its applicants, had a smaller percentage of admits actually matriculate, ended up with an overall class with lower SAT scores, and had to reduce loans and give out more grant money. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=cheri

As you’ve pointed out, markets vary. You are not competing with Yale. You are competing (I think) for mostly local kids with mostly modest academic credentials, correct? Your institution’s financial aid is not highly regarded, so you are also competing for upper-middle-class kids who can pay most or all of the tuition.

I have to tell you, Doc, that if I were president of your university, I would be worried. The best I can tell from here, your institution is weakly branded, draws heavily from local, well-off kids, has few financial aid resources to fall back on to attract more kids if demand trails off, and that demand is too closely linked to local economic conditions.

And, as I understand it, the boomer echo has caused rising applications for many years because there were more seniors and more of them going to college. I believe that echo is scheduled to peak and then decline either this year or next, but I’d have to look it up.

The discussion centers around this point: We’ve just gone north of $33,000. Have we reached the point at which families say: “Great education, sure — but not at that price.”

Of course, I missed the point, which a dean made to me. “As long as colleges we compete against for students keep raising their costs at the same rate as ours, we can keep raising our costs similarly.”

The various publications rank us, too. I talk with many parents of prospective students — and deposited students — and ask, “Why us?” The answers I get really don’t touch on the factors that US News uses to determine its rankings.

Is the campus clean? Neat? Are people friendly? Will my child get a job upon graduation? What’s the food like? Will my child get a dorm room or a room in an apartment suite? How experienced are the professors in my child’s intended major?

No parents has ever asked me the percentage of graduates donating to the Alumni Fund. No one’s asked me the percent of faculty with PhDs.

They do ask about class sizes. That’s important. They rarely ask about the academic rankings and median standardized test scores of our undergrads.

Parents wonder mostly about value. They define it in many ways. A parent of a student I’m recruiting asked me last week, almost plaintively, “Will you take care of my kid?”

Paternalism aside, ranking systems such as US News don’t seem to matter (even though the university touts itself when we get “good” rankings). It’s all about how these families, about to make an investment that may approach $200,000, view “value.”

But hey, we’re not Yale, and we don’t want to be.

Oh, was this satire?

I’ll never tell.

Egads, young man, how could you possibly quantify what is essentially a qualitative entity …

Cheers, JS. Oh, was this satire?

And the methodology is perfect.

The data are what they are.

So sue me.

(Hey, my alma mater didn’t even make the list.)

I think you made a typo with #8 and #11:)

Jeff