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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, August 20, 2005

BEST COLLEGES LIST

UD’s friend JW sent her this year’s US News and World Report results.

A few comments: The decline of the lesser Ivies proceeds apace, with my alma mater, Northwestern, doing better than Cornell and Brown (and better than the more intellectually serious, non-Ivy, University of Chicago, where I got my Ph.D.).

American University, an expensive private college here in Washington, came in at a surprisingly low 85th. Can the scandalette involving its grandiose president have had an impact?



More broadly, I’d note that you can get a very good to excellent undergraduate education at almost any of the first, say, sixty schools listed; and there are quite a few good schools all the way down the list of 120. Rutgers, UC Santa Cruz, Indiana, Colorado, Kansas, Oregon -- none of these ranks very high, but they’re all very good.

Which leads to a couple of questions. How can we account for the dramatic price differentials among some of these essentially equivalent institutions? For some you’ll pay about $50,000 in tuition alone; others will be far, far less expensive.

And why are American students and their parents so anxious about getting into good colleges, when there are clearly plenty of good colleges to go around? From a recent article about high depression rates among college students:

But the cries for help appear to have other causes, too. The quest to get into a top college has grown so cutthroat for many that more students are emerging from it emotionally damaged. "Kids are burning out sooner and sooner," says Leigh Martin Lowe, director of college counseling at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. "They're not being allowed to enjoy their teenage years, and many of them end up in college and they don't have the energy or stamina to really turn it on." At MIT, Jones, the admissions dean, gives preference to students who are "self-driven" (read: not being pushed by their parents), based on her belief that self-motivated students are better able to cope with failures. "Our culture has become insane — we're making people sick," Jones says.
Posted at: 8/20/2005 05:15:00 PM