The topic of college rankings and college reputation discussed at Portia’s dinner gathering upon her return from New England brings into question to what extent to these numerical figures impact our decisions to apply to particular universities? Having gone through the experience of applying, it is such irony that Portia brings up the subject of U.S News and World Report’s national college rankings because that source became a major figure in my application process as a senior in high school. My selection of universities was determined primarily by rankings. I selected only private institutions and ones only within the top 25, the reason being that anything lower and my parents made the justification that anything below that standard and I would be receiving an education of a similar standard elsewhere but at a significantly reduced price.
Furthermore, as an international student who lived over 9,500 miles away from the United States I never had the luxury of visiting the colleges I was accepted into, so naturally my source of eliminating the weaker options was through these statistical figures. Portia’s discussion of how these rankings affect the yield and the applicant pool of a college is hence so relevant to my own experience. For me, I was torn between Middlebury College and Carnegie Mellon. Middlebury was the fourth ranked liberal arts school, had a yield rate twice that of Carnegie Mellon’s and had accepted under 20% of its applicants. Carnegie Mellon on the other hand was only ranked 22nd under the national college rankings and its acceptance rate was shockingly high. The reason why I ultimately chose Carnegie Mellon over Middlebury was reputation. No one from my region of the world had the remotest idea of what Middlebury was, but for the most part, they had heard of Carnegie Mellon. The moral of my story? Rankings are everything.
I disagree however with Portia’s view that the role of admission is reversed once a student is admitted into a college. Portia seems to infer that colleges have to fight to lure students to actually enrol. I can understand that colleges may offer students merit scholarships or athletic scholarships to entice the strongest admitted students to enrol but I know for a fact that financial awards of any form are not offered to international students so there is no mechanism drawing us in. In addition, Carnegie Mellon in my opinion had the most unwelcoming admission process of any other college I applied to. The way in which the school informed its applicants of admission was a small word in a box that you would only notice if you checked your application status page on a regular basis, no notification of when decisions were released and no formal acceptance letter until many weeks later via the slowest form of air mail. Every other college that admitted me sent me a FedEx package. Those small gestures made me feel wanted by those schools even if they weren’t as well recognised for their academics. I know that Princeton University’s admission process is in no way unique because my sister enrolled there as an undergraduate, coincidentally during the same time in which the author was working as an admissions staff so it would be interesting to investigate her reasoning for this idea of reversed roles.
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