The belly of the beast

Any college admissions resource has to start with the annual August ritual, the eagerly awaited, hotly controversial U.S. News & World Report college rankings guide.

The Washington Monthly fights back with its annual counter-version. According to the Monthly, the U.S. News rankings are all about what your college can do for you, while its rankings are about what your college can do for its country (and society, and the Global Village).

Parents and students who are making an all-out college search should check out both. The dead-trees versions are full of related articles. My sympathies are with the Washington Monthly version, though my 11th-grade son disapproves of any ranking system at all.

The scrappy Education Conservancy has dedicated itself to fighting the U.S. News rankings and the culture they encourage. Here's the Associated Press, via Forbes.com, on Education Conservancy founder Lloyd Thacker:

Activist Boycotts School Rankings
By JULIA SILVERMAN

PORTLAND, Ore. - From his haphazard hideyhole of an office in this laid-back West Coast outpost, higher education activist Lloyd Thacker is raising a ruckus about college admissions that's got some of the country's most elite universities paying close attention.

His goal is no less than a wholesale change at admissions offices, the first collegiate stop for the thousands of overachieving students who pour out their hearts, SAT scores and GPAs each year, in hopes of being accepted to their first choice school.

He's taken direct aim at the annual U.S. News & World Report guide to the nation's "best" colleges and universities, the latest version of which hits newstands Monday - though the list was released last week and put Princeton University at No. 1 for the eighth-straight year.

More higher-education coverage:

Associated Press via Louisville Courier-Journal
Aug. 26, 2007
Colleges seek 'authenticity'

By Justin Pope
Associated Press

If there's a sign of the times in college admissions, it may be this: Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application -- on purpose.

"Sometimes it's a typo," he says. "I don't want my students to sound like robots. It's pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there's no spark left."

And the San Francisco Chronicle's weekly Higher Education column addresses an issue after my own heart (as a public-school advocate):

COLLEGE BOUND
A weekly guide to higher education

Joanne Levy-Prewitt
Question: My daughter is starting ninth grade at a diverse public high school with a strong academic program. She was accepted into a very good private college prep school, too, but decided to go to the public school for the diversity and size. She is a strong and serious student. How do you think her chances of getting into various universities will be affected by her decision to go a public high school instead of a private school?

In addition, is it true that the United States' graduating class of 2011 will be the largest pool applying for college in recent history?

(The latter question is of interest too, since I've previously read definitively that the classes of 2008 and 2009 — the latter my son's class — will be the largest high-school graduating classes in history. This confuses some people, since we all know about high birthrates of the baby boom, 1946-'62. But in that generation (mine), lots more kids dropped out of high school without prompting much concern, and the notion was still that only the academic and socioeconomic elite went to college. It was still a new idea that college wasn't just for white kids from the right side of the tracks.


— Caroline