Mark Stucker: [00:00:00] Sure. Yeah. They can be absolutely all over the place so for example, Washington Monthly, which really measures more social mobility, people that go into public service, the ability to move. Working class families more into different socioeconomic opportunities. And who does public service?
They have Berea College number one, whereas the Wall Street Journal, times higher ed ranking has Berea 148 Niche has Berea 58 Babson College, a school you probably know, being in Massachusetts of, Niche has Babson at 93. And then EduRank, which is another one that’s been growing a fair amount they have them at 334. Wall Street Journal has them at 2 and LinkedIn has them at 7. So they are literally all over the place because they’re formula driven and different formulas emphasize very [00:01:00] different things.
Jonathan Hughes: Hi folks, and welcome to the MEFA podcast. My name is Jonathan Hughes, and I’m not going to say too much before the show today because we have both a slightly longer show than typical.
And an exciting topic and guest that I want to get right to. And you just heard him. He’s an old friend of ours. Mark Stucker from the podcast, Your College Bound Kid among much else. And what we’re gonna be talking about today are the college rankings. What do they measure? What they can tell you, what they can’t tell you and how you should incorporate them into your college search.
Julie and I learned so much from him, and so will you, especially if you’re pouring over lists of colleges right now. So I will be back to wrap things up after the interview. Now let’s learn all about it with our guest. Mark Stucker.
You’re a college admissions expert. [00:02:00] An author of 171 Answers to the Most Asked College Questions, founder of the Business School Match for You and host of course of a venerable podcast. Your College Bound Kid, Julie and I have been on before, and you’ve been here before, so always a treat to get to talk to you.
Welcome back to the show, Mark Stucker.
Mark Stucker: Great to be back. Great to be back. Always great to be, I always say yes anytime you ask me
Julie Shields-Rutyna: Oh, be careful. Be careful, Mark.
Jonathan Hughes: So what we’re talking about today, as I said, is a call, a topic of which I am. Almost completely ignorant, and that is college rankings. So I don’t think about college rankings all that often, but I know that people do worry about them and they do talk about them. So can you tell us and everybody listening what are. College rankings, what do they look like? Where can they [00:03:00] be found?
Mark Stucker: Wow. This is a great topic and it’s one that’s got depth in substance. So college rankings are an attempt to list colleges in an ordinal list, right? First, second, third, fourth, fifth. According to best, they’re highly controversial, because.
Really this is a very much a customized process for each individual person, but they’re incredibly popular because most people think that of course you’re gonna tell me that your school is good. Of course you’re gonna do that. So they look for outside substantiation, and people tend to think of them as being analogous to like reviews that you might see like on an Amazon or something, like an outsourced of outside objective source.
And a lot of people think they started really with US News in their first publication in 83. That’s really when they took off. They really started at really the start of the 20th century, and those rankings really were like, who got [00:04:00] listed in things like National Register and like his, who’s who, successful alumni, that kind of thing.
That was around for 60, 70 years until it became highly publicized when US News came up with a. Sort of stumbled on something and it just took off and it got to the point where more than 50% of the revenue was coming from this one annual edition. Since then, you’ve seen just the complete proliferation where there’s more than 20 sources out there that are doing the rankings.
After a while we’re like, Hey, can’t beat ’em. Join people railed against them for years. Educators, in fact, I’ll grab this. I have two quotes at the start of my book on, on rankings. And how pernicious they are. One says the commercial, the commercialization of college’s mission has created a crisis by undermining educational values.
And the commercialization has been led by the sters, the rankings. The rankings apply a degree of precision and authority that is simply not supported by educational data. Their influence on education in this [00:05:00] country has grown way beyond any educational jurisdiction. They have dictated the way education is perceived and perceived.
That’s Lloyd Thacker. I won’t read the other quote, which is a little more, even more pungent and powerful, but so they’ve been highly controversial because they, one study found that moving up or down the rankings can make a difference in thousands of applications that you may get. Just moving up a few spots.
And then it certainly has great correlation with a term you may or may not be familiar with called yield. Yield is just an admission statistic, right? The percentage of people that say yes to your offer, right? You put a hundred offers out there to 10 come certain. There are schools that have less than 10% yield, and then Harvard and Stanford usually duke it out every year for the highest yield, which is usually.
Used to be in the low eighties, now it’s more into the high seventies and then everything in between. But that’s critical. You gotta get the right number of heads in bed. So you gotta work off projections of how many do we have to admit to get what we need. [00:06:00] So the higher, the rankings is proven to be correlated to that.
So when you look at boards of trustees in that they’re almost always trying to improve the school’s rankings. And I. I see why on my end, because people will pay more if they think a school is higher rank. Like they’ll tell you, I’ll pay full for this school and they won’t even pay half of that for another school.
So schools are aware of that. So there’s a lot of jockey that goes down to move up the rankings, but after railing and railing against like the US news, because that’s really when they became popularized little, really late eighties that came out in 83, but really 87 on, they just took off.
Now everybody’s in the game. Forbes has one and New York Times has one and Wall Street Journal has one and Niche has one. And LinkedIn is the most recent one to dive in there. And Niche has one and I could go on and on with all the people that have a rankings.
Julie Shields-Rutyna: So it’s, yeah. That’s interesting ’cause I was going to ask you who some of the other big players are. But, so I guess what I’d love to know is. Are they [00:07:00] all measuring the same thing? How are they doing these measurements? I know it’s funny work. We work in, loans as part of our job and, there are three credit bureaus that, will give people a credit rating.
And so it just reminds me like, so our, are all of these places how are they measuring, how are the measurements different from study, ranking to ranking.
Mark Stucker: Sure, yeah. They can be absolutely all over the place. So for example, Washington Monthly, which really measures more social mobility, people that go into public service, the ability to move working class families more into different socioeconomic opportunities.
And who does public service? They have Berea College number one. Whereas the Wall Street Journal, times higher ed ranking has Berea 148 Niche has Berea 58 Babson College, a school you [00:08:00] probably know being in Massachusetts. So you know, niche has Babson at 93. And then EDU Rank, which is another one that’s been growing a fair amount, they have them at 334. Wall Street Journal has them at two. And LinkedIn has them at seven. So they are literally all over the place because they’re formula driven and different formulas emphasize very different things.
Jonathan Hughes: Is that clear to people who are looking at this, these lists? Do you think okay this place emphasizes social mobility, so they’re going to be higher versus. They’re just looking at the, at a particular list and thinking these are the best schools.
Mark Stucker: That’s a great question because it’s absolutely not clear, and one of the things that troubles me the most is when you visit colleges, almost everybody touts the rankings.
Oh, we’re number seven in this. We’re number two in that. They’re number three. They just say it like [00:09:00] it’s a fact, and I’m talking about. Really highly esteemed professionals who know better, quite honestly. But it works too. I’m, I remember I had a student maybe eight or nine years ago, and they were down to two, two Massachusetts schools.
Boston University was one and I can’t remember if the other was BC or tops, but I, it was two of those three. And I remember the mom saying to me. Boy, one school just had all their rankings, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the other school didn’t. And she was very much drawn to the one that touted their rankings.
But people will say things all the time oh, we’re number third in this. We’re number five in that. And, it’s so competitive out there. People are looking for any competitive edge, but professionals know the subjectivity of it. They’re highly subjective. They measure very different things.
For example, something like US News is really measuring really selectivity, wealth and prestige really. [00:10:00] That’s really what they’re measuring. And then when you get into things like, Forbes is tends to measure like more like career success, income, that kind of thing, like alumni income, and then.
LinkedIn is more, they have one. It’s like you’re the, they look at the success of the alumni. It’s very much driven by alumni production. So that’s something about the more recent one to jump into. The foray has been that. Now a lot of people don’t know this, but if you’re an traveling around the world, the most famous rankings worldwide is the QS world rankings.
That’s the most famous one that’s quoted internationally in this country. US News. Still quoted the most, but their market share has been infringed upon. They’re losing market share as all these other, as the proliferation of all these other rankings emerge.
Jonathan Hughes: And is this QS one any more [00:11:00] useful?
Mark Stucker: So here’s the thing. To the extent to which their formulas come closer to your individual value set. It. Then you might find that, oh, I might find that somewhat respectful, but that’s one of the biggest mistakes people make, is they don’t read the formulas. And when you read the formulas, you’ll find they’re really all over the place.
They just throw it out like it’s objective fact and it’s factual, I like to point out a lot of the fallacy in the rankings, and for example the year before last US News, they’ve got into ranking best places to live too. And so they said the best place to live is Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I don’t like cold weather, so forget it. I’m done. I’m out just off weather alone.
Julie Shields-Rutyna: Or wearing a block of cheese on my head, but-
Mark Stucker: There you go. So there, there’s a real problem that way with them because [00:12:00] there’s so many things that they, that are so important to an individual and they can’t be taken into consideration by the rankings. There’s just there’s just so many things that really fit in that category.
Like for example, one person. Would die in. I mentioned weather, but somebody else would think a place is way too small or too large and they would re, be repelled by it or drawn to it based on size. Another person might think of place is too urban or too remote. The campus setting, they might want, a suburban setting or college town.
There’s cost. Okay, one place school might be really too expensive for another person, another one place might get ranked really high, but it’s not my type of kid. Or it may not even offer the program I want. It may not, I may wanna study business and it doesn’t even offer business, or I wanna do petroleum engineering and it doesn’t even offer that.
People have strong views on how if a place is too close to home or too far away [00:13:00] from home, you’ve got curriculum. Some people wanna open curriculum or core curriculum or something like the Great Books curriculum, or it could be too rigorous or I drown, or not rigorous enough. There could be diversity.
Things people are looking for. Somebody might want an HBCU or they might want a women’s college or minority serving institution. Somebody might want the service academies that people might have strong views on crime. So there’s, the pro that’s the problem with the rankings is that no formula will ever really quite match what you are looking for.
So what I try to do, like when I’m working with a student. I’ve found that over time I’ve found like a subjective argument. An analogy tends to penetrate almost better than numbers and logic. So I’ll say to people, if you were to go to Foot Locker right now, the most expensive shoes at Foot Locker are the Air Jordan 30 nines.
Like two 50 or the Nike, LeBron 20 ones. [00:14:00] They’re like 220 bucks or the. There’s also a Nike foam pte, like two 50, so and so that might, there might be all this buzz. Look at this kid. He is wearing these air Jordan 30 nines. Can you believe that? And the kid’s getting all this approbation from peers and everybody for wearing, this hot, trendy shoe, but.
If you put that shoe on your foot and you get fungal infection or ingrown toenail or blisters or bunions, calluses or corns, heel, S burns, hammer tone, gout or plantar fasciitis, like what good is that expensive pair of shoes on your foot? And that’s what I try to get people to see. Like the shoe has to fit your foot and over time you build up some good stories.
Like I like to tell a story of a student I worked with a maybe three years ago now, a family. Family reached out to me because he was very miserable and he wanted to transfer. He was coming from a West coast location. And when I met with him, boy was he blasting that school. It was [00:15:00] rough. And I had to say to him like, I just have to ask the question, like, why you really hate this place?
Like, why did you pick it? And he said, they only accepted 8% of the kids. How could I turn that down? So that’s what happens if you move away from you customizing this process for you.
Julie Shields-Rutyna: Clearly, I can see why these can be very harmful because again, I, I like the whole idea of an individualized process, but I think, and you tell me if this is true, mark, I think sometimes people look to things to simplify the process sometimes.
So I think of if I need a new vacuum cleaner, I might type into Google best vacuum cleaners. Now I know what I’m going to get back is no definitive answer. But it gets me pointed in a direction if I start reading from four different places that this one’s a good one. So I wonder is there a place is there a way that some of these rankings could be useful?
So that, [00:16:00] that’s my question. Yeah.
Mark Stucker: Yeah. So if someone’s going to use the rankings, there’s several things I would say. One, make sure you read the formulas. I’ve already said that. Two, read a bunch of them. Because that will tend to refute the idea of the precision of them. You’ll see how the numbers are all over the place and that will help you to realize, oh, there’s gotta be some subjectivity here, because these things are a little bit all over the place.
What I normally say to people is, most of the time, highly ranked schools are very good schools, but you just have to figure out if they’re good for you. Now, one reason why I tend not to like them is because I have this saying that numbers do voodoo on the brain. So remember that I probably said that before.
Because I say it a lot, right? So if somebody sees one that you’re 16 and one 16, they really just have a very difficult time believing that the one 16 could be better than the 16 when a lot of times it really is. [00:17:00] And so that’s the problem I have is I feel like most people are not able to handle them and use them responsibly now.
New York Times came up with something in 2023. There’ve been versions of this before, but they probably did the best one. It’s a do it yourself ranking, so it allows you to pick the criteria that you value and you punch them in. It’s still not perfect because it still can’t account for all of the factors, but it’s gonna be a lot better because at least you are putting things to the prism of what you value.
Another type of ranking that is, is different to me, even that it still has some of the same pitfalls would be rankings of top programs by major. Those tend to be better. There’s still a subjective element. So let’s say you run let’s say you run best engineering programs and then you can do them with a lot of precision.
Like you could do it for. Chemical, electrical, mechanical, whatever. If you do that, some of the programs that you’re gonna [00:18:00] see that are gonna emerge. MI t’s gonna be up there for sure. You’re gonna see programs like Georgia Tech and Caltech and Stanford, and Cal Berkeley, and Illinois and Purdue and Michigan.
You’re gonna see a bunch of schools that are gonna surface. Those schools do tend to be very good schools, but then you’ve gotta still figure out maybe the cost doesn’t work. Or maybe, some people don’t like Berkeley, they think it’s either too liberal or they’re not com there’s too many homeless people around there.
That’s just, Caltech, it’s 900 kids. I don’t want that small, like you still, there’s still other factors, but those at least tend to surface. Very good programs. So the cumulative rankings are the worst by far, because there’s just so many things that go into what makes a really good school for you.
But if you wanna know what are the best business programs? And I remember soon, I was working with 22, 23 years ago, and he was quite [00:19:00] sharp, so he was strong and he could compete in a lot of the more selective pools in the country. He, his approach was, I figure things in the top 50 are pretty good, so he is almost treating everything in the top 50 as all really good.
And then he started applying his own subjective filters, so he used it as a way of filtering out. Now, personally, with 2200 schools, you could miss a lot of schools. You’re still taking, you’re still only looking at about 2% of schools if you do that. But it’s at least a better approach than thinking that number six is going to be better than number 36.
And that’s just what most people do.
Jonathan Hughes: Sure. I wonder too, I think the end point of all of this stuff for folks, and what a lot of parents wonder, I think in particular, is. If you go to a higher ranked school, does that mean you’re going to get a better job? What does this all end in for students?
Like what’s the end result here? And can you speak to that a little bit?
Mark Stucker: This is where it gets really subjective. That is, in many cases, that’s going to [00:20:00] be a myth, but in some cases it’s going to be true. So it’s where it subjective, right? There’s certain professions where going to a highly ranked, college is going to almost be a requirement in some cases, or it’s going to give you more of a leg up. Like you’ll find that with management consulting, like places like McKinsey, like they do recruit from a certain group of schools. You’ll see it in investment banking if you wanna go into the New York banks, like there are exceptions, a lot of the schools people might not think that are around New York.
Places like Rutgers or CUNY, like they still have. There are forays into those worlds, but you’ll see a higher percentage of that white shoe law firms, that’s more on the law school side, but so there are some, but for the majority of the professions, for one, the list of what employers think of is being very good.
Schools is not the same as the rankings. They have a lot more [00:21:00] metrics that they’re using. They just tend to have a much longer list. That’s one thing. And then more and more importantly than almost anything these days is experience. ’cause employers are really hiring people that do internships and co-ops, and they get to prove yourself over four to six months as opposed to a resume and a interview and some references.
I just. Had an interview. In fact, it hasn’t been gone live. It’s going live on our podcast. But a student went to Rochester Institute of Technology, which is a fantastic school, and it has amazing cybersecurity program, and that’s what he majored in. But it’s not one of those bumper sticker designer label schools.
They still say yes more than they say no, but he did all the right things that employers look for and. Microsoft has 330,000 applications every [00:22:00] year for their internships, of which they take little less than 1%. He got one of those spots and was offered a full-time job after going out there and doing that because the family knew right from the start, one, the rankings didn’t capture how strong our it was in cybersecurity.
And then they’re co-op based schools, so he was able to get all these experiences and set him up and position himself. But, so he got the offer over many other people from designer label schools weren’t getting those options. And that’s something that would surprise a lot of people that happens.
So it’s really for so many jobs, it’s going to be the combination of the internship and then it’s gonna be all your personal qualities, your communication skills, your integrity, your work ethic, your resilience, your. Problem solving skills, how good you are at what you do. All of those things will shine in that environment.
And there’s talent everywhere because a lot of times people end up going to colleges because of cost. And so most [00:23:00] employers know there’s incredible talent at a wide range of schools. And so when you get to put yourself in that opportunity, then you can shine. But certainly there are, I don’t want to be naive.
There are times, like even outside of those professions when a higher ranked school ends up benefiting somebody. And one of the biggest benefits of the college you go to is who you’re surrounded by. And higher ranked schools do tend to be more academically selective. And that’s a big part of the education experience is who you’re surrounded by, right?
You’re in class 15 hours out of 168 hours, so who you’re surrounded by does have a big impact on rising tide lift cell boats. And so there’s certainly benefits to being surrounded by a group of highly motivated, people who handle their business and are responsible not only for how it challenges you to be your best, but even your eventual network.
And there is gonna be [00:24:00] some correlation. For most of the rankings, selectivity plays a pretty big role in their formulas, and so I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna minimize that because I do believe there’s value to who you’re surrounded by. But the problem that people, one of the problems people get into though, with this ordinal thing is they’ll just think, like I said, six is better than 65 when with 2200 schools out there, even if you went to a school that, let’s say was rate rated, 80th, that’s still in the top 4% of colleges in this country.
Julie Shields-Rutyna: Many parents, I think are especially well in general, maybe status conscious about this process. And so I think this question may even go beyond the rankings, but just in general, when you greet a parent and a student coming into this process to work with you, how do you.
Try to help them see that status is, [00:25:00] one piece, but how this process should really be directed at finding that right fit for the student. How do you change the minds of some people who may come into this with a different way of thinking about it?
Mark Stucker: Yeah, and it’s a great question because status is huge and in a lot of places it’s the number one thing.
In some places it’s the only thing to people. So what I find with that is there’s two groups. There’s people for whom status is important because they are so convinced that higher status is going to lead to better career outcomes, and who’s that want better career outcomes for their kid. That is gonna be a lot easier family for me to work with because I’m gonna be able to show all kinds of different data to show.
Outcomes from certain schools because what you’re never asking a family to do is sacrifice quality. So you’re not, you’re never asking for that, right? So you, there’s lots of ways you can show outcomes data [00:26:00] for people for whom that’s their concern. The harder part is the person that just wants status for status sake.
And I’ll know that person because I. I may find a school that is such a good fit for everything they say they’re looking for, and they will shoot it down immediately if one of their peers is not impressed with it, they don’t even wanna hear it, or they won’t even give it a listen if they feel like that name is not going to create the oohs and the ahs.
And unfortunately there’s just so much pressure on kids. Especially in affluent suburbs and in independent schools, this is how people keep score. And as human beings, people want validation. They wanna feel affirmed and validated, and if that’s the way it’s done, it’s no different than adults.
Sometimes. I’ll use the example of, you probably won’t go back to [00:27:00] your reunion if you’re unemployed. You’re on your fourth marriage and you’ve put on 150 pounds, like you might skip it ’cause it’s embarrassing. And there are communities which it’s going to be embarrassing because people are gonna make a lot of comments like, wow, I thought you’d do better than that.
And everybody wants validation. It’s just human nature. And so that puts a lot of pressure. And that’s not only, that’s not only kids, that’s also parents. Parents feel that same pressure. And with parents it’s oftentimes harder because they just can’t fathom how much things could have changed. They cannot believe that in the early nineties, places like WashU and St.
Louis and Johns Hopkins were taking more than six outta 10, and now they’re closer to 6%. So they can’t, they just can’t conceive of that. So it can really lead them to. Have unrealistic expectations [00:28:00] and then that leads to all kinds of other problems ’cause their kids pick up those expectations and then kids feel like I’m a failure ’cause I’m letting my parents down because they think I should go to designer school X, Y, Z when like a student I’m working with now, my dad told me the other day, I had to tell the, I had to tell the family that the school you’ve really set your heart on.
Is probably not going to happen, based on the data that I have. Like it could, but you need to be prepared for it not to happen. And think the dad said to me like, wow, because, I went there and like my kids’ academic performance is so much stronger than mine ever was. This, this is a little hard to hear.
So it’s just very hard for parents to. To, to be able to make that adjustment to how much selectivity has changed. And, we could get into all the reasons why That’s true. It’s the common app, right? Making it easy to apply. It’s the internet age, it’s also the rankings, the growth of the [00:29:00] rankings, making people feel they need to go to certain types of schools.
And and then all the buzz is around these schools, so the more buzz you hear. Among the New York Times authors have had on my podcast, Ron Lieber, he wrote the book, the Price You Pay for College. He’ll say, listen, if I, th more than 30% of our audience is Harvard Curious.
They either think their kid’s going or they’re curious. So if I write about Harvard, I’m gonna get clicks. The whole thing. You write about Stanford, everybody clicks. You write about Sanford in Alabama, nobody clicks. So then it leads to this sort of preoccupation. So if you wanna get clicks write an article, college admissions hardest ever to get in this year is admit rate goes down to 3%.
And then so it creates this frenzy. And then the way people adjust to that is I better throw in five more apps this year just to cover myself, which then drives down the admit rate. Makes it harder to get in, the harder it gets into, then it becomes more exclusive. Now it’s the Ferrari or the, ess or whatever it is, that it just [00:30:00] creates that allure and now people want it more. So we’re caught in this vicious cycle.
Jonathan Hughes: You’re talking about numbers doing voodoo on the brain and you mentioned you can work with parents or students who have, I dunno, maybe a more rational or concrete concern about this.
How do you, or do you find a way out for the other parents or the other students, the ones who are just emotionally can’t? Make the decision that they’re going to shut down that college that’s perfect for them if it’s not high in the rankings or has the buzz about?
Mark Stucker: It, it’s very hard, because you have to meet people where they’re at and they’re not gonna listen to you if you come with something that’s not acceptable with, to them.
So basically you have to have a list of schools that is, that are acceptable to them, that aren’t as hard to get into. [00:31:00] As other schools. And sometimes it’s hard ’cause you don’t necessarily know what those schools are. Not always. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you don’t. ‘Cause it really can vary from person to person.
But that’s one of the things you have to do. And then you’ll, you still need to always be showing the outcome data because even that, they’re primarily concerned with impressing peers in that they still care about that. ‘Cause sometimes, you have to talk into their language listen.
If you go here, maybe you’re not gonna be the person that celebrated, but when you come back to a reunion in five or 10 years, you’re gonna be very gainfully employed based on here’s the data. And if you can delay that gratification, you can almost have to talk in that type of language, to them.
But I get very concerned with this whole frenzy over this stuff, and it’s for a couple reasons. One. I want everybody I work with to feel better about themself, at the end versus how they [00:32:00] feel now. And I’ve often used this example before on the podcast and working with families. It’s if you like basketball and you enjoy playing, you probably are not gonna judge yourself as a successor or failure, whether or not you make the NBA All-Star game.
But this is what I feel people have done. Like they’ve literally erected a standard that is. Almost impossible to achieve. And then they’ve decided you’re a winner or loser based on whether or not you achieve that standard. One, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of mental health problems. And then the other thing that you’re doing, and this is the part that really troubles me, people that really buy into the rankings, they have a tendency to think, if I don’t get into one of these schools, then my career goes on a certain trajectory.
It’s not the a plus trajectory. It’s not even the A, I hope maybe I’ll do, maybe I’ll have B or B plus type success, and that’s just not true. And you’re immediately limiting yourself right away because you’ve bought [00:33:00] into this, canard that if I don’t go to brand name designer school, then I don’t get in this network and nobody wants to hire me.
And maybe I’ll be successful, but I probably won’t be very successful. And now you probably won’t because you’re mentally defeated, but it’s just not true. So if you look at Frank Bru, Bruney wrote a book that was very popular where you’ll, where you go is not who you’ll be. Jeff Lingos, recent book Dream School.
If you look at all of the passion behind those books, it’s all the same thing. It’s attacking this same thing, this mindset that if I don’t go to X, Y, Z, prestigious, highly rated school, then you know, I’m not a, I’m not a success and. I probably won’t have the career success that I would’ve liked that think that I think I should have or I hope to have.
And so we’re all coming at it because we see the deleterious impact it has on kids. One thing I’ll share that surprise may surprise people, there’s something [00:34:00] I find even more powerful than rankings, and that’s acceptance rate. More people are influenced by the school’s acceptance rate than rankings.
I can show you a number of schools that have pretty high rankings, but if they have a pretty high acceptance rate, they don’t really get a lot of fanfare and buzz and a lot of people aren’t clamoring to go there. Which leads to all kinds of things because this happens with rankings too. Like a lot of people have been busted for fabricating rankings and there was a major 2013 study by admissions professionals.
Where they felt 93% of people are fabricating their numbers in order to inflate the rankings. But the same thing happens with acceptance rates too. They, they either recruit to reject, so you can micro target c plus students through student search and buy and list of names only to not admit them to drive your admit rate down.
You, you can also, this isn’t as easy as it used to be, but. You can call something a completed [00:35:00] application, that’s not really fully a completed application. You can do all kinds of things, right? No, and sometimes this is done for good reasons. No app fee, no essays, nothing. Blitz people with, kinds of targeted communication.
Say no app fee, this, that, the other scholarship about driving up your apps. And then there’s also only. Selecting the kids that have had so much engagement with you that you’re picking the kids that you think are gonna come. And there can be good reasons for that, but it can also lead to, I can think of a school, and I’m not gonna mention their name, but they show an acceptance rate around 30%.
Meanwhile, they’re giving students with a 2.57, 2.75 GPA $20,000 merit scholarships because they’re vetting people that they think are gonna come and they wait list those who they don’t. But that’s all intentional because if we don’t have a certain kind of acceptance rate, then people aren’t gonna take us seriously.
So I actually find acceptance rate and I have ample evidence [00:36:00] of this. I actually find acceptance rate actually carries more weight than rankings even.
Jonathan Hughes: That’s great. I’m glad that you mentioned that and hearing it. It’s easy to think. I can imagine a student listening to this and getting very jaundiced about the whole process.
So let’s end on some good perspective for that person. What do they do? How do they go ahead and make the best choices for themselves?
Mark Stucker: Yeah. Part of it is going through a lengthy process to really know yourself. Know what you’re looking for ahead of time. And that’s gonna be, that’s gonna be all over the place, right?
That is really gonna vary from person to person. Some people it’s really want that career type data that, show me the track record. Other people, it’s much more a certain kind of kid or a certain kinds of college experience. Football fraternities, fun, all of that, or whatever it [00:37:00] is.
So it starts with really knowing yourself, and and then it also involves learning how to get beyond the marketing of the school to really understand the culture of a school and what a school has to offer. And it, we probably don’t have the time to, to get into all the different ways to do that.
But that’s really it, like knowing yourself and getting beyond the marketing so that you can really tell is this school a good fit and a match for who you are. Some of it also is buying into the concept of what I started out earlier with you want the shoe that’s the custom fit for your foot.
And if you can buy into that, if you can buy into the fact that if you go somewhere. You’re gonna, that’s a better fit for you. One, you’re gonna be happier and then you’re more likely to be more successful because you’re happier.
Jonathan Hughes: Mark, is there anything you wanna say before we go?
Mark Stucker: No just this is a lot [00:38:00] of fun.
Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you tackling this topic. We’re up to, I dunno, close to episode five 90 on our and we haven’t returned to this topic with this kind of, depth in probably five or six years. So I’m thinking. We, we either need to do this or I need to take this episode and run it on our podcast.
Jonathan Hughes: Listen, when I first got the idea to do the show, you were the only person that I had in mind to talk about it, and I knew you would know all about it, and you did. So thank you so much for coming back. It’s a pleasure, as always. Oh, this is a blast. This stuff’s a lot of fun for me. Good to see you again, Julie, John.
Julie Shields-Rutyna: Great to see you. Thank you so much, mark.
Mark Stucker: Yeah. All right. Bye now.
Jonathan Hughes: All right. That was our show everyone. Thanks once again to our friend, mark Stucker. Mark, you’re always generous with your time. And wise and humane in your perspective. Julie, too, also generous, wise, [00:39:00] and humane. So thank you for joining me today. And folks, if you liked what you heard from us today and you want to hear more on planning, saving, and paying for college and career readiness, then you can follow the show and you can do that wherever you find your podcast.
And even as important as that, leave us a review. Just helps us to keep doing what we’re doing and getting the show out in front of folks like you. I’d like to thank Shaun Connolly, our producer. I’d like to thank Meredith Clement, AJ Yee, Lisa Rooney, Lauren Danz, and Christina Davidson for their assistance in getting the show posted.
Once again, my name is Jonathan Hughes, and this has been. The MEFA podcast. Thanks.