New College Rankings

Around the halls of New Trier High School, hardly a day goes by where people aren't talking about colleges and comparing the hundreds of colleges that kids are applying to.  It is natural for us to try to declare that one college is better than another in every way, because it is easier to then create rankings.  However, it's not always easy to decide which college is "better" than any other college.  The US News and World Report, Forbes, and many other publications have attempted to do this for years, but the different methodologies of each ranking make each one drastically different.  How do you decide whether Yale is "better" than Harvard?  No one can really definitively know, but President Obama is determined to do so.


The Obama Administration has announced their plans to introduce a government college ratings system.  Reasons for this change are that they want to help students weigh the pros and cons of certain schools as well as to prove that the $150 billion dollars the government gives to colleges and universities each year is worth it.

The new government-run rating system would factor in things like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate, and how much money their students earn after college.

I think that these changes can really help our country if done the right way.  I think it could give students better advice on which college will be most worth their money, and I think it could filter out schools that are expensive and don't have graduates that are making enough money to pay for their education because the colleges themselves are bad.

What do you think about the government getting involved in college rankings?

Betrayed by the Game

For my junior theme paper I read The Last Shot by Darcy Frey.  It is an account of the year the Frey spent with the Abraham Lincoln High School basketball team in 1991.  He followed the lives of Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, and Darryle Flicking.  All three of them were stars on the team and were being recruiting by Division 1 schools to play basketball.  When the book ends, Tchaka is going to Seton Hall on a full ride, Corey is going to junior college in Texas, and Darryle is going to junior college around Los Angeles.  However, the obstacles put in front of them by life in Coney Island kept all of them from achieving their dreams.

Of the three, Tchaka had the most promising future because by the end of high school he had secured a full scholarship to Seton Hall, a Division 1 school.  Throughout Tchaka's recruitment, the coaches at Seton Hall would repeatedly tell him that he'd contend for a starting spot right away, that they thought he could be star, and that they thought he could have a chance at the NBA if he went to Seton Hall.  However, soon after arriving on campus Tchaka learned that these were all lies, and that he had been recruited as a bench player the whole time.  After two fruitless years at Seton Hall he transferred to UC Irvine in hope of more playing time.  One night while driving back to campus after practice, Tchaka fell asleep at the wheel and got in a bad car accident, leaving him with life-threatening injuries to his skull, lungs, legs, and hands.  He was never able to play basketball to his potential again because of the injuries.  After the accident, transferring to CW Post, and a failed tryout in the semi-pro leagues, Tchaka gave up the game of basketball and has been living paycheck to paycheck doing manual labor ever since.

After spending some time in the JuCo leagues in Texas, Corey Johnson lost hope in ever being recruited to a Division 1 team, lost motivation and dropped out of school.  He then continued to pursue his dream of becoming a poet by writing his first set of writings to be published.  He has continued to struggle after high school, living paycheck to paycheck just as Tchaka has.

Lastly, there was Darryle Flicking.  After becoming one of the best JuCo players around, Flicking was recruited by many Division 1 coaches, but decided to go to Division 2 UC-Riverside because he felt he could better focus on earning his degree there.  He did eventually graduate in 1996 with a degree in sociology.  But his mental and emotional troubles from his childhood stayed with him.  He was arrested twice for abusing his wife while in college, and later became homeless.  Then in 1999 he was walking along railroad tracks and was fatally struck from behind by an Amtrak train, which friends of his believe to be a suicide, which he almost attempted during his time at Lincoln High.

For all of these players, basketball was the promised road out of their struggles.  They chose basketball in order to avoid the troubles of getting involved in drug dealing in the streets of Coney Island, but in the end, how much better off are they?  Unfortunately, the sometimes cruel world of Division 1 basketball holds more stories like these than the publicized success stories of a lucky few who make it.