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?