He wrote a book on how to choose a college, and says rankings aren't that useful

For many high school seniors heading back to class this fall, the new school year comes with an added layer of pressure: making a list of colleges to apply to.

The stakes of those choices are high: you’re picking a place where you’re going to spend the next two to four years of your life, ideally having experiences that will shape the course of your adulthood.

It can be overwhelming — which is why many students turn to the rankings of publications like U.S. News and World Report. With the massive number of schools and programs to choose from, it can seem clarifying to look at a list that organizes them into a hierarchy. But our next guest says that can be a mistake.

Jeff Selingo is the author of the book “Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right For You,” and he’s also an adviser to Arizona State University President Michael Crow. ASU, like many other institutions, makes no secret of its rankings — anyone who’s driven around Tempe has seen bus ads trumpeting the school’s rank in various categories like innovation, sustainability and employability.

But Selingo says rankings like that don’t really tell students what they need to know to make a good choice about where to go to college. He spoke more with The Show.

Full conversation

JEFF SELINGO: We don't have an easy way to define what makes a good college, because every student has a different experience, and you really don't know what you're buying. Economists call it an experienced good, because it's one of those things you don't know what you're buying until after it's over.

SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, and what I am seeking out of my college experience might be different from what you're seeking out of your college experience. Just because Harvard University represents that well for you, it might be the case that the type of education I would get at Bates College would actually be much more suited to what I'm seeking out of the experience. 

So a ranking system that is pitting Harvard University and Bates College against each other might not necessarily be useful for me if I really think about what I want my college experience to be. 

SELINGO: Exactly, Sam, and I saw this. I interviewed a student named William. He's the lead in my book “Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You.” And he was so focused just on prestige. He was so focused on getting into the most prestigious college he could get into, which ended up being Columbia University. And then he gets there, and he realizes it's not what he wants.

He wants to get into a specific class, and there's a waiting list that probably won't put him in that class until junior or senior year, if at all. He wants to do undergraduate research with a professor and his advisor basically said, “yeah, that professor doesn't really do research with undergraduates, only graduate students.” He described the core curriculum which every freshman takes as just a slog to get through. No one's enjoying it. There's competitions to get into clubs. And I said, “did you look at any of this during the college search?” And he said to me, “no, because I was just looking at the brand. I was looking at the rankings.”

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, I mean, that makes me think about when I was going to go to undergrad, and I really wanted to study theater. I was looking at one school that was a big prestigious university, and it was in a city and I thought like, “oh, that's gonna be awesome, you know, there's gonna be places to be in all the time, and I'm gonna be right in the mix with people who are doing this professionally right away.” 

Then I went to visit this very small school. It wasn't Bates College, but it was a teeny little liberal arts school. I went to this playwriting seminar and the professor had it in her house and she served us pie and coffee. The conversation lasted well past the end of the class and everybody just seemed happy to be sitting there in this warm environment talking about theater in this very blue sky, dreamy way. 

I was like, “oh, this is the experience I'm looking for.” But that school that I ended up going to didn't have a ranked theater program. It barely had a theater major at all, but I knew that experientially, it was what I was craving. 

SELINGO: You were craving things that most students want. They want a supportive experience, particularly when they start college. There's a data point that I have in the book that if a professor treats you like an adult, this is so important to helping students thrive in college.

They're able to be seen by somebody else, and that professor beyond just teaching them, and it could be, by the way, more than just a professor, it could be a coach, it could be a staff member, but I think all of us who had a good undergraduate experience can point to people, they could be peers even, people that helped us at various moments of that undergraduate experience, and that's what you're looking for.

DINGMAN: So Jeff, in addition to your book, you're also a professor of practice at ASU. You're an advisor to President Crow. Can you talk at all about how you deal with this issue and this question in your work at the campus? Because ASU is obviously an institution that leads with a lot of these rankings as many other colleges and universities do. 

SELINGO: So, two things I think are critically important. One is, there's this idea in higher education, especially in the U.S., that small equals good. And exclusivity, often through your admissions process where you end up denying 90% of students, means you must be good. All it means is that you're bringing in really high quality students and not ruining them for four years. I think that's kind of easy work.

The thing that I like about ASU and a number of other universities is they say, “we think more students than just the very top students can succeed, and we're going to help them succeed.”

And so that leads me to the second point, where ASU has really been a leader, and I think the reason why they've gotten this innovation ranking for so long is they were very early on in this idea of the student success movement. Because when I went to college, there was this basic sink or swim mentality in colleges, and if you couldn't make it, it was your fault. It was not the college's fault.

Student success is not just on the student. And so we have to build these structures to help identify students who might be running into trouble early on in the semester. What is the trouble? Is it financial? Is it academic? Is it personal? And then finding them to help to get them through. And that helps retain those students and eventually graduate them.

Does that help the university? Of course it does. But it also helps the student. Because we have, right now, we have almost 40 million American adults who have some college credit, who started college at some point in their life and left.

DINGMAN: Yeah, boy, that number is really striking.

SELINGO: Forty million. Forty million Americans, yeah, have some college credit and no degree. Now they could be in their 20s, they could also be in their 40s or 50s, but at some point, they attempted college. And it didn't work out for them. Some of these people might be only a few credits short of a degree. They might not even know it.

And we know that over the course of your lifetime, a college degree will, in most cases, will not only provide you more money, it also provides you options and mobility to pick the jobs that you want to take, to move out of jobs that you don't like, to move into new careers, to move into new cities.

DINGMAN: It also seems like for people who are just starting to think about going to college or on the precipice of making that decision, it points back to this idea that we started with this idea of an experience-based good. 

And if I'm clocking all this correctly, it seems like what you're arguing for is for students to think about the kind of experience they want to have that's most likely to land them in a place that's going to carry them all the way through rather than thinking about, what does this ranking system tell me about the hypothetical value of this place that I'm going to go? 

SELINGO: Exactly. It's a poor proxy for quality, the rankings are. Maybe I don't want a big school, maybe I want a small school. Maybe I want something close to home, maybe I want something in an urban environment. What often happens is that students just run right to the brands and they just start making their list.

And if you look at a typical student’s list, it will include a big public state university like ASU. It will include a small liberal arts college like Pomona College. It might include something like, you know, Bowdoin College or Bates College up in, you know, Maine, and I look at that list and I'm like, some ways this makes no sense, right?

DINGMAN: Right. 

SELINGO: Well, what are you looking for?