Danielle Kolin knows what it feels like to be number one. Along with the rest of the freshmen at Harvard University, she can claim that her school sits atop the most recent U.S. News and World Report list of America's Best Colleges.
Across the United States, a swath of new college freshmen have descended on the country's esteemed campuses, and their preconceptions about the college experience will be confirmed or disproved in the coming months.
And while most matriculating freshmen interviewed for this article may have ended up choosing to attend the most highly ranked college from those to which they were accepted, almost all maintained that ranking systems had no significant impact on their decision.
"Rankings themselves are very unimportant," Kolin said, adding that she hasn't observed much discussion of rankings among her Harvard classmates.
Most students interviewed emphasized the arbitrary nature of college rankings systems, saying they focused instead on schools' general reputations or their gut instincts.
"How can you differentiate between schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Brown," said Esther Zuckerman, a freshman at Yale, "besides the fact that Yale's the best?"
Indeed, though interviewed students denied the importance of rankings in the college selection process, many admitted turning to rankings for mere personal edification.
"I looked at rankings after I got in," said Matt Smith '12, who was accepted to Williams College - ranked first among liberal arts colleges - but decided to attend Brown. "It was more of an ego thing than anything else."
This is no surprise, said Daniel Weiss, president of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and a strident opponent of the ranking systems used by publications like U.S. News and Forbes, which he equates to a "beauty contest."
"Rankings provide information that people think is useful," Weiss said. They play to "a weakness in our culture, which is we're always looking for a quick-and-easy answer. And so everybody wants a David Letterman top-10 list as opposed to a substantive understanding" of what is important to a college experience.
Methods for ranking the country's top universities and colleges tend to be complex, and are highly varied across different systems. Factors that influence ranking systems range from measures of student selectivity to financial resources to student evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com. The algorithm used by U.S. News prioritizes peer assessment, which accounts for 25 percent of the ranking's weight. This survey enables the presidents, provosts and deans of admissions to "account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching" among peer institutions, according to the U.S. News Web site.
"The reputational ranking as I see it is also silly," Weiss said, lending support to the sentiment shared by many current college freshmen interviewed that rankings don't actually matter.
But the system used by U.S. News - the "pioneers" of college rankings - has more comprehensive faults, said Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University. Vedder helped design the recent Forbes college ranking list. "It's almost like evaluating a restaurant on ingredients used in making the food rather than how the food tastes to the customer," Vedder said.
Vedder is part of a group of academics who are trying to change the way people use rankings. In the Forbes ranking system he worked on, Vedder employed more personal criteria such as student opinion on class instruction, the success of graduates, average student debt, graduation rate and academic success measured by rewards, prizes and fellowships granted to students and professors.
"We think our rankings are more based on outcome and sort of what consumers are interested in rather than on what university presidents think of the reputation of a school or ... on how much money they spend compared to other schools," Vedder said.
Still, Vedder defended the general worth of college rankings because they provide a bottom-line measure of colleges' relative performance to people who do not have a widespread knowledge of these institutions.
Rebecca Gotlieb, a freshman who chose Dartmouth, ranked 11th on last year's U.S. News list, over UC Berkeley, ranked 21st, said that rankings were only important to the extent that they lined up with her perception of a school's prestige. "Rankings, by nature, are just a quantifiable assessment," she said.
But some students did look carefully at rankings when making their decisions, though not in the way Vedder and other leaders of these ranking systems intend. "I feel like I looked at all the rankings that were available to me out of curiosity," said Laurie Schleimer '12, though she admitted that they were irrelevant in her ultimate decision to attend Brown.
Others, like Sam Barasch '12, looked at rankings because "they told me who I was better than, and who was better than me."
Several freshmen said a school's actual number on a list was secondary to a school's academic reputation or the feeling they got when they visited a school.
Although most students agreed that the rankings made sense, almost all felt, like Keeley Jacobs, a freshman at Davidson College in North Carolina, that "it's less about the ranking and more about the fit."
Daniel Ma '12 agreed: "It really just came down to stuff that rankings couldn't really tell you."
One ranking that seemed to influence many at Brown was the Princeton Review's placement of Brown at number two on the list of schools with the "Happiest Students."
"One statistic I can say is accurate is that Brown is one of the happiest campuses," Jeffrey Blum '12 said.
Beth Slattery, a college counselor at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, Calif., acknowledged that many students do use rankings as a guide even if they are unwilling to admit it. But she emphasized the importance of feeling right at a campus.
"I would, by and large, say if a kid is using rankings as their primary criteria, I think they're less likely to be happy," Slattery said. "I think a kid who's worried about fit is more likely to be happy than a kid who's worried about rankings."
