Harvard, Princeton Trade Places What Does it Mean for Choate?
By Peter Krawczyk ‘08
News Reporter
This year, Princeton University overtook Harvard as the best undergraduate college in America according to the highly regarded U.S. News & World Report rankings, breaking a three-year tie.
However, this shift in the upper echelons of the nation’s most popular college survey is unlikely to have a significant effect on Choate students applying to college this year.
As Director of College Counseling Dean Jacoby told The News, “The individual, very specific rankings are not particularly important to us. That is, we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about if last year a school was twelve and this year it becomes nine, or if it was one last year and this year it’s three.”
Instead, the rankings are used more as a way of generally grouping schools, for example, the top 25 colleges listed in the survey.
This is due in part to the fact that, as Jacoby said, “the criteria [for the rankings] is largely made up of things that are not related to the student experience.”
Examples of such factors considered in the survey but not affecting student experience include predicted graduation rate, alumni giving rate, and a peer assessment score based on a poll of college and university presidents.
Overall, according to Jacoby, “the U.S. News list is not a good way to come up with the schools that are right for you because so little of it reflects the issues that students care about.”
Said one student in the class of 2007 recruited to Princeton, “[The rankings] didn’t affect my choice of school at all … I think it would be silly to allow the rankings to sway a student’s college choice.”
