Little-Known, Infuriating Truths About Applying To College

Not everyone has to go to college, but just because an economy has a lot of jobs it doesn't mean those jobs are good. Degrees are linked to coming out of recessions unscathed, because a job that pays the bills month to month won't be enough to keep a house or raise a family if you suddenly find yourself unemployed again. So there are ideas to improve enrollment rates, from encouraging adults to go back to school to running more online programs.

But meanwhile, students have to figure out what to do when they're told that their school is vanishing halfway through their degree. Most schools are planning their closures so that everyone can complete their programs or transfer with relative ease, but there are also cases where financial disasters are hidden right up until students need to figure out what they can do with 18 months of sociology credits from a school with a phone number that's now answered by a weed dispensary.

It's not just famous people like Jared and George W. "Spelled Yale With a 6" Bush. Students in families that make more than $630,000 a year -- America's richest 1% -- are 77 times more likely to be admitted to Ivy League schools than the children of families making less than $30,000 a year, despite the fact that getting diamond-studded Tim Ferriss books for Christmas doesn't magically make you 77 times smarter. Even families making less than $65,000, at which point we're talking about 60% of America, have fewer students in elite schools than the 1%.

Rich kids can also take the athletic track. And we're not talking basketball and football. The Ivy League loves golf, rowing, and other sports that you need money to even learn, let alone excel in. The ones who actually have a shot on academic merits can also get a leg up with money, whether it's a private tutor or expensive prep courses. It's easier to ace tests when you have a maid and cook to help protect your study time. These methods aren't corrupt per se, but they are a reminder that life isn't as simple as declaring, "If you think about it, affirmative action is the real racism!"

Then there's the very culture of elite schools, which can be a maze of obstacles and unstated norms. During spring break, for example, rich students travel while poorer students, unable to afford to leave, have to stick around and live off of rationed meals or food banks because the dining hall closes. One school lets students pick up a little money doing custodial work, because nothing says "equal opportunity learning environment" like poorer students having to scrub the toilets and throw out the used condoms of their well-off peers.

Remember, Harvard doesn't secretly teach a different, more accurate kind of economics than Michigan State. These schools are selective because they want their names to be synonymous with exclusivity, even if that exclusivity is based more on how a student's grandfather made his fortune than on a student's ability. And speaking of exclusivity ...

As a "bonus," this artificial exclusivity makes performing well on the SAT look all the more important, which inflates the value of retakes and prep services. It's like a symbiotic relationship between two assholes. Test-optional schools can even buy data and then reject students based on the very information they're supposed to be ignoring.

All of this contributes to a dumb snowball effect whereby students are applying to more schools than ever before in order to ensure they get in somewhere, which creates yet more rejection opportunities, which further drives acceptance rates down. Again, this is making education more about branding than knowledge. Surely, if you went to an elite school that rejected hordes of hopeful dummies, the knowledge must be good, right? But it's really class that's being sold, not knowledge. That's because ...

What we do know is that the rankings are wildly overhyped bullshit more interested in getting people talking about them than they are in imparting useful information. Yes, Princeton will probably give you an overall better education than the Bismarck School of Meth Studies, but what does it even mean that Northwestern is ranked one slot higher than Duke? These aren't opinions on Batman movies; there are too many factors at play to be able to declare one analysis a perfectly objective one. You don't need a ranked list for absolutely everything -- and believe us, we'd know that better than anyone.

It's also difficult to rank the ranking's flaws, because they're all so egregious. Turning students away for the sake of looking more selective is a big one. So is the fact that schools spend money on what the rankings deem important, not what their students and faculty actually need. Precisely what the rankings deem important shifts from year to year, which ostensibly makes them more accurate, but also creates large gains and drops that don't really mean anything (but which do draw eyeballs). Oh, and over the years, the rankings have put a heavy emphasis on inane factors like "reputation," which is self-fulfilling, because it turns out that people have better things to say about well-ranked schools even if they've never set foot on their campuses. What the rankings tend to not factor in are minor trifles like what students learn and how well they enter the workforce upon graduation.

It's just a mortarboard measuring contest so that parents at the HOA barbecue can brag about their child going to a "better" school than those hippies down the street who put up an unauthorized Christmas decoration. You can't distill four years of educational and personal growth into a pseudoscientific number. What you can do is make applicants and their parents worry about the class of the school they attend, trick them into forking over money for U.S. News' paid tools, and perpetuate the idea that a degree is the sign of either a genius or a slacker depending on what classroom someone sat in. That's why we just studied Applied Vodkaology at a school we saw advertised on daytime TV, and we've never looked back at those blurry years with any regrets.

Mark is on Twitter and wrote a book.

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