Northwestern students pride themselves on a large number of things. Whether it’s our sports teams (as with this year’s football season) or our notable alumni (hello, Seth Meyers), Wildcats rarely downplay the school we love so much.
Arguably, one of our most important and laudable achievements is that little thing that shows up in U.S. News & World Report each April, or annually surfaces on the Princeton Review Web site. Everyone — alumni, current students and prospective students — see, critique and analyze college rankings. They’re a necessary part of the fabric or our country’s education system. Our current status at number 12 is something of which to be proud, something which every Northwestern student secretly wants to publicize.
But what makes Northwestern a better institution than, say, Brown? The 2010 Best Colleges list, published by U.S. News & World Report, is based on several factors, including cost, total enrollment and acceptance rate. And since U.S. News publishes the end-all, be-all of college rankings, they must have found that magic formula to determine what makes one great school better than another, right?
Unfortunately, there are many past, present and future collegians that believe this to be the case. The rankings in U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review have created a relationship of trust between their findings and their readers: because one school is pinned higher than another on their ladder means that those students are smarter, happier and more successful than the ones of a lesser rank.
It would be a lie to say that while applying to schools, students did not at all take these rankings into consideration. Incoming Medill freshman Alyssa Howard said that she may have been too concerned with U.S. News & World Report’s numbers when applying for college, but now believes that so much of picking a school comes from a more holistic experience.
“Northwestern is consistently ranked well,” Howard said. “While this was by no means a deciding factor, it did indicate to me that Northwestern would be a place where I could grow and expand my perspectives.”
But each of these schools is unique and successful in its own right, something prospective students definitely understand but don’t always comprehend fully. In fact, many organizations are publishing different rankings to reflect these different facets of colleges and student life.
One ranking, in particular, has been sent over quite a few listservs in the past few weeks. The Daily Beast printed a piece entitled “The 50 Most Stressful Colleges,” in which they analyzed U.S. News & World Report’s top 50 universities and ranked them accordingly. We hit number 10, behind Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon and Caltech. How is it that Carnegie Mellon “beats” us by two in this ranking, while they fall 10 behind Northwestern in U.S. News & World Report? The better question, though, is why do we let ourselves care so much?
“If anything, seeing a school placed high on the rankings only increases my interest in that college,” said Stanley Kay, an incoming Medill freshman. “If students feel they have a lot of work, then they probably feel their school is stressful. But most of the time, intelligent students thrive on stress.”
One of the five factors that The Daily Beast considered while ranking stressfulness was the rank and size of each individual school’s engineering program. I have incredible respect for engineers, more than any other school at Northwestern, and I truly believe that they hold the power of the future. But there is so much more to a school than an engineering department. It is an incredibly stressful curriculum across the board, yes, but does it wholly justify a school’s stress level?
Stress is relative, and perhaps Northwestern students harbor more of that relative stress than those at other institutions of equal academic caliber. We have an astonishing engineering department — which I’m sure The Daily Beast contemplated while ranking our school in their little list — but we also, apparently, fulfill the remaining four categories of “stressfulness,” including cost, acceptance rate, competitive academics and crime.
Is Northwestern more difficult because The Daily Beast says we are more stressed? We create difficulty, and we manage stress. We can be taking a difficult course load, be working a part-time job, while also combating villains on the street and may never be stressed. Everyone has that friend who simply is able to balance his or her busy life without exerting a sigh of frustration. How are they able to rank something that we can’t even quantify ourselves?
These rankings are, ultimately, arbitrary. As students, we shouldn’t base our experiences off of what anyone else has to say about our school, including our stress levels. We define our time at Northwestern without the help of such rankings, and we don’t need The Daily Beast to tell us how much we want to pull our hair out during finals.
We can still be proud of school ranking, sure, and we can still complain about how stressed we are. We can still buy pennants for our dorm rooms and do yoga every other day to combat the strains of the quarter system. But base your opinions on your own time here, such as your relationships with professors or your last chemistry midterm. College rankings may speak volumes, but what is more influential is how you, personally, experience your school. And that’s something U.S. News & World Report and The Daily Beast simply can’t rank.