You've got a fairly significant decision to make fairly soon. How do you go about the process of selecting the best school: College visits? Academic reputation? Affordability? Friends? Siblings? Best football team? Best social scene? Distance from home? To what extent should we trust those annual college rankings?
In the essay "The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us," Malcolm Gladwell critiques how US News & World Report ranks colleges. In the very last sentence of this essay, he concludes, "Who comes out on top, in any ranking system, is really about who is doing the ranking." One of the issues that I see is that our culture places a fair degree of faith in all of these rankings instead of being more critical.
For example, a few years ago, Black River High School was named as one of the Top 100 High Schools in the United States. While I do think that Black River does have an excellent school, I was surprised. How does US News and World Report rank these high schools? It turns out that they used one single measure at the time: what is the percentage of your student body that takes at least one AP exam. This is something that meta-data can easily show, and a single reporter or a small team can assemble a list, pull some demographics, and the public will scour the results for the "best" school in their area or their state. Everyone's happy, right? And, certainly, there's some correlation between the percentage of students taking AP exams and the quality of a given high school, but this methodology also raised a few questions in my mind:
- Why didn't they use the results of the AP exams? Note that the number of their students who passed with a 3, 4, or 5 was very close to the national average. (So, does a Top 100 high school get average results?)
- Would unscrupulous administrators at some schools try to game the rankings by mandating that all students, ready or not, simply take the exams? (Disclaimer: I do not believe that was happening at Black River.)
- Should organizations such as US News and World Report have a more robust and comprehensive system of evaluating quality?
- What would the general public take from these results? Answer: Since the local news media trumpeted the results far and wide, it cemented Black River's reputation as a highly successful academic high school.
- If the general public believed that Black River was a highly successful academic high school, how would that, in turn, affect the type of students who did (and did not) want to attend that school, and thus, possibly influence future academic results?
- Would anyone else question the validity of the methodology? For example, would the local media qualify the rankings by noting how they were determined?
- What should "the best" really mean?
Write about 100 words on exactly how Gladwell tries to persuade his audience to agree with him. Don't worry at this point about all the literary terminology, but rather begin to notice what is the most compelling evidence to support his case. How does he present it? How do all the parts of the essay work together? Notice that I'm not asking you for your opinion. (That would be easy.) I'm asking you to comment upon his argument and his style. Dig into one specific example, and/or respond to what others have written to make this more of an interactive comments forum.