Why a magazine's swimsuit issue business model decides where teenagers apply

When PBS NewsHour's Gwen Ifill asked the editor of U.S. News and World Report whether its annual Best Colleges issue was basically a marketing tool, like Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue for academia, the editor didn't really deny it. He said the magazine is, among other things, a business, and that it sells the journalism it produces. That single issue draws ten million page views in a month when the rest of the magazine's output draws about five hundred thousand.

Julie Lythcott-Haims walks through how much weight that one issue carries and how little it deserves. Over seventy-five percent of a school's ranking comes from measurable figures like class size, acceptance rate, and alumni giving, some of which schools have been known to manipulate. Almost a quarter comes from what college presidents themselves call the beauty pageant: senior administrators rating the academic programs of schools they've likely never set foot inside. There are roughly twenty-eight hundred accredited four-year colleges in the country, and the SAT scores that feed heavily into rankings and admissions correlate more reliably with a family's wealth, through years of test prep and retakes, than with any measure of intelligence.

A handful of colleges have tried to opt out. Sarah Lawrence stopped requiring SAT scores in 2005, and U.S. News responded by assigning the school a made-up score roughly two hundred points lower than its peers, as punishment for not playing along. Meanwhile, Stanford's own admission rate fell from 12.6 percent when Lythcott-Haims applied in 1984 to just over 5 percent in 2014, not because the education changed, but because more admitted students started saying yes.

Smith College admissions officer Sid Dalby puts the odds in terms parents can feel in their gut: if there's a five to ten percent chance of rain, do you wear your raincoat? Probably not. But tell people there's a five to ten percent chance of admission, and almost nobody assumes they'll be part of the ninety to ninety-five percent who don't get in. Lythcott-Haims's point isn't that elite colleges are worthless. It's that the anxiety attached to a tiny number of brand names is wildly out of proportion to what those rankings actually measure.

Before you let a ranking number set your family's anxiety level, look at what actually goes into it, mostly wealth-correlated test scores, alumni giving, and other schools' reputations, none of which measure classroom teaching. Widen the list of schools you and your child consider seriously beyond the twenty or so names everyone already recognizes, since a great undergraduate education exists at hundreds of the roughly twenty eight hundred accredited colleges in the country. Ask what kind of environment and teaching style would actually suit your particular child, rather than which name would look best repeated at a dinner party. And hold the real odds in mind, a five to ten percent admission chance is not a plan, so build a list where most of the outcomes would still make you glad.