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There is no one ranking that should help people decide where to attend college. Each individual should develop their own ranking based on their needs and goals in life.
I think it is a shame that Clemson has pursued a higher ranking at the expense of those parents of students who would attend the school. By simply raising tuition, they have raised their 'ranking' from the high 30s to the low 20s. How does this improve the school?
Yea, many schools specifically try and raise their rankings by transferring NEED based awards to MERIT awards (to attract smart kids). I myself was one of those who picked a school based on an arbitrarily high merit award compared to even my safety schools.
I don't punch much emphasis on college rankings, especially one single ranking. It's not that there are not different tiers of quality colleges or that the top 10-15 in most of these are fairly consistently accurate (in a broad sense); rather they don't tell the whole story regarding exactly what may be important to each individual person (major, career choice, payoff).
Is it worth it to go to an out-of-state school ranked #50 vs an in-state school ranked #100? Will you actually see a monetary or career benefit/payoff between the supposed differences in quality made up by the differences in tuition? Probably not but you could find anecdotal cases supporting both. Or perhaps, a #75 college is #10 in the country for a specific major. Or, a #50 college happens to have a good relationship with specific employers in their city or state and thus it opens up a more direct door than a higher rated college somewhere else for a certain industry. LOTS of factors to consider.
I did not go to Clemson or SC (nor did I go to college in South Carolina period) so I'm not in either camp here, just pointing out objectively that the rankings are a dog and pony show for the most part.
You have these USNews Rankings, Shanghai does an international Academic rankings, Wall Street Journal Recruiter's Rankings, Huffington Post Best Value rankings, Kiplinger's Best Value (public colleges) rankings, Princeton Review Best Public University Value rankings, and then rankings by majors as well. Many schools vary WIDELY across all these rankings.
For example, the school I went to is ranked anywhere from top 15 to over 100 depending on the ranking. However, (last I looked - so these could be wrong today) it was top 20 in recruiter rankings by overall school, top 15 in recruiter rankings by major, top 25 by value for public college, top 30 by US News major, and top 30 by Shanghai world academic rankings by major. It was also in state for me + some academic scholarships. However, the school as a whole barely makes the top 100 US News usually. So how meaningful is the US News generic ranking to a prospective student or me as an alumni? Not very in my opinion. (That doesn't mean I put much blind emphasis on the other rankings though either)
There is no one ranking that should help people decide where to attend college. Each individual should develop their own ranking based on their needs and goals in life.
I think it is a shame that Clemson has pursued a higher ranking at the expense of those parents of students who would attend the school. By simply raising tuition, they have raised their 'ranking' from the high 30s to the low 20s. How does this improve the school?
Years ago upwards of 50% of a college budget came from the state. Know its usually less than 10%.
How else are the schools suppose to make up the difference?
And ps...Clemson is still alot cheaper than many public schools.
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