Rankings

In a previous blog post about the Forbes rankings, I explained why I think understanding the methodology of a ranking is the key to determining if and how a particular ranking is helpful in your own college search.  Since US News is the granddaddy of the college rankings (now in their 26^th year), I’m always interested in how they change their methodology each year.

Yes, US News changes their methodology each year.  Why?  Well, according to them, it is because they are ever striving to make the rankings better.  I’m a little more cynical and believe they do it so that the rankings actually change a bit from year to year.  It is a hard to get people to buy an annual ranking publication if the rankings stay the same from year to year.  Why buy the 2011 edition if it has the same list as the 2007 edition?  (If you want proof that these tweaks in methodology do result in variances in the rankings from year to year, check out this chart that compares colleges' US News rankings from 1983-2007.)

Regardless of why US News changes its ranking methodology each year, they do.  So do this year’s changes make the US News rankings more or less helpful?  I’m sorry to say they make them less helpful and below I’ve explained why.  Just to make this more fun to read (as well as more interesting to write), I’ve imagined a point-counterpoint debate between US News and myself about each of the changes in methodology.  The US News quotes come straight from the horse’s mouth.  They can all be found within US News own description of the methodology.   I’ve taken the liberty of following my own rebuttals with explanations so you understand my thinking.

 

Change #1:  US News has renamed its categories for schools.

US News says, “To make the rankings more understandable and to reduce confusion, for the 2011 Best Colleges we changed many of the ranking category names.”

Alison says:  You failed, US News.  Your category system wasn’t a particularly good one to begin with, but now it is just a hot mess.

***

Before US News decided to change things, they ranked schools within 4 categories based on the degrees conferred by the institution:

1. Universities:  confers bachelors’, masters’ and doctorate degrees
2. Universities-Masters:  confers bachelors ’and masters’ degrees
3. Liberal Arts Colleges:  confers bachelors’ degrees with more than 50% in liberal arts & science majors
4. Baccalaureate Colleges:  confers bachelors’ degrees with less than 50% in liberal arts & science majors

The problem with these categories isn’t one of nomenclature, although US News claims it is.  The problem is that these categories don’t mirror the way students and families think about their college choices.  Students and families think in terms of selectivity.  Just stop and ask your average 11^th grade student or parent of an 11^th grade student: “What kinds of colleges are you considering?”  Do they say, “Well, I’m only considering Ph.D. conferring institutions.”  No, of course not.  They say, “Well I think I’m a pretty good candidate, so I’m shooting for the most selective colleges, places like Harvard and Williams.”  In the US News system, Harvard and Williams are in different categories and can’t be compared to each other, while Harvard and Wright State University are in the same category and can be compared to each other.  Come on.  Not a very helpful category system for real people.  I can say I have never had anyone ask me to compare Harvard and Wright State.  They simply aren't the same kind of institution.

To solve the supposed problem with the nomenclature, US News has renamed the categories, but not changed which schools are in them.  Can anyone say lipstick on a pig?  Worse still, the new names are actually misleading.  Universities-Masters become Regional Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges become Regional Colleges, while Liberal Arts Colleges become National Liberal Arts colleges.  Supposedly the “Regional” moniker reflects that the colleges and universities within these categories “tend to draw heavily from surrounding states.” Really?  Because I’m pretty sure that all the military academies draw from a national pool of students, but the Air Force and Coast Guard academies are labeled as “Regional Colleges” while Westpoint and Annapolis are considered “National Liberal Arts Colleges."

Change #2:  US News has precisely ranked the top 75% of schools in each category, instead of just the top 50%.

US News says:  “In response to a strong interest from readers in knowing precisely where all schools on their list stand, we've opted to display the rank of the top 75 percent of schools in each category, up from 50 percent. This top ranked group will be called the First Tier. The schools in the bottom 25 percent of each group are listed alphabetically as the Second Tier; which was previously called the 4th Tier.”

Alison says:  Be humbler, US News.  You can't possibly believe that you have the ability to distinguish between school #80 and school #81.  Just give us tiers and let us quibble about who is #1, #48, #325.

***

I happen to have been a fan of the US News tier system of rankings because I think they actually tell you something meaningful. In the tier system, schools were grouped by quartiles:  Tier 1 (top 25%), Tier 2 (26-50%), Tier 3 (51-75%), Tier 4 (bottom 25%).  I personally think that this is about as precise as you can be in a rankings system:  ask someone who knows colleges to separate them into the best, the above average, the below average, and the worst and those groupings won’t differ much from person to person or from criteria to criteria.  But ask for precise rankings and you see wide divergences because in order to be that precise, you have to start splitting hairs and deciding which hairs are more important.

US News thinks they have the ability to be precise.  They say that “the data are complete enough to numerically rank more schools given our robust methodology. The quality of the data we collect has improved over the years, so that it is now rich enough to rank more schools numerically.” I challenge that.  Lots of their data is suspect (see more below about reputational surveys and the new graduation rate measure) and the weights they assign to various data are not all that defensible (should reputation be more important that retention and graduation rates or quality and contact with faculty?).

Beyond that, their regular changes in methodology ensure that the rankings move from year to year, so how meaningful can a precise ranking be?  Far more meaningful is that a school consistently shows up in a particular tier.  For example, Brown has been as high as 7 among the national universities (1985) and as low as 17 (1992, 2003, 2004), but has always been in the top 25.  Obviously Brown is consistently in the top tier.  Do you really need to know more than that, and could you really prove to me that Brown is really 7 instead of 11 or 15 or 17?  I don't think you could and I don't think US News can either.  Besides, when you are doing a college search, a tier is enough to give you some basic guidelines.  Then you move on to understanding the nuances that really distinguish colleges and give each college a personality as distinct as a fingerprint.

Change #3:  Graduation Rate Performance (a comparative measure of predicted vs. actual graduation rates) has been given more weight in the ranking.

US News says:   “Graduation rate performance is more heavily weighted. This measure now accounts for 7.5 percent of the final score (compared to 5 percent previously) for National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges. This variable—the difference between a school's actual graduation rate and the one predicted by U.S. News based on the students' test scores and institutional resources—has been well received by many higher education researchers because it's a measure of educational outcomes and also rewards schools for graduating at-risk students, many of whom are receiving federal Pell grants. This means that schools can benefit in the Best Colleges rankings by enrolling and then graduating more of these at-risk students.”

Alison says:  Pay attention to your customers' needs, US News.  You don't belong in the middle of educational debates about how to get more at-risk students enrolled at college.  You are providing a service to students and families who are using your rankings in the college search.  They do care about the outcomes, so give them the best data available about that, not some cooked up prediction you make.  Satisfy them, rather than pandering to critics in higher education in an effort to rehabilitate your own reputation within the higher education community.

***

I have always been skeptical of this so-called “graduate rate performance” measure.  It compares US News calculated predictions to actual college outcomes.  Why do we care about a prediction when we have the outcome?  Predictions are only valuable when you can’t know the outcome, but still need to make a decision.  Once you know the outcome, you should and do use that information in your decision making.  So if you are concerned about a college’s graduation rate (and everyone should be), then you consult their actual graduation rate, not the US News prediction of its graduation rate.

Interestingly, US News reveals why it even uses this measure and it isn’t to help their customers.  Instead, it is a “make nice” gesture to the higher education community who bemoan how the US News rankings (and others like them) discourage schools from all sorts of behaviors that serve loftier goals in higher education, including enrolling more at risk students.  US News is a commercial enterprise and the needs of its customers should come first.

Worse, I think that US News has sacrified its customers' needs for nothing but a token gesture.  Supposedly by including this measure, US News compensates for how its other measures penalize schools for enrolling at-risk students.  But it doesn’t.  This measure accounts for 7.5%; the measures that are negatively affected by enrollment of at-risk students (freshman retention, graduation rates, student selectivity) account for 35%.  7.5% hardly offsets 35% -- you do the math.

Instead of this "make nice" gesture, I wish US News had beefed up its data on college outcomes.  What about adding the percentage of students who graduate in 4 years (not just 6)?  What about adding the percentage of graduates who are gainfully employed or enrolled in graduate school within 6 months?  All that data is readily available, verfiable and helpful.

Change #4:  US News has included the results from a survey of pubic high school counselors in the calculation of a school’s reputation AND published it as a separate ranking.

US News says: For the first time, the opinions of high school counselors—a font of firsthand information about the schools their graduates attend—are factored into the ranking calculations for National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges…  [We surveyed] 1,787 counselors at public high schools from nearly every state plus the District of Columbia that appeared in the 2010 U.S. News Best High Schools rankings… The counselors' response rate was 21 percent.

Alison says:  Get with it, US News.  It is already easy enough to challenge the validity of your rankings because of the inordinate weight given to reputational surveys.  Now you compound the problem by adding in the results of a survey that had a bad sample set and a pathetic response rate.  Hardly first-rate data.  In fact, it appears that your data amounts to the opinions of 375 people.  Not very impressive and certainly not worthy of being published as a separate ranking.

***

Now, US News will get no argument from me that college counselors are a font of wisdom – after all, I am both a college counselor and I'm certainly a font of wisdom.  And if US News is going to persist in using “reputation” as a fundamental criterion for ranking schools (reputation counts for 22.5-25% of a school’s ranking), I suppose college counselors are a pretty good group to survey.  But this survey and its data hardly represent the collective wisdom of college counselors.  First, why would US News limit itself to counselors from public schools that it ranked in another ranking?  No idea, but it is hardly a valid sample set.  What about private school counselors, a lot of whom specialize in college counseling, and what about independent college counselors like myself?  We are easy to identify through professional associations, so it really puzzles me why US News couldn't go to the trouble of selecting a valid sample set.  The only theories I can formulate don't make US News look good, so since they are nothing but theories, I won't offer them.

Second, the response rate was pathetic.  If you combine the limited sample set surveyed with the low response rate, you discover that 375 public school counselors had inordinate power this year.  Really I don't care who they are -- the opinions of the smartest 375 people in the world shouldn't comprise 7.5% of a school's ranking.  One interesting side note/back story here.  There were emails that flew between counselors within professional associations about whether the counselors who did get the survey were going to boycott it.  Many voiced their belief that rankings are more harmful than helpful and indicated they would boycott.  I suspect the response rate reflects this.

Bottom Line?

US News says:  Better than ever.  (Okay that's my summary, but I don't think they would argue.)

Alison says:  Worse on all counts.

Comments or Questions?

Anyone want to defend US News’ changes?  Anyone learn something they didn’t know?  Anyone want to offer a different point of view on the importance of methodology?  We’re interested.  Please post!

Alison Cooper Chisolm is a former admissions officer at three selective universities and used to compile all the institutional data that makes these rankings possible.  She submitted her first response to US News back in the dark ages -- 1991.  At Ivey Consulting, she now heads our college admissions consulting practice and provides one-on-one coaching to students and families about all aspects of the college admissions process.  A core component of that coaching is working with a student to compile his or her "right fit" college list -- a college list tailored to that student's particular interests, talents, and desires.

Forbes has just released its annual ranking of America’s Best Colleges for 2010 (online at www.forbes.com/colleges and in hard copy in the August 30, 2010 issue of Forbes now on newstands).  I admit that I got it hot off the presses and spent way too much time online today playing around with the interactive tools.  Of course, I am a college counseling professional and a bit of a data nerd.  So I love college rankings of all kinds and I feel like I can make good use of them.  But here’s my warning to all you prospective applicants out there:  you’ve got to read the fine print and do some ranking of your own if you are going to compile a list of colleges that are right for you.

What’s the fine print?  The methodology and the data sets used to compile the rankings.  All the rankings publish them, so read them and think critically about them.  You can get the description of the Forbes methodology and data online by clicking here.

What does the fine print tell me about the Forbes list of so-called “Best Colleges?”

In terms of basic methodology, I’m intrigued by and generally agree that four of the criteria they use to compile their rankings are important to consider:  student satisfaction, postgraduate success, student debt, 4 year graduation rate.  But I’m baffled by the fifth criterion they use:  what are they thinking by including national competitive awards given to students and making it almost 1/10^th of the weighted score given to a college?  That just seems wacky and irrelevant to me.

In terms of data, I think Forbes falls down on the job here.  The Student Satisfaction data is particularly suspect because of the reliance on data from RateMyProfessors.com and MyPlan.com.  This data is a completely uncontrolled sample set and will be skewed by the differing participation rates at the different colleges.   For a college with a low participation rate, a few disgruntled students active on one of these sites could ruin a college’s ranking.  The Postgraduate Success data is also flawed.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Forbes has considered data relevant only to one type of success – namely business/corporate success.  In the Forbes ranking, success is measured by your pay grade, whether you bothered to fill out a Who’s Who listing, and if you have risen to the level of corporate officer.  Come on.  Success is much broader than that.  At a bare minimum, I think Forbes would bother to include the some data that measures whether a college has done its job of preparing you to get a job or get into graduate or professional school.  Data about the number of graduates who are employed following graduation and/or enrolled in graduate or professional degree programs is readily available and could have been incorporated.

My bottom line review of the Forbes rankings?  Pretty good methodology, pretty bad data, so not very helpful or illuminating in really revealing the "best colleges."  But if one of your primary criteria for a "best college" is the cost of education, including typical student debt, then you can get some good comparative data here.  The hard copy includes this information on the chart listing the rankings and it is available online only through the interactive tool called “Screener” found as a button about two-thirds of the way down the middle column on the landing page for the rankings article.

Comments?

What do you think? Post your thoughts on the Forbes ranking!

Alison Cooper Chisolm is a former admissions officer at three selective universities and used to compile all the institutional data that makes these rankings possible!  At Ivey Consulting, she now heads our college admissions consulting practice and provides one-on-one coaching to students and families about all aspects of the college admissions process.  A core component of that coaching is working with a student to compile his or her "right fit" college list -- a college list tailored to that student's particular interests, talents, and desires.

The Financial Times has just released its latest rankings of European Business Schools. Its top 10:

1. HEC Paris
2. London Business School
3. INSEAD
4. IE Business School
5. IMD
6. ESCP-EAP European School of Management
7. IESE Business School
8. EM Lyon
9. Rotterdam School of Management/Erasmus
10. Vierick Leuven Gent Management School

Some oddities and observations in the accompanying articles (here and here):

• Eric Weber, the associate dean at IESE in Barcelona, "says that so far the school is not worried about job placements, but he acknowledges that student expectations may not be met." [I'm thinking maybe they should be worried about job placements, particularly when over half of their graduates in recent years have pursued finance careers.]

• Eric Cornuel, director general and chief executive of the European Foundation for Management Development based in Brussels, "believes that European schools are less exposed and less sensitive to the economic downturn than US schools" because "European schools have some degree of state support and few if any endowments, and will not be exposed financially to the same degree" as American business schools. [What's left unsaid is that publicly funded European schools have far less money to throw around than their privately funded counterparts in the United States, and their failure to raise money privately has arguably compromised their quality compared to American institutions.]

• The shorter MBA track at European business schools (one year, rather than two in the US) is usually considered an upside for many applicants, but in a down economy like this one, it might be better to ride out the downturn in a 2-year program than have to graduate at a low point. The opportunity costs of attending a 2-year program just got a whole lot lower, although the cost of an additional year can be an issue when credit is this tight.

The blogosphere has come down hard on Michigan Law School's recently announced Wolverine Scholars Program. I'm excited when any law school innovates, so I chatted with Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss to find out what's what. Our Q&A below:

 

1. Could you explain what the Wolverine Scholars Program is and who is eligible for it.

Our new Wolverine Scholars Program will invite applications from University of Michigan undergraduates who have at least completed their junior year and at most are scheduled to graduate in Winter or Spring 2009 (that is, rising and graduating seniors) who have cumulative GPAs of 3.80 or higher; review will take place during the summer, and will substitute for the usual LSAT requirement an intensive review of the undergraduate curriculum. It is a non-binding program; if an applicant is admitted, he or she is free to apply to other law schools—but since we are not requiring the LSAT of the applicants, it is of course our hope that we will attract people for whom Michigan is their first choice, and who will choose to enroll here rather than going through the hassle of applying to other law schools (including the necessity of taking the LSAT).

2. You've come under a lot of fire in the blogosphere for the program. For example, MoneyLaw, Above the Law, TaxProf, and Prof. Henderson (of Indiana) have basically accused you of a transparent attempt to game the rankings. Prof. Henderson has gone so far as to say that "the only rational explanation is that Michigan seeks a rankings payoff." How do you respond to that? If gaming the rankings wasn't your only motivation, or your main motivation, what was your reasoning behind the program?

Well, I’d have to actually say the opposite is the case—that is, a desire to manipulate the rankings would NOT have been a rational motivation for this program. Consider, if that were the purpose, whether it would make sense for a public institution whose every admission decision in recent years has been subject to FOIA requests from multiple organizations to announce something so publicly! Further, since we anticipate being able to matriculate at most 5 to 10 Wolverine Scholars—a fractional sliver of our typical entering class of 360—this couldn't be a successful route for manipulating the rankings, even if we were so inclined. That number of people couldn't possibly affect our LSAT median, and is quite unlikely to affect the GPA median by even 1/100th, let alone materially.

Instead, we were motivated by a desire to strengthen our intra-institutional ties with the undergrad community, which is our single biggest feeder and at which, nonetheless, there is a persistent, unshakeable rumor that it is impossible to be admitted to Michigan Law if one attended Michigan for undergrad. As a result, we lose a lot of people who don’t apply, thinking it’s just not worth their time—and we therefore we miss getting applications from many students who would be great additions to our class. Relatedly, we needed to think creatively about ways to increase the applications we receive from our single biggest source of in-state residents (given that we are a public institution with a goal of matriculating 20% of the class as in-state residents). Bottom-line, we had well-considered policy objectives here, and our policy decisions have never been dictated by blind obeisance to rankings.

3. If you are willing to admit X students a year without an LSAT score, why require an LSAT score from the rest of the class? Why not just do away with it completely?

We have found the LSAT to be an excellent tool for predicting first-year grades, and believe that it is an exceptionally well-designed standardized test. That does not mean, however, that there may not be limited, special circumstances where reliance is not necessary, or not appropriate. We have a LOT of data on Michigan undergrads who enroll here at the law school, and the data lead us to be very confident that we can learn what we need to about ability to succeed here from a rigorous examination of the curriculum of those students who have proven themselves able to achieve at a very high level. We just don't have that body of data for other schools.

4. Some other law schools -- including top law schools like Georgetown and Northwestern -- have admissions programs that do not require an LSAT score. Any idea why people are piling on Michigan and not on those other schools?

Michigan certainly does get people's attention when it comes to admissions issues! But I suppose it's also timing; the programs that I know of are not of recent vintage, and I do think that attention to standardized tests and to rankings has really amped up in the last couple of years.

5. Colleges and business schools innovate constantly with their admissions requirements. For example, a number of top colleges make the SAT optional, while Harvard Business School has the 2+2 program. Why do you think law schools are generally so resistant to experimenting?

I confess I have found it rather surprising that in a climate where many organizations are examining the appropriate use of standardized tests, one very small outside-the-box step by one law school should attract such apparent shocked skepticism. Law schools (and the law as a field, more generally) tend to be very conservative in their approach to any proposed changes, however, and so I suppose the reaction was not completely unpredictable. I’ve had a lot of supportive emails, though, from prelaw advisors and admissions consultants, so I’m hoping that once the initial excitement winds down, the people who really matter to us—i.e., our applicants—will see that we're trying to be critically thinking about what we're doing. That can only be a good thing from their perspective.

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

One of the really interesting things about Gen Y is how dramatically its preferences are driving changes in everything from workplace policies to luxury goods marketing to real estate development.

Last week, I headed over to the Boston Society of Architects to hear a talk by a woman named Persis Rickes about ways in which architects who design for universities need to be thinking about what Gen Y wants out of its academic and living spaces.

The talk was in many ways a primer on Gen Y for an audience that didn’t know much about this generation. Dr. Rickes did a great job pulling together some of the basic information about Gen Y (much of it culled, with attribution, from the seminal work Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss). I was most interested in the following points from the talk (and for clarity, I'll break out the parts that are my own editorializing):

Many buildings will be around for 50 or 100 years -- how do you design a building that may already be outdated 10 years from now?

Just ten years ago, university architects were putting jacks in every wall on the assumption that everyone would want to be able to plug in anywhere for internet access. Of course, today everyone expects wifi, and all that wiring isn't getting used. Wired? That's so last millennium. Trying to predict what people will want out of their spaces for the next half century is perhaps a quixotic exercise, but architects are trying to be as forward-thinking as possible.

What about the ideal architecture for Gen Y? Part of that depends on their aspirations, which brings us to:

Gen Y is civic minded, socially conscious, dedicated to justice and the environment, and involved in a variety of causes.

Gen Yers expect to learn in real-life scenarios to prepare for their careers after college, and colleges need to be building the equivalent of “moot court” classrooms for students to get hands-on experience that approximates what they’ll face out in the real world. Students expect opportunities for real-world internships and service work. Schools need to offer “blended spaces” for teaching and learning a mix of academic and practical skills.

Anna says: This desire flies in the face of the mission of a liberal arts education, which values teaching you “how to think” over teaching specialized or pre-professional skills. But even at staunch liberal arts colleges, students are demanding hands-on experience through their extracurricular activities and internships, even if they don’t receive academic credit for them. Schools will need to think about what kinds of spaces they’re offering for hands-on training and learning, whether that happens as part of the curriculum or as an extracurricular activity.

I also wonder what it means for business schools that an entire generation is obsessed with social or environmental justice jobs (that's not the best short-hand and doesn't really cover the whole range, but I'll use it for these purposes). I personally think it would be impossible to do good without the private sector, but I suspect that business schools have a marketing problem on their hands with this cohort, and it explains the big uptick in social entrepreneurship and corporate citizenship offerings at business schools.

It also explains why so many college students are flocking to law school. I often talk to people who think they can litigate away the world's big problems -- poverty, hunger, international conflict, and war -- and they have every expectation that they’ll do so while making six figures or more in the process and living a somewhat glamorous life. (Brangelina and Bono have created some unreasonable expectations.) The social justice jobs are definitely out there, but many people I hear from struggle with the paychecks associated with those jobs. Sometimes people come out of school with unrealistic expectations about what kinds of salaries they can command in a certain job or with a certain diploma hanging on the wall, and those expectations (reasonable and unreasonable) are a big subject of this whole blog more generally.

Because realistic expectations are so important, it is absolutely necessary for college students to observe different jobs first-hand, whether it's through an internship or some other avenue.

Gen Y is obsessed with achievement and is really, really stressed out.

Gen Y is under a lot of pressure to achieve and excel. They like conformity and rules, because conformity and rules relieve some of that pressure. They have an overachiever culture. They know that they are being measured. They want constant feedback.

That means schools will need to offer a lot of tutoring and testing help, as well as spaces where those services can be accessed 24/7. Students also want a lot of very nice extracurricular spaces to blow off some of that steam, and there’s also increased demand for spirituality and meditation spaces. They also need spaces to be overachievers and show off their work, for example through state-of-the art performance halls.

Anna says: This has absolutely been my experience counseling Gen Yers for the last eight or so years. They are so worried about making the slightest mistake, because they feel that the stakes are so high, and I continue to grapple with the best ways to deal with their high anxiety levels.

This is a generation for whom mental health treatment and mental health prescription drugs are fairly routine, and I wonder how people who work with, manage, counsel, teach, and mentor Gen Y can best prepare themselves to work with these high anxiety levels. It's not specifically what most of us are trained to do, but maybe we need to be. From time to time we hear awful stories about college students going over the edge in one form or another, and I'm intrigued by Cornell's efforts to train the university community to deal with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

More generally, these are the most risk-averse people I’ve ever encountered, and they fear doing things on their own (more on that below in the teamwork discussion). The kinds of questions people run by me every day reflect that fear. (“The application instructions say to put my name in a header. Could you please look at my header and sign off on it before I submit?”) Part of that phenomenon I also attribute to their parents (more on that below too). Part of our challenge as mentors for Gen Y is to help them develop their confidence to make decisions on their own when they are feeling that immense pressure to spread the risk. It's an interesting contrast to the strong confidence they feel in other ways (the next topic).

Gen Yers all think they’re special, don’t leave their parents behind, and want everything tailored to them and at their disposal 24/7.

Gen Y requires constant praise, much of it gratuitous, and feels entitled to it. Their parents have fed this sense of entitlement by making their kids feel as if they are the center of the universe, and the parents’ lives do indeed revolve around their kids. Gen Yers are sheltered and overprotected. They expect everyone else to jump at their say-so and are supremely confident -- some would say over-confident -- in their abilities.

For space planning, this means that Gen Y students expect 24/7 access to people and spaces and services, and schools will have to provide the technology to enable that kind of access. They expect private bathrooms and showers, single dorm rooms and apartments, and customized everything (such as cafeterias with 24/7 access to vegan food or whatever the case may be). They expect top-of-the-line health and wellness centers, academic support centers, and larger admissions offices (because they bring their whole families along).

Anna says: Yep - I’ve already said plenty on this subject (here and here -- note that the posting you're reading now will show up at the top of both links, so you'll have to scroll down for the older postings). The brouhaha over this recent voicemail is the perfect example. (Gen Y high school student finds it completely appropriate to call the COO of his county school system -- at home -- to complain that classes haven’t been canceled after three inches of snowfall; COO’s wife leaves an angry voicemail telling the kid to “get over it”; kid then posts the COO’s email and phone numbers on facebook.)

I'm also reminded of something an admissions officer once said to me: "With Gen Y's parents, their kid is always gifted or learning disabled. Those are the only two options." It's no accident that their children take that self-perception with them to college and into the workplace.

Gen Yers are always part of a group.

As much as they all want their own dorm rooms and bathrooms, they spend all their time together, travel in packs, work together, and study together. They therefore need lots of informal spaces that let them learn and study in groups.

Anna says: I've noticed that they also like to work on their applications in groups. Their college and grad school essays get passed around all over God's creation for feedback from parents, friends, neighbors, you name it. That's why so many essays read as if they were written by committee... because they were written by committee, and that rarely makes for a good essay, because the applicant's voice gets completely lost in the shuffle.

On an unrelated note: I've observed that Gen Yers also like to date in packs. In a way, it's not even a date at all, at least as someone Gen X or older would understand it.

 

Gen Yers multitask.

They need blended spaces for work and play because they’re never doing just one or the other.

Anna says: Definitely true. Whether they’re surfing the internet while in class, writing a paper at Starbucks, or instant messaging every five seconds while studying for an exam, this is an "ADD" generation that can’t focus on one thing for any length of time -- not necessarily because they literally have ADD (although some of them do, and that can compound the challenge), but because competing technology is always pulling them away from the task at hand. In that sense, young or old, we're all ADD'ers now, certainly in the workplace, but Gen Y takes multitasking to new extremes.

I wonder whether it’s a good idea for schools to accommodate this need to multitask. I know professors don’t like it when their students are buying shoes online during their lectures, and there has been some research showing that the human brain just doesn't do things all that well when it's multitasking (a lesson for us all, myself included). Just because Gen Y (or anyone, for that matter) wants something, does that mean it’s always good to give it to them?

 

Gen Yers are respectful of authority.

I’m not sure how respect for authority plays itself out in architecture and space planning, but the architects in the room found this characteristic very interesting.

Anna says: I disagree strongly with this characterization of Gen Y. I think the confusion on this point comes from a Boomer baseline of what it means to defy or disrespect authority. I suspect that in Boomer minds, if college students aren't lighting fires, smashing windows, and threatening to burn down Yale like in the Boomers' college days, then Gen Y must be pretty respectful of authority. And it's true that Gen Y, because of that risk-aversion I discussed above, doesn't like to rock the boat the way Boomers seemed to take a certain kind of pride in doing. But I would argue that Gen Y's admirable refusal to destroy things doesn't mean that they are respectful of authority.

Aside from that voicemail example I linked to above, I'll also point out the following:

I get an earful all day long from employers when they hear that I write about Gen Y. I hear about Gen Yers marching into the workplace thinking they can do the CEO’s job better than the CEO, and sometimes even saying so out loud. They expect management responsibility their first day out of college. I’ve even heard one employer tell me about a recent college grad who, on being given certain instructions, rolled her eyes, threw her pen on the table, and said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.” That loud thud you hear is the sound of jaws dropping at workplaces across the country.

I routinely have applicants tell me, in effect, “Yes, I know you were an admissions officer, but here’s why I think you’re wrong.” I get some level of push-back just about every day. I do want people to disagree with me, because I know I'm not omniscient and often the input is helpful. Still, I'm curious that there is so much push-back when it's my expertise and experience they're seeking out in the first place, and I get that only from Gen Y, and the younger set of Gen Y in particular. It's interesting.

I hear this kind of feedback from professors as well, who are also surprised by the way in which their students communicate with them, and the ways in they make demands. For example, I have heard from several professors who are shocked to receive what they consider shamelessly casual emails demanding (not asking for -- demanding) special considerations, extensions, etc. These professors are also, in some cases, shocked to be referred to as "hey john" or whatever their first names happen to be.

Over the years, all this leads me to conclude that this is not a generation that as a group respects authority, experience, age, or a higher position on the org chart, although individual differences certainly occur (as with any of these generalizations).

On this subject, one of my Gen Y colleagues pointed out the following to me -- great food for thought:

While Gen Yers may not have respect for the trappings of authority (emailing profs with first names, office etiquette, etc.), I think they have tremendous respect for the value of authority. That is, they know what it means to be ranked X, or in position Y, or to be offered a job at a particular bank or office. They also know what it means to "know" someone in authority -- how to pull strings, ask for favors, and use connections to authority figures to advance their careers, percentages (of admission?), etc.

I recognize that this is a wholly different "respect for authority" than that term usually involves, but it it still a type of respect. It's a respect for the power of authority -- for the access, advancement, and "step skipping" that authority can grant you (i.e. if you "know" someone you can avoid some of the bottom rungs of the ladder).

So in that sense, I don't think Gen Y is entirely disrespectful of authority. I think the concept of "authority" has changed; instead of authority being representative of "the man," it's about "the connection," the "hookup," or the favor. Why apply through HR if your father's partner can put your resume on the desk of an executive? The recognition of the executive's power is a certain "respect" for his authority. Not the same type of respect we're talking about, but a respect nonetheless.

There were a lot of other interesting nuggets at this talk, but I’ll conclude by asking the following:

Anna Also Says: This stuff doesn’t come cheap. Who's paying for all of this?

I know applicants who decide where to go to college because one school has a cool rock climbing wall or that other school’s dormitories have seen better days or that school has the best cafeteria.

Somewhere in the application frenzy, the big picture seems sometimes to get lost. This country club approach to college doesn’t come cheap, and when Gen Y complains about its staggering student loans, I have to wonder who they think is financing those Olympic size swimming pools, state of the art performance halls, 24/7 access to freshly prepared vegan menus, spa-like wellness centers, and so on. That lifestyle is very expensive, and college students are paying for it with a staggering amount of borrowed money, plus interest.

It makes me wonder what some people's priorities are, what they're looking for in their college experience. Sounds to me as if some of them want a 4, 5, 6-year stay at Canyon Ranch rather than the best education they can find. I don't knock any of those wonderful features -- I know I would have loved them when I was in college too -- but I see some people focusing a lot on the immediate benefits and not on the long-term costs.

It also becomes very clear to me why many college students find it such a shock to join the real world after college, when they no longer have student loans to fund such a posh lifestyle. No wonder most of this age group moves back in with mom and dad for some period after school. This goes back to my theme of expectations and figuring out what's realistic and what isn't.

I heard one university representative at the talk say that her college had to offer this lavish lifestyle because that’s what they have to do to compete for applicants. Having been an admissions officer, I understand the pressures schools face to attract applicants. I do wonder, though, about the college administrators and trustees who are perhaps allowing their educational missions to be compromised too much, the parents who are letting their kids pick a college based on a rock climbing wall or a cafeteria menu, and the magazine rankings that reward schools for increasing their expenditures per student. Something is out of whack.

17-year-olds are 17-year olds, and I don't fault them if they are still figuring out what their priorities are, how compound interest works, and what kind of life they want to be living five or ten or twenty years down the road. And it’s our job, as the ones with a bit more life experience, to help them think about those things (even if they're not always inclined to listen to us).

Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country, mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:

You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment. That's why it's so important to think about your career options coming out of various schools. If you have to pay $1,000 a month in after-tax dollars to cover your student loans, you'd better be sure you will be able to find work at a well-paying law firm after you graduate. If you graduate $100,000 in the hole, don't assume for as second you can run off and work for a public-interest legal clinic. And until you've paid off your debt, or unless you attend a law school with a generous loan-forgiveness program..., you won't have the freedom to go sit on a beach and stare at your belly button while you contemplate what you really want to do with your life. Think of it this way: Lots of people rush off to law school on the assumption that a law degree gives them freedom, but you don't really have freedom when you've mortgaged the next ten -- or thirty -- years of your life. (Law school graduates who join big firms don't have much trouble repaying their loans on the ten-year payment plan, but most law school graduates don't end up joining big firms, and many end up extending their loan-repayment schedules to thirty years.)

...

The top fifteen [law schools] also offer a level of job security that other law schools can't. People at the top schools who find themselves in the middle of the pack or even below still do just fine on the job market, even at the highest levels of the job market. The further down the food chain you go, though, the less of a safety net you have. Once you get to the second tier and below, you need to be at or near the top of your class to end up at a top firm in your region or with a top judge in your region (the national market is a much more difficult proposition), and people in the bottom half of the class often face grim hiring prospects.

Law school applicants fight me on this all the time, but I stick to my guns. Most ABA-approved law schools are not worth the investment. It's painful for people to hear, and most insist on learning this truth the hard way.

Now comes an article in today's Wall Street Journal, front page and above-the-fold no less, making the same argument:

A law degree isn't necessarily a license to print money these days. For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.

The article gives some harrowing examples (all bullets in this posting are verbatim):

• The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.
• A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, [Israel Meth] earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia University.
• Sue Clark... this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs," she says.
• Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying work since.
• Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice. He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me $500.

Are there some law schools that are honest about their graduates' job prospects? Refreshingly, yes:

• Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools."
• The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006 graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract employees nine months after graduation. Schools "should be sharing more information than they are now," says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for career services who put the changes in place. "Most people graduating from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."

More typical are the dodgy (and some would argue fraudulent) recruiting practices of many law schools. As the article points out, "students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences." Examples:

• Tulane University... reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes. On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn't include what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.
• A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the school reports that 41% of last year's graduates work for firms of more than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits, Joan King, director of the school's career center, concedes. Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract attorneys is "minimal" but declined to give a number.

Declined to give a number? When annual tuition for full-time students at Brooklyn hovers around $40,000 before expenses (which tack on another $20,000)? That says it all. If these were for-profit companies trying to raise funds from clueless investors and publishing questionable data in their prospectuses, the SEC would be all over them. Universities get away with a lot, so buyer beware.

And note that the US News rankings do not provide information you can necessarily rely on. Their data is self-reported by the schools, and schools have huge incentives to fudge the numbers.

Finally, note that tuition and expenses are about the same to attend Brooklyn Law School as to attend Columbia Law School, even though graduates face wildly different job and income prospects during law school and afterwards. It is simply not rational to pay Columbia-level tuition to attend Brooklyn Law School. That's just one example, but you get my point.

Udate: here.

And another article in which I discuss what I perceive as one of the downsides of conventional college rankings: that they focus on and try to measure the quality of incoming freshmen (SAT scores etc.) rather than the quality of education they receive at their respective colleges or the value added by those colleges. Basically, it's an input vs. output argument. I'm not the first or only person to make it (the Spellings Commission has been grappling with the output side of the equation for a while now), but it's something to keep in mind as you use rankings to help you think about different schools, whether at the college or the graduate school level.

A friend of the Ivey Files sends me this news story and asks whether MIT should drop in the rankings for admitting someone that stupid. I'll let you be the judge. Guess some people didn't learn from Adult Swim's little bomb scare here in Boston back in February. If my grandmother were around to read this story, she'd no doubt whip out one of her favorite sayings: "She's brilliant, but not very bright."

This will make for one doozie of a disclosure addendum if Ms. MIT (evocatively named Star Simpson) ever applies to grad school.

The Boston Globe reports that Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore plan to opt out of the US News college rankings. The departure of these heavy-hitters should have some impact, but I suspect that until Harvard, Yale, and Princeton boycott the rankings, the rankings will continue to lumber along.

I wonder if US News will just start making up data for the departing schools, as it did with Sarah Lawrence College? Also interesting: BusinessWeek uses regression analysis to "fill in" historical data for business schools that it hasn't surveyed before in its MBA rankings.

On a related note: I've heard from several people who attended this year's Admitted Students Weekend at Stanford Law School that Dean Kramer repeatedly flaunted the school's US News rankings in his sales pitches. Ironic, given Kramer's caterwauling to the NYT about the lunacy of the rankings methodology. Guess he thinks he can have it both ways.