I remember Tuesday, April 6, 2021, well. It was Ivy Day, an occasion when many Ivy League colleges and other selective universities release their admissions decisions, and certainly a day circled on the calendar for many bright high school students. It was also a day when, after opening three straight rejection letters from Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, I realized my dreams needed… a little restructuring.
“What if I’m worthless?” I jotted down in my journal. “What were the last four years for?” All those late nights spent in turmoil, every obsessive detail, crossed t’s and dotted i’s and now-meaningless accolades, striving for that perfect résumé. My fiery desire to be a Harvard man scorched through my extracurriculars, friends and my sense of worth, dealing damage that I’m only now starting to understand as I begin the process to replant who I am. So when that meticulously constructed house of cards fell, well, there didn’t seem to be anything except for darkness beneath.
For others, Ivy Day is a joyful culmination of everything they’ve worked for, but for every ecstatic, tearful reaction video posted, there are at least 19 unrecorded moments — jagged, tearful breaths; a quiet, unceremonious exhale for an opportunity lost. Regardless, no matter the outcome, our lives after the fact are never the same.
Starting in middle school, many of us felt the seismic pressure of getting into a prestigious university placed on our backs, culminating into a roaring earthquake by our senior years when the purpose of our entire lives up until that point seemed to revolve around getting into a top 10 college. And, every year, the chokehold those forces have on students only gets tighter; the theatrics, clamor and genuine — maybe unfounded — heartbreak only seem to increase.
How did we get here?
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Created in 1983 by Robert Morse, the U.S News and World Report college rankings quickly became the center of college admissions nebula over the four decades it’s been annually published. Everything regarding an institution’s prestige revolves around this list, affecting how students fundamentally think about college admissions. Even a slight one-rank improvement for a university leads to a 0.9 percent increase in applicants, a Harvard Business Review paper found. The word-of-mouth, grapevine prestige of a university now follows what the U.S. News rankings say instead of previously defining the rankings themselves, becoming so tantamount to how our colleges are perceived to the point that numerous colleges have made explicit efforts to increase their rankings number, from Baylor University offering incentives to their incoming freshman class to retake the SAT to increase the University’s average SAT scores to Northeastern’s focus on gaming the rankings in their core strategic plan, pushing them from a rank of 162 to 49 in 17 years. Additionally, there are numerous cases of misreporting school information for a rankings advantage, most infamously with Columbia University, whose dizzying descent from a rank of 2 to 18 was a result of being caught red-handed with distortion of class sizes, faculty statistics and spending on instruction.
The status of the U.S News rankings as the gravitational center of college admissions isn’t exactly justified, either; the goal of a comprehensive ranking of academic institutions in and of itself is a semantically meaningless endeavor. U.S. News uses indicators such as small class sizes, high student-to-faculty ratios, graduation metrics, school and student selectivity, and institutional spending on student and faculty to measure a university’s worth. This fails to capture the rich, kaleidoscopic nature of higher education in America — mostly because such a task is impossible under the current rankings system.
As a result of how metrics are weighted, smaller, well-endowed institutions that focus on selecting students with academic aptitude will be rewarded with a higher spot in the rankings. Essentially, the defining qualities of an Ivy League school are treated as being synonymous with academic excellence itself, according to the U.S. News college rankings, while schools with a differing set of core ideals are discarded. For example, schools like Penn State University that focus on varied admissions classes with socioeconomic diversity are naturally put at a disadvantage, since indicators like graduation rates are intrinsically tied to factors like family wealth instead of institutional quality. Penn State is punished because it admits underprivileged students and tries to give them a quality education instead of admitting high-achieving, wealthy students. And, when the pull of that list becomes too high, every college that wants to be prestigious (read: rise in the rankings) has no choice but to mold itself into a simulacrum of a private, selective university, even if the core identity of their campus is entirely different. To do anything else is to drop in the rankings, and to drop in the rankings is unfaceable.
Essentially, the U.S. News college rankings boil down the appeal of a university, those indescribable things that make a college campus deeply resonate with its students, into statistical qualities that it can measure and understand. The worth of an institution becomes not only judged on its own qualitative merits, but rather those of an arbitrary standard removed from that university’s best interests — unless that university just happens to be an Ivy League school or thrives to become like one. Those rankings numbers erase the beautiful idiosyncrasies of American higher education in favor of one quantitative model of academic excellence that isn’t even based in academic reality.
And it’s not just the universities themselves that falter and become filled with the weight of the U.S. News rankings. Those same rankings became so culturally distorted that they’ve immeasurably shifted our own academic proprioception: our self-worth and sense of achievement became tied to that number. Yes, I wanted to go to Harvard because of its rich tradition and exemplary academic environment, but mostly because it was number one. Our own sense of self, those things that make us so deeply memorable to people around us, then, is also stripped or downright ignored in favor of a model that the ranking of the college that you eventually attend as the apex definition of who you are as a person. We, then, become not only judged based on our own qualitative merits, but rather those of an arbitrary standard removed from our best interests with indicators like GPA and SAT scores, saying nothing about who we are as individuals. Ultimately, benefiting wealthy families that have the institutional regard to set up their children with private tutors and test preparation courses, leaving everyone else who can’t afford to keep up to rot. The U.S. News college rankings, in more ways than one, erases heterogeneity in favor of an easy-to-understand model that just happens to disproportionately benefit the wealthy. This splits the landscape of college admissions into one of wealth, rankings and prestige and another of merely trying to float on top of inflated costs and simply going to college in the first place.
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Regardless, the postmodern Ivy League institution isn’t really about the education it provides, but rather the brand it sells. An exemplary education can be achieved anywhere, especially if one’s volition is high, but to be branded with that mark of prestige and have that Ivy League education on your résumé and to your colleagues? That’s something only those schools can offer. In the same way as college rankings, it scrapes a complicated idea of the world under its hood — filled with legacy admits, a nepotistic Dean’s List and more wealth than one can imagine — in favor of a streamlined, numerical version of what society ought to be.
At its core, college rankings sell simplicity.
They sell a version of American society under which meritocracy runs supreme, and the best and brightest from any socioeconomic corner of the world can come to those elite institutions and be elevated into the lives that they deserve. They sell a number that is seemingly supreme, carrying the idea that the worth of those colleges always has been readily apparent, can be quantified and is easily delineated, that the worth of you has always been uncomplicated, and with your belonging at Harvard or Yale or Princeton or any prestigious university in the top 10, you are supreme. This is where the danger of that number lies.
All of us grapple with the messy, obfuscated legacy of greatness. The U.S. News rankings, at their very core, offer a simple and accessible definition of what greatness is, both for a university and for you. God, we so desire that simplicity when we were 17 or 18 trying to make a decision that held such a profound impact on the rest of our lives. When we were all first starting to have a sense of who we even were as individuals, of who we could be, of what this swirling, miasmatic world meant, that dazzling sublime that hits us straight on the chest, brings us down to our knees and robs us of any previous operational definition of how everything all worked. The center of the college admissions nebula isn’t really the U.S. News rankings. It’s our innate desire for simplicity. It’s our innate desire to be great.
And, well, it’s oxymoronic. The U.S. News rankings are a deeply comforting version of reality, but it’s untrue; the world, our colleges and its students can’t be delineated so easily, and we can actively see the harm that believing in this system causes, especially when Columbia-sized cracks start to form.
Now, I’m happy here at the University of Michigan. I think this campus offers such a rich emulsion of people and ideas, allowing all those discordant bits and pieces to come together into their own sort of postmodern harmony that becomes so, so resoundingly resonant to us. I love the quiet sanctity that the law library offers, locking eyes with a fleeting stranger on the Bursley-Baits bus and all of those little details that college rankings do not have the capacity to capture. And in those moments, I have found my worth as a human being: a fluctuating, hopelessly complicated version that lies beyond what language can describe, but one which I feel is more true. And those roots that I’ve planted extend much farther than any ivy vine.
Statement Columnist Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu.