re: New US News college ranking just dropped

1. One of the hardest things IMHO for high school kids to understand is these rankings do a generally poor job representing post-graduate outcomes. Yes, an engineering degree from MIT gives you a leg up vs an engineering degree from LSU (or just about anywhere else for that matter), but there’s practically zero difference in having a degree in a field like engineering or business from Washington University in St Louis (#8) vs any public SEC school. In actuality, no employer is going to look at resumes from two equally qualified entry level applicants and pick one solely because he went to UC Davis (#37) instead of University of Cincinnati (#151).

2. The #1 thing the elite private universities could do for this country is to expand enrollment. All of those schools have the endowments and (with the possible exception of MIT & Columbia) the land/facilities to double in size. Rice is doing the right thing, aiming to increase undergrad enrollment by 20% over 4 years. All the fancy schools should follow suit.

3. This somewhat pains me to say it, but, if you are a Texas high school student, it is really hard to pass on UT. Yes, you’ll need to finish in the top 6% of your class (and even that only guarantees admission to certain undergrad colleges), but UT is affordable ($12K in-state), generally highly-ranked (#38), and really highly-ranked in fields like engineering, computer science, and business (all top 10). UT is well-represented in a lot of industries, especially Tech. In my experience, UT is better-represented a in Tech than just about any other big public school. University of Illinois and Purdue are sneaky-good public schools for similar reasons.