Dane Masters

If you’re a high school junior or senior, you might be wondering how much of a difference going to a top ranked college really makes. Should you put in the extra time and effort to maintain a higher GPA so you’ll be able to get into an elite school, or can you afford to back off a bit and enjoy what’s supposed to be the best years of your life? After all, as long as you get a degree from somewhere, you’ll be set. Right?

Despite this sort of thinking, most graduates fail to get good jobs with enticing salaries. Why is this so? It is because most well-known companies prefer to have as their employees, graduates from the Universities of Northwestern or Pennsylvania or Harvard. Graduates from mediocre colleges or unknown schools only rank second on their lists. So, the college or school does matter. The more elite, the better! Newspaper articles that claim, for example, MBA graduates drawing salaries of up to $100,000 a year, do not mention these facts. Hence, it is advisable that youngsters wishing to have a bright future work extra hard to get admission into a well-reputed school or college.

Now, various sources rank schools in varied ways. A youngster planning his/her future would be well advised to check them out thoroughly before deciding to aim for any one of them. Additionally, there is competition among the colleges themselves; so their rankings keep changing year after year. The reasons for these changes could be myriad–the teaching faculty is not up to the mark, the college lacks funds to carry on further activities or the academic courses offered are too few to attract many students. Sometimes, the ranking order changes for reasons that are not so important to the general public, but for the fact that they do not suit a certain system in ranking. Thus, the explanations for rank order changes that are displayed by the source explanations should be perused in depth, so that there is better understanding of how these rankings were arrived at and the factors causing these changes.

Many students ask whether it’s better to go to a top ranked college that’s higher in overall ratings or that’s higher in the particular subject area that they wish to study. For example, Yale might have the highest cumulative rating out of all schools in a given year, but MIT might have the highest rating for engineering programs. If you’re fairly certain that you want to be an engineer, then by all means, you should go to the top ranked college in that discipline. But if you think there’s a chance you might change your major halfway through your sophomore year, then going to a school that scores well in cumulative ratings would be the better choice.

Where can you find a current list of top ranked colleges? Well, you probably already know that a national magazine devotes an entire issue to this subject, so that would be a good place to start. Beyond that, there are several other sources you can check, including books, websites, and annual school guides.

If the idea is to have a comfortable lifestyle in the future, then the time to work is during the high school years. A little effort and sacrifice will ensure that the coming years provide huge benefits.