Moe’s B2B World

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.

There is a difference between a college or school that is ranked overall to be the topmost and a college/school that is considered the best in a particular discipline of study. We can take the example of Yale University and MIT to illustrate this. Yale may stand out as the topmost college overall, but MIT stands out as the best institute where engineering courses are considered. Then a student wishing to go in for that discipline should definitely opt for MIT instead of Yale. In the case where a student might change course midway, it is better to opt for the college which has topped the list in general rankings.

A national magazine lists out all the schools and colleges in their ranking order. Every year, a whole issue is devoted to this cause. A student can also look at the annual school guides or books or the World Web. The rankings should be the most recent ones.

Yes, diligence is required during the high school years for admission into a high-ranked college. But if one has an eye on a bright future, then the effort will be well worth it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Education.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.