Episode 66: Spotlight Effect

Date of Publication/发布日期

February 18, 2022

Author/发布者

Curtis Westbay

Language/语言

English

Files & media

Volume

Volume 2 2021-2022

Have you ever thought about how publication rankings are calculated? I’ve found that, in almost a decade as a college counselor, many parents and students fixate on a college’s rank. It is treated as shorthand for some abstracted concept of quality. Here’s what the US News and World Report US National Universities ranking actually is:

On its face, this might seem like a good approach, but of course, there are always caveats.

For example, spending per student includes the graduate and undergraduate population at a school, even if there is a massive gulf between the average amount spent per student of these two groups. Especially at a place like Harvard (itself treated as a shorthand for quality), the fact that graduate students outnumber undergraduate students by a margin of nearly four to one (about 18,000 graduate students to a little over 5,000 undergraduates) doesn’t inspire confidence that this methodology is particularly thoughtful.

The peer assessment survey is conducted of higher education administrators, like presidents and deans of admission. This survey accounts for 20% of the ranking. Should the opinions of higher education administrators really outweigh a more objective and crucial measure of academic quality like student-faculty ratio, let alone by a factor of 20 to one?

I could go on, but I’ll cut to the chase and tell you how I feel:

• Insofar as rankings are thought to be a measure of academic quality by the general public, this is a true triumph of marketing, and in my opinion, little else. Ranking publications know that people associate certain schools with excellence. If their rankings didn’t maintain that status quo, they would probably be disregarded. It appears that it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement (and an extremely lucrative one) for places like US News to set up their metrical analyses of American universities in such a way that there isn’t too much movement from one year to the next... even if the components of the ranking methodology seem to have little connection to the experience that students will have. In short, I don’t think you can tell much about what life will be like for a student at a college based on its ranking, especially when it’s made like the one above.
• The rich literally stay richer. A college’s ability to pay professors, the proportion of alumni who gives money, and the amount of academic expenditure per student account for 20% of the ranking above, with no meaningful promise that those resources will produce a better experience for undergraduate students. This fact also heavily favors private universities, where salary figures aren’t set and maintained by a state entity. This is part of the reason why UC-Berkeley can be the mecca of heavy metal chemistry, a place where European Nobel laureates sought asylum after World War 2, and discover 10 elements (one named after the college: Berkelium!), but somehow can’t crack the top 20 of this list, year after year. Personally, I find it impossible to believe that the academic quality of a place like UC-Berkeley is notably worse than literally any school in the US, maybe the world. To boot, it’s all about who you ask: Forbes ranked UC-Berkeley #1 among American colleges this year.
• Many parents will rebut these arguments when I get on a soapbox like this by saying that, if employers in China care about the rank of a student’s alma mater, then we should too. I’m sympathetic to this argument, to an extent: I suppose that more opportunities are better than fewer. But this argument has its limits— where I can’t get on board with this sentiment is that money isn’t happiness. That’s cliché to even say, but it’s just true. Maybe one of our students achieves the impossible, gets into their highly-ranked dream school, has a plethora of employment opportunities open to them, gets that job at a company with a household name... and then they’re miserable, not only on the job, but at every step along the way. There is so much pressure on our students to chase credentials and accolades, as, to be honest, the most highly selective universities hardly take notice of applicants without these feathers in their caps. But the credentials and accolades aren’t happiness, necessarily. The acceptance of and degree from a prestigious university might not produce happiness either. The dream job may not bring happiness either. If you’re chasing an achievement and, in the pursuit of it, it makes you deeply unhappy, maybe it’s time to reconsider your goal.
• Our students compare themselves against their peers all the time. I can’t count the times when I’ve seen students get back a graded assignment and the first thing— the very first thing— they do is compare the score with their classmates. They don’t stop to look at the things they missed and ask why they missed those things or even take a moment to be happy that their hard work has paid off until they know whether or not they’re the best. And to be honest, sometimes I feel guilty that I play a role in this sense of competition.
• In psychology, there’s a concept called “spotlight effect” that adolescents are particularly susceptible to. Spotlight effect happens to students in early to late adolescence as they try to figure out who they are and how they fit in, socially. When students feel the spotlight effect, they are convinced that everyone is scrutinizing their every move, all the time. It makes students feel self-conscious when attention is called to them (and our teachers should be mindful of this). It makes them wonder how they are perceived by their classmates. And, ultimately, it puts a ton of pressure on those parts of themselves that they value. If a student wants to be thought of as intelligent (and this is a highly-valued quality in our community— a school like ours tends to draw students who care about academics, and of this we are proud), then they feel irrationally ashamed when they don’t meet their self-imposed standards for intelligence. Of course, students don’t arrive at these standards on their own nor in a vacuum. Parents, educators, and peers shape our students’ values and ideas of success. And so, after rambling on for so long, I will finally get to my point: