More on this in a Q&A format in the post right above.
It's worth understanding the relationships between the multiple statistics about a university,[1] and with its output - that is to say, life satisfaction. There are numbers for average early career salary, but precious little on satisfaction: Forbes, for example, uses a very dubious metric of percentage of alums donating to a university, and how much they donate on average. (Dubious, because this likely has to do with the institution's proactivity in soliciting donations, as much as with alumni gratitude.) There is almost nothing on overall life satisfaction - which is curious, because this is the main output we're concerned with when we apply, or send our kids, to universities - isn't it? What I could find, strongly suggests that the differences in life outcomes caused by universities are minimal, if any; the strongest is a ~10% premium in income at the most selective institutions. But the only reason to care about money is because we think it would make us happier - and if it's not, which is what the few numbers we have are showing, why are we bothering with this?
It's scary to buck trends, especially for parents, in a way that you worry might damage your kid's future. Here's what I'm telling you, parents: you're causing your kids definite harm with the current get-into-college rat-race, for benefits which are at best slight, and maybe - probably - are entirely illusory. That is to say, you may well be taking away a happy childhood for nothing. When you tell your kids not to cave to peer pressure, set an example for them to follow. If you're not brave for them, no one else will be. If you go all-out in college admissions madness from preschool on, you owe it to your kids to know why you're really putting them through this. For their sake, I hope it isn't just because you're trying to win status points or avoid judgment from your family or neighbors or coworkers.
The most important conclusion is for stressed out kids and their stressed out parents: you will be fine. You will get in somewhere, and you will get a good education, and have a good life, and it will be fine. The ranking numbers are often based on very arbitrary decisions, cardinal rankings are not good bases for statistics because they often imply gigantic differences, and the makeup of the individual students is far and away the most informative driver of choice of university. Kids: try to get into the best school you can for what you're interested in, but don't kill yourself to do it, and don't despair if it doesn't happen - because it really doesn't make much of a difference. Also consider where you want to live, and what kind of people you want to date and be friends with for life.
FOONOTES
[1] If you're interested in relationships between those statistics, they're below. I have to emphasize, again, for something that causes so much stress and consumes so much time, when we choose colleges, we really don't know what we're buying. There is amazingly little literature on outcomes, which suggests that whatever is driving the college admissions Olympics, it's not how much getting into good college benefits our lives. Even though that seems absurd, it's also obviously true.
For the relationships between SAT, acceptance, and endowment size, here's how it came out. SATs are more closely correlated with the other two, about equally with both in fact. Endowment per student correlates markedly less well with selectivity.
- SATs vs percent of applicants accepted: R^2 = 0.5896. The ones that are much more selective than their SATs would predict - the four military academies (which are obviously selecting on something besides SAT), followed by CUNY-Baruch and Babson College. The ones that benefit students - they are NOT as selective as SATs would predict - are Villanova, University of Maryland-College Park, and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
- Endowment per student vs SATs: R^2 = 0.5711. I even chose a logarithmic curve, since the SAT approaches but cannot pass 1600, but it didn't improve the goodness of fit.
- Endowment per student vs percent of applicants accepted: R^2 = 0.3388. The curve looked like endowment might have an increasingly marginal effect beyond $500,000/student, but even taking out the institutions above that or trying to fit exponentially or logarithmically didn't do much to the fit. The ones that are off-trend in a way that benefits students (lets higher amount of applicants in than their endowment would suggest) are Grinnell, Wellesley, University of Richmond, Texas Christian, and believe it or not Princeton. "Benefit" assumes that the endowment actually affects student experience.
[2] I had also been quite curious about the effect of nationally prominent athletic programs, especially football, on academic rankings. This is from personal experience, since I recall how the yield (% of accepted students actually matriculating) went up after Penn State's almost-number 1 1994 season. The Flutie Factor (cited in this paper by RT Baker, which was submitted to an academic institution but doesn't look like it's peer-reviewed) shows that the effect was known prior to that (the year after Doug Flutie won the Heisman, Boston College had a 25% increase in applications.) While there is very little literature about the effect of sports performance on academic ranking, this paper argues that in fact increasing football ranking does increase academic ranking.
