The 155-year-old college, which had been founded by abolitionists, had imploded. The once proud prominent liberal arts college, was pretty much out of money, out of students (around 300 were enrolled),
and out of time.
Critiques published in The Chronicle of Higher Education
suggested that the school’s demise would hardly have been a surprise
to those with any familiarity with the school. An Antioch graduate of
the 1960s wrote this scathing observation in the Chronicle: “By the
early 1990s, its once-packed library was nearly deserted. The campus
itself was beyond seedy. Some buildings were crumbling, others were
vandalized, and many walls were spray painted with edgy graffiti. Beer
bottles and cigarette butts littered the grounds.... The library’s collection
was spare and dated, rich with pre-1970 books and serials, poor
on materials thereafter.” And esthetics and a lousy library collection
were hardly the school’s only problems.
Why dwell on the problems of a troubled school that will obviously
not be on any teenager’s list of must-see colleges in the years to come?
(Since the announcement, the trustees and the alumni have been
working to find ways to keep the historic college open.) Antioch can
serve as a warning to any students or parents, who are tempted to rely
too heavily on rankings. Here’s why: Despite Antioch’s severe problems,
those ubiquitous college guides were still praising Antioch.
The popular Fiske Guide to Colleges, 2008 edition, for instance,
devoted two and a half pages to Antioch in its tome that included more
than “300 of the country’s best and most interesting colleges and universities.”
U.S. News & World Report America’s Best Colleges, 2007
edition, singled out Antioch for its high proportion of classes that contained
under 20 students. It also listed Antioch in its compilation of 13
schools with “outstanding” internship programs.
The most over-the-top critique about Antioch came from a very
popular book entitled Colleges That Change Lives, 40 Schools That
Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges by Loren Pope, a former
education editor at The New York Times. Here’s what the book,
which I happen to greatly admire, had to say about the school in its
2006 edition: “Antioch is in a class by itself. There is no college or university
in the country that makes a more profound difference in a
young person’s life, or that creates more effective adults. None of the
Ivies, big or small, can match Antioch’s ability to produce outstanding
thinkers and doers.”
How could all these college experts have been so wrong about Antioch?
The easy answer is that any book that tries to sum up what a particular
college or university can offer by using a numerical ranking or
a two-page write-up can’t possibly provide a meaningful analysis of a
school.
Economics explains one reason why evaluations of colleges are often
superficial. Imagine spending enough time on a campus to be able
to draw a realistic picture of a school’s strengths and weaknesses. Now
multiply that amount of time by hundreds of schools. It would require
a huge commitment of man hours—and money—to compile a meaningful
analysis of hundreds of schools in a guide that’s cranked out
annually.
That explains why a lot of the analysis is done at computer terminals
far from campus quadrangles. Fiske Guide to Colleges, for example,
obtains a great deal of background from the schools through
questionnaires that it mails school administrators. Fiske also asks
these administrators to distribute a different set of questionnaires to a
cross section of students. What it sounds like to me is that institutions
do a lot of self-grading. In other words, it doesn’t sound too tough.
Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report relies too heavily on school
reputations (deserved or undeserved) rather than trying to measure
whether institutions are doing a good job of educating students.
It’s fine to use these guides as a starting point. Through these
books you may discover schools you didn’t even know existed. You can
also use them to discover what range of grade point averages and SAT
or ACT scores is typically required to be admitted to a particular
school. The guides can also share valuable financial aid information.
What you shouldn’t do is rely heavily on these books to determine
which schools you explore and which you snub. Some students believe
that if a school didn’t get a nod in the Fiske book or Princeton Review’s
The Best 366 Colleges, there must be something wrong with it. U.S.
News & World Report induces even more snob appeal. Some kids
don’t want to step foot on any campus that doesn’t crack the lists of the
top 10 liberal art colleges and national universities.
At the same time, you shouldn’t make decisions based on the marketing
material that colleges generate. The promotional assault, which
often starts after your child has taken the PSAT test (baby SAT) as
early as his or her sophomore year, isn’t just relegated to the booklets,
postcards, and letters that clog mailboxes. The deft marketing is just
as visible on college Web sites.
Finding and paying for the right academic fit is too important to
leave to superficial snapshots of colleges and universities. There is a better
alternative. In the next few chapters, you’ll learn ways to evaluate
schools and academic departments based on what is important to you.
Action Plan
• Don’t rely on any book as the ultimate source of information on a college.
• Do your own research on colleges.
Source:The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price
