A head-and-shoulders illustration of Petey. He is smiling and has light skin, beard stubble, and is wearing a blue baseball cap that has the MIT logo on it.

We’re number 1 — but for whom? by Chris Peterson SM '13

the global ranking vs the local fit

Yesterday, U.S. News and World Report designated MIT as the top-ranked school in its annual rankings of the nation’s best universities for the first time since the ranking system was launched in 1983. A number of people wrote me to express their congratulations, or commented favorably on reddit or College Confidential. I appreciate their well-wishes, but I am puzzled as to why.
Many blogs by MIT Admissions staff past and present have expressed their skepticism of the practical utility and social role of these rankings on the college admissions process (see e.g. Ben’s classic “Many Ways To Define ‘The Best‘”), or problematized aggregate statistics as a method for in assessing the quality of a class (see e.g. me here). If you’ve attended an information session that I’ve given over the last two decades, you’ve heard me close by saying that of all the ways to choose which college to attend, going by ranking qua ranking is one of the worst.⁠01 Others include: prestige, what stickers look best on the back of the minivan, which ones would most impress your classmates, etc. In general, seeking validation or affirmation from your college choices will not help the part of you that needs the validation/affirmation; it is too hungry to be satiated by such meager fare. But since not everyone gets to hear me say that in person, I’m going to quickly explain why on the blogs.
My basic argument⁠02 If you want an expanded argument, you can see this <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-order-of-things">essay</a> by Malcolm Gladwell in <em>The New Yorker</em> all the way back in 2011. I hadn’t ever read it until doing some research for this blog post, but it is a more developed version of this same line of thinking. is this: the construct of a universal, ordinal ranking of colleges and universities is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading to the individual question of finding the right fit for you,⁠03 Putting aside for a moment the negative impacts of rankings on university administration generally and admissions specifically (see e.g. <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/517897">here</a>, <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227?utm_source">here</a>, <a href="https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/College-Rankings-as-an-Interorganizational-Dependency/9984283577302771">here</a>, and <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09006">here</a>, just to name a few). as an individual applicant, because it is necessarily blind to your individual needs and interests. Look at the criteria and rating methodology, and then ask yourself: do I, as a future college student, want to simply max all these sliders to figure out where I will be happy, fulfilled, and well-educated?
I think the answer for most people would be clearly no, because while some of these measures might capture reasonable metrics of a kind of quality, many of them are unrelated to the actual undergraduate experience, and they embed the USNWR’s editorial judgments about what is most important and why —  not yours.
Instead, I implore you to think about who you are as student and a human. Who do you want to be? Who do you want to be surrounded, inspired, shaped by? How do you like to learn? What motivates you —  and what demotivates you?
I don’t think MIT is the best university in the nation or the world. I don’t think that is a coherent thing that any university can be. I think MIT is the best university for particular students at a particular stage in their social and educational trajectory.
Who are those students?
A good first place to look is our list of what we look for (with expanded descriptions of what each means on that page), which presently includes:

  • Alignment with MIT’s mission

  • Collaborative and cooperative spirit

  • Initiative

  • Risk-taking

  • Hands-on creativity

  • Intensity, curiosity, and excitement

  • The ability to prioritize balance

  • The character of the MIT community

None of these are captured in these —  or any other —  rankings.

Additionally, as someone who has been a grad student + taught at MIT, the concrete mechanics of the education matter a lot too. Here are some things I’ve experienced or seen that are true of the MIT education that are not true of many universities:

  • We have no class rank or latin honors. There is no one gunning to be the valedictorian of MIT or have summa cum laude on their diploma.
  • We have a forgiving educational on-ramp. Your first semester is graded pass/no record (you either pass the class or there is no record you took it); the second semester is graded ABC/no record. There is a lot of time to ramp up to MIT without fear of failure.
  • No one declares a major until the end of their first year at the earliest, and it is easy to switch afterward.
  • The drop date —  the latest date you can drop a class without it appearing on your transcript —  is ~10 weeks into a 14 week semester. You have a lot of time to try something out of your comfort zone before you have to fully commit to the bit.
  • After the first year, there is no credit limit (how many courses you can take a semester), and it’s easy to register across departments and even for graduate classes. You shouldn’t make MIT harder than it needs to be, but you’re not going have an artificial ceiling placed on you either.

These are unusual features of our education. I love them and think they are part of what makes MIT students so dynamic, collaborative, and capable. They are not measured by any ranking. And while they make MIT a great fit for some students, they may make us a poor fit for others. Are you motivated by competition and the drive for a high class rank? Are you often paralyzed by the prospect of choice and need someone to make decisions for you you —  in how many classes to take, or how long to stay in them, or what major to choose? These would be good reasons not to come to MIT —  or at least to recognize that you will be challenged to change.

I once spent several hours on the last day of CPW talking to an adMIT who was choosing between MIT and another famous school. She described herself as someone who couldn’t make decisions on her own, who was always running herself into the ground on all of her commitments because she couldn’t say no, and who was relentlessly motivated by competition with other students. I advised her she would find MIT’s institutional design to work opposite to all of her tendencies. She chose to go elsewhere, and I think was happier for it. Other students have had the same situation and come to MIT specifically because they wanted to be in a different environment.

An institution will mold you inexorably in its image. Whether or not you are, in fact, the average of the five people you spend the most time with, it can be a useful thought experiment to make decisions as if this were true. And while you will ultimately end up becoming yourself, the person you become is indeterminate, contingent, and subject to change through factors related to the people you surround yourself by and the policies of a particular institution —  most of which, again, are not contained in any ranking methodology.

My best advice, to the extent I can give any, is to think a lot about what motivates and excites you. Think about the people you want to be surrounded and inspired by. Think about the environment that brings the best out of you —  or what you want to bring the best part of you. Because that which brings the best out of you is the best university for you —  regardless of ranking.

  1. Others include: prestige, what stickers look best on the back of the minivan, which ones would most impress your classmates, etc. In general, seeking validation or affirmation from your college choices will not help the part of you that needs the validation/affirmation; it is too hungry to be satiated by such meager fare.⁠ ↑
  2. If you want an expanded argument, you can see this essay by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker all the way back in 2011. I hadn’t ever read it until doing some research for this blog post, but it is a more developed version of this same line of thinking.⁠ ↑
  3. Putting aside for a moment the negative impacts of rankings on university administration generally and admissions specifically (see e.g. here, here, here, and here, just to name a few).⁠ ↑