| The rankings mattered to me when applying to schools because it seemed like a useful metric to judge the quality of education I would get, and the usability of that education. When you're making one of the biggest decisions of your life, rankings can help you know how good your choices are. Not saying rankings are correct... But for those applying, they likely appreciate having a ranking mechanism. It's one of the few objective measures of universities available. How do you know, otherwise, if this university that wants to charge you $40,000 per year is really going to deliver on their promise? You can't just go back to school again and start over. It's a life decision, so there is a desperate desire for the applying student to have an objective way of stack ranking the choices. (Disclosure: I attended MIT. And I basically just applied to the top 5 or 10 computer science universities -- again, using rankings. And hoped to get into one of those.) |