It must be a nice feeling to have everyone that you met in the first 17 years of your life call to congratulate you on being accepted to one of the nation's leading schools. Surely everyone one of you out there, as matriculated undergrads at, boy oh boy, Johns Hopkins University!, fielded several dozen such warm phone calls way back when as high school seniors. Oh no, you say? You mean that, save for your guidance counselor, no one even knew about the mere existence of Hopkins, let alone how to properly pronounce it? Sucks, doesn't it?
Quite sadly, Hopkins' reputation hasn't improved and shows no signs of doing so in the near future. U.S. News and World Report''s annual college and university rankings, the ultimate barometer of what the "hot" schools will be, is entirely overrated.
For starters, the omnipresent troika of Ivy League powerhouses (namely, Harvard, Princeton and Yale) claims the top spots in college rankings every single year. Our very own Hopkins took a mad plummet from the number seven spot just two short years ago down to its current number 16 spot, which it shares with Brown.
Brown. The school where it is possible to graduate by taking almost all pass/fail classes! Can you imagine the sea of elated faces, positively brimming with gratitude, if we could take Physics and Orgo like that? And besides, how can we trust U.S. News if their ratings fluctuate so drastically in such a short period of time?
Let's face it. We face a lose-lose situation here at JHU. With grades that are significantly deflated, not only does our morale take a significant nosedive, but it also hurts our chances of getting into those top-notch grad schools. The New York Times recently wrote that the percentage of As doled out by Harvard professors has not only been on the rise in recent years, but is actually close to 60 percent (if memory serves me correctly). They write that professors at Ha-vahd are concerned that students will see them as hard graders if they are any stricter with their grading policies. Finally, the secret comes out as to what makes Harvard a gem - the professors actually care about the students there!
This lose-lose situation also shows up in aspects related to the admissions process. Because Hopkins is not very well known, fewer people apply. As such, its selectivity rating drops, which in turn causes fewer of those top notch applicants to apply in the first place. How can we reverse this trend? For starters, it would help if Hopkins more actively recruited pre-frosh, which would not only result in an increase in applications (and hence, a surge in the selectivity rankings) but also get the word out on the street that hey, Johns Hopkins University exists!
Who knows how long it will be until Hopkins once again rises to the pinnacle of the college rankings? But then again, we all know how superficial the rankings are.
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