Campaigning at Columbia and College Rankings

​Last Monday, we hit up Columbia’s new student orientation with some more guerilla marketing.

I recently came across an NPR piece on Obama’s new policies that would implement a more comprehensive set of factors in college-rating. The new system would affect funding amounts for schools that receive federal aid.  Based on this info, the U.S. Department of Education would hand out a score. The performance-driven program attempts to incentivize higher quality instruction; the higher a school’s rating, the more federal aid a student at that school would receive. The article questions whether the data required under Obama’s evaluation (e.g., graduation rates and employability) can be accurately measured. (To that I say it can’t be worse than the methods of notorious college rankings publisher U.S. World & News.) This drastic shift in education oversight only shows me that kids and (more likely) their parents will be even more fired up about attending the best schools from an early age…

Our best push with flyering was at the end of the day when we caught the mass of self-congratulatory parents and students streaming out from the tents post-Dean’s welcome speech (I don’t actually know what he/she said because I always tune these out.).