Episode 83: Finding the Right College – Mission Impossible? with Jed Macosko, Professor of Physics at Wake Forest University and Research Director at Academic Influence
Originally from Minneapolis, Professor Jed Macosko has lived in Minsk, Princeton, Belfast, Tashkent, Chicago, Copenhagen, Moscow, Albuquerque, and Strasbourg. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science from MIT and earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley. After a postdoctoral research stint with Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Carlos J. Bustamante, he worked with Nobel laureate Kary Mullis at a start-up in Irvine, California than with Professor David Keller at the University of New Mexico. Currently, Jed is a professor of Physics at Wake Forest University. He continues his two decades of research on the mechanics of cells and molecular motors while teaching undergraduates the basics of big data and virtual reality. His lab has received millions of dollars in outside funding, and he is a contributing author of several books. His work has been cited thousands of times, and his parents have been developed in the biotech sector. One of his most fulfilling intellectual projects so far has been at AcademicInfluence.com where he serves as Research Director and Chief Public Liaison.
Why is college ranking relevant in the modern era?
People like being able to quickly look at a list and see the rank of the school they are applying to or got admissions to. That is the beauty of a ranking. It is so simple, you just look for the schools that you are interested in and see where they sit on the list. People use them to make decisions more than ever before! The role of the rankings is to give parents and students an easy way to know if they are getting a good value for the huge amount of money and time they are spending on education.
Direct marketing to students
It was in the 1990s that schools started direct marketing to students. They would have letters with the student’s name printed on the envelope or glossy brochures. Some are even personalized to the individual student with their name on them. This would entice the upcoming college freshmen because most 16 or 17-year-old kids do not get much snail mail, especially when it is professionally done. They would apply even though they have no business applying to the school. It is because the schools that were sending those mails had a vested interest in getting as many applicants as possible. AN example of this comes from the University of Chicago which use to have an uncommon application. They broke it down and went with a common application. The students did not want it and the alumni did not want it but in order to rise up in the ranking, they had to do it because they were admitting almost over 40% of the applicants because originally students didn’t apply to the University of Chicago unless they were really interested in that university. Once they started the common application and after hiring a marketing person and sent out lots of mail to get the attention of the upcoming students who were about to graduate from high school. This was done to attract many students because one of those students could be a good candidate and you want to make sure that person applies.
Finding the right solution
Students are always trying to find the right college for them but there are so many places to choose from and they do not have an idea where to start. Even after getting accepted into multiple schools, they still do not know which one is right for them or which one has the best value. One solution is creating a way to input all of the student’s data like gender, ethnicity, SAT or ACT score, GPA, etc. Then the system will tell the student which colleges are the best for that student. There is another solution for people who do not really care about which school they should go to. This solution is probably never going to happen because as long as there are rankings and websites that provide ranking then people are going to want to distinguish themselves from their peers, by getting into schools that are “better” than their peers. They want validation so it can be really tricky to convince everybody in the United States that they do not need to care about which school they go to. Academic Influence realized that they needed more objectivity because the US news and world report rankings are based on surveys that go out to university presidents and university deans of admissions. These three people at each school give the information of the rankings that you find either in the newspaper or online. That’s a value that they assigned to the prestige that they think about when looking at a college. Academic Influence came up with an algorithm that looks at the influence of every person on the planet alive or dead, who has contributed something that is now in one of these huge big databases.
Contact Jed Macosko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-macosko-a037854
Learn more about Academic Influence: https://academicinfluence.com/
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