Sitting for a dozen hours on airplanes yesterday and the day before allowed me to read, with some care, among other things, the November 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly, their first annual issue on “College Admissions.” Overall, the articles on this subject are extremely informative; I can’t recall better articles on these subjects by journalists. Anyone with children facing college admissions in the next few years will benefit from this issue.

The most attention, alas, has gone to their “top 50 schools” based on selectivity, calculated on the basis of admit rate (1/3rd), SAT (1/3rd) and percentage of students in the top 10% of their high school class (1/3rd). Although the ranking got a lot of attention, leave it to other journalists to fail to read the “fine print,” for as the accompanying article makes clear: “Such a rating seems to provide clarity. But the clarity is an illusion.” In other words, the accompanying article debunks the ranking.

To be sure, it’s odd that the author also says the top 50 list “reveals a few surprises…but only a few.” I’d say half the list is fairly ridiculous. Consider the most-remarked upon: Chicago at 39th. Chicago’s SAT scores place it with the top 10 for selectivity; what kills it is the “admit rate.” But admit rates are a function of your applicant pool, and all kinds of factors affect your applicant pool some of which may be inversely correlated with educational quality (e.g., Chicago is perceived as “hard” and “nerdy,” so all the horny valedictorian boys apply elsewhere, etc.). Conversely, that the US Air Force Academy, the US Coast Guard Academy, and the US Naval Academy appear in the top 50 is entirely a function of their low admit rates; but the academic credentials of their students are markedly inferior. Yet there’s high demand for spots at these places among a large pool of students who aren’t especially competitive by academic criteria. And so on.

So skip their “top 50 list” (or look at the component data, and forget the ranking). But read the articles. They’re a genuine service.

(Those who read this issue will learn, among other things, that one thing the SAT is not is an IQ test, as some appear to think. The SAT has only one legitimate, and confirmed, use, namely, as a preditor of freshman-year performance in college.)