what is currently the most underrated and the most overrated college in the country?

This is an easy one… All of them. You see, our perceptions of what are good schools are driven by many things, but almost not at all by the quality of teaching and learning that goes on at those schools. Take the USN&WR rankings… I don’t recall the exact percentage, but I believe 40% of the total rank is based on the “perceptions” of other college and university presidents! Still another significant percentage is based on the dollars received in grant money for research (mostly scientific stuff here). So those factors really provide little to no evidence that quality undergraduate education takes place at those institutions.

You could go by the distinguished careers of their graduates, but even that’s a flawed measure. We all know (hopefully we all know…) that opportunities in life are not equitably distributed. Some of us have opportunities that others do not, and thus we acheive, while they don’t (or vice versa). Sure, the average SAT at Harvard is high, but chase the histories of those students back in time and look at *why* their SAT is high. Did they have the best education? Did they go to private, prep schools? Did they just work their behinds off? What? Sure, each of those schools accepts students from varied backgrounds, but if you look at the average family income of students at those schools at the high end of the reputation scale, you’ll see a striking correlation with income.

Underrated Colleges:

This is more difficult. How would you determine this? If we **knew** of outstanding performance of a school, then wouldn’t it *not* be underrated? So maybe this is an impossibile discussion.

I will say that I think community colleges generally and trade schools are underrated as a group. Many community colleges do a great job teaching, and they certainly do an important community service. They provide for inexpensive education, transitions for people who didn’t perform as well as they could’ve in HS, and valuable educations on their own for a variety of jobs and pursuits in life.

Trade schools, in my opinion, are even more underrated. In the US, people have started to believe that everyone needs to or should go to college/university. This is misguided for so many reasons… First, if everyone did go to earn a four-year degree, then exactly who would you hire to fix your leaking plumbing? Anyway, trade schools teach people to make a living providing valuable services to the members of their community. We *all* hire them, and we *all* need them. More importantly, our collective community needs them. For example, I can’t have my own electricity generator (well, i could, but…), so you, me, the guy next door, and everyone in town needs the folks who were trained to work the electric lines. The same’s obviously true of all utilities… Anyway, I can’t recall who said it, but all honest work is noble, and all workers deserve respect for what they do. Trade schools provide us with those workers, and I think they’re horribly underrated.