How Jesuit Schools Rank

I love Boston College!

After much consideration and discerment 🙂 , I wish to propose a Jesuit NCAA Division 1 Christmas Holiday Basketball Tournament that would field the top 8 teams in both the Men’s & Women’s Divisions. Proceeds would go to a worthy charity to be decided amongst the colleges and universities.
With an 8 team field, each representitive team would play 3 games, with winners advancing to the final, and losing teams continuing to play in a conolation bracket. The #1 ranked team would be seeded to play the #8 ranked team; #2 would play #7; #3 wouldplay #6 and #4 would play #5.
The teams chosen could be from the last The Collegiate Basketball News Men’s Rating Percentage Index (RPI) College Basketball Ratings at the end of the previous season, or a mutually agreed upon value system. The event can take place in the home town of the top ranked team each year.
If this system were in place today, the following Men’s team would be involved due to the latest RPI:
15. Georgetown
17. Xavier
33. Gonzaga
55. Marquette
80. Saint Louis
82. Fairfield
106. Creighton
122. Boston College
In the Women’s Divison, the teams participating would be:
9. Xavier
20. Georgetown
25. Gonzaga
50. Boston College
61. Marquette
67. Creighton
128. Saint Joseph’s
133. Detroit
Again, the proceeds would go to a charity that is mutually agreed upon.
This can work, it would be fun, it would get national media attention, and it would help a worthy cause.
Tim – Xavier ’76

i admire jesuit education. many of our leaders in any field of work are products of jesuit schools expecially ateneo university, loyola heights, quezon city. i have friends who come from this school and pries formators in the seminary whom i highly respect and admire. one of which is fr. danny huang, s.j.
hope by signing in to this blog, i may learn a lot from talented people who will be sharing their thoughts to the public. many thanks!

Aren’t surveys ranking hospitals and schools tiresome and ridiculous at this point? The most famous come from U.S. News and World Reports and Forbes. These rankings are highly political and capitalist in nature and provide only a means to snatch the growing pool of college-age applicants. But underlying these polls is another trend at work: a neoliberal approach to qualifying institutions by quantifying them with statistics to indicate whether they are successful or not. Don’t get me wrong. I am not against data driven information. Some practices are worth tracking. I recently read an interesting article on tracking best practices to handle cystic fibrosis and the good that comes from a patient tracking his or her breathing, mucous, and bacteria. But when it comes to tracking institutions, particularly colleges and hospitals, we should be very wary of polls.
The data collection from this poll is comical indeed. The author of the recent Forbes rankings, David Ewalt, who usually reports on beer drinking and beer brewing, recently took a stab at collecting data from ranked 600 U.S. colleges for Forbes . By pouring, oh, no, sorry, wrong context, poring over the data collected from silly websites such as ratemyprofessor.com, Ewalt demonstrated specious collection methods. The success of graduates depended on how much money they made or whether students continued with further education (more money for schools). But are these criteria how we judge success? I judge success differently. I see success as those who volunteer to work for the common good, to assist the poor and volunteer a year in inner cities or developing countries, and those who speak the truth at whatever the cost. Obviously, success depends on Forbes’ values. This survey also has little respect for the role religion plays in the life of students. No religious school made the top 20. Wouldn’t that be an added benefit to one’s education? Developing a religious identity has been shown to help people develop a sense of happiness in life.
I have attended three Jesuit schools. I graduated from St. Joseph’s University (the survey mistakenly identified it as a college, which was changed in the 70s). I also attended Fordham University and Boston College. Each of these places offered me different experiences and certainly assisted me in life, academically and professionally. Personally, I would rank these schools differently than Forbes ranked them. I believe that I am a better candidate to rank these three schools. And two schools missing, St. Peter’s College and Spring Hill College do a hell of a lot more than many of those who outranked them.
Still these rankings aren’t meaningless to parents and prospective students. One parent recently shared with me that parents of Catholic school students have been withdrawing their children from diocesan and faith-based schools because the top 20 schools discriminate against Catholic school students. By transferring their sons and daughters into the suburban schools, they have found better acceptance rates into those top colleges. And this is what worries me most: that Americans have been sacrificing their own values to listen to a beer critic who looks at ratemyprofessor.com and uses Forbes’ values to rank schools. That really gets my goat. Instead, I would like to create a better way for us to rank our schools based on shared values of Catholic parents and students. Is it disturbing that a Jesuit school failed to rank in the top 20? No. Maybe we can see it as a badge of honor. No Catholic school ranked in the top 20. In fact, no religious school ranked in the top 20. This reveals much more about Forbes than it would care to admit.
What should all of this mean for us? Perhaps we need to remember our values and forget Forbes’ values. Thank God they are very different. “For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” 1 Tim 6:7-10