August, 2004- As students return to class, college guidebooks return to bookstore shelves, and each manual promises to give readers the inside scoop, the definitive description, or, in the case of U.S. News & World Report, an ordered list of the best colleges. Most college administrators take a dim view of the rankings, but many consumers purchase the ratings and use them in the college-search process. The presidents of some of America's leading liberal arts colleges offer their own opinions about college rankings.
William G. Durden
President of Dickinson College
(717) 245-1322
durden@dickinson.edu
Every year U.S. News spends significant resources to analyze its ranking data, believing it to be a valid, scientific process. And every year students and parents rush out to buy the issue, believing that the information is accurate and objective. But how can it be accurate when 25 percent of the total score is based on a subjective academic reputation survey of administrators? Are any of us so well versed in the programs at our peer institutions that we are qualified to objectively rate them? No. Consequently, ratings get based on inherited reputation, biases developed over the years and last year's rankings. If the rankings are here to stay, parents and students should insist that the non-objective measure of academic reputation be eliminated. At best, it double counts for student behavior objectively measured by selectivity, SAT scores and graduation rates. At worst, it misleads parents and students who are paying tuition for perceived value.
Colin S. Diver
President of Reed College
(503) 777-7762
wendy.shattuck@reed.edu
Since 1995, Reed College has declined to participate in the U.S. News college rankings. It has done so for two primary reasons. First, rankings create powerful incentives to distort institutional behavior, manipulate data and diminish valuable differences among institutions. The evidence, as noted in research presented by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Monthly and others, indicates that the U.S. News ranking system has had precisely these impacts. Second, rankings reinforce a view of education as strictly instrumental to extrinsic goals, such as acquisition of prestige or wealth, that is antithetical to Reed’s philosophy — and, indeed, to the ideal that all liberal arts institutions hold dear — that higher education should produce intrinsic rewards, such as liberation, creative fulfillment and self-realization.
Reed does make public extensive information and data about the college, in order to help applicants make informed choices about the college. But it does not knowingly cooperate with, and thereby implicitly endorse, rankings.
Ronald R. Thomas
President of The University of Puget Sound
(253) 879-3202
president@ups.edu
God is in the details, and so is the devil. The value of rankings like the U.S. News “best colleges” is that each component used to “rate” a college is informative: the student/faculty ratio, for example, correlates well with excellent educational environments. But how important is it compared to, say, the reputation of the college in a poll of presidents? Here comes the devil. U.S. News weighs reputation 25 times more important than student/faculty ratio in making its rankings. The conclusion? The best colleges in U.S. News are the colleges with the best reputations, and the colleges with the best reputations are the ones that U.S. News ranks the best. The good news in this devilish cycle is that most prospective students don’t pay much attention to the rankings; what is (and should be) important to them is how well the college’s individual facts fit their individual educational needs.
Christopher B. Nelson
President of St. John’s College, Annapolis and Santa Fe
(410) 626-2510
Christopher.Nelson@sjca.edu
St. John’s College declines to participate in the U.S. News survey because we object to a process that attempts to measure effectiveness in the classroom in the same way a sports magazine ranks professional baseball teams in the pre-season.
Rankings perpetuate a false impression that a good education can be numerically quantified, and they encourage colleges to aspire to higher rankings rather than a better plan of education. A college’s distinctiveness is lost in this system. For some students, the mission, mode of teaching, and character of the “lower-tier” colleges make them a far superior choice than “superstars.”
Rankings assume that the value of an education can be quantified. How can the quality of conversation between a student and faculty member be quantified? What numbers reveal the discoveries students make in class, or reflect their maturation in thinking and written expression? Measuring the quality of an education requires judgment. These rankings involve too much counting and too little judgment.
Joan Hinde Stewart
President of Hamilton College
(315) 859-4105
jstewart@hamilton.edu
With the flexibility and range of choice it allows, the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Our colleges are public and private, two-year and four-year, large and small, rural and urban. Some are historically black, religiously affiliated or focused on the liberal arts. There is a place for everyone who wants a college education. With the implication that institutions of such diversity can be formulaically compared and ordered, rankings do a disservice to the richness and complexity of American higher education and a disservice to the 17- and 18-year-olds who are making one of the first really difficult decisions of their lives.
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