Nelson Bingham
Acting President of Earlham College
(765) 983-1211
prexy@earlham.edu
College officials are not "afraid" of college rankings. We are, however, somewhat suspicious. Accountability is not the problem -- we are held accountable all the time, by students and their parents, by alumni and other donors, by accrediting teams, and by our local communities. The issue, rather, is what the basis should be for such accountability. Should there be a single standardized dimension by which the diverse set of higher education institutions are compared irrespective of their distinctive missions and characters? Or is the most effective accountability that which tests a college against its own distinctive goals? In my own field, psychology, suspicion has grown concerning any unitary measure of human intelligence and there has been a move toward multiple intelligences as a means of understanding individual differences in competence. Among the reasons for suspicion about college rankings is that they so often preempt multiple intelligences for understanding an institution's competence.

J. Timothy Cloyd
President of Hendrix College
(501) 450-1351
cloyd@hendrix.edu
Parents and prospective students investing in a college education deserve an objective resource for evaluating colleges and universities.  Unfortunately, the current criteria used in most college ranking systems rely heavily on measurements of financial resources and entering student test scores, which do not guarantee an exceptional education.

Including more qualitative criteria, such as the number of students who study abroad or who conduct original research, would help ranking systems measure a college’s educational output or student achievement. Armed with such information, parents and prospective students could assess an institution’s ability to engage its students individually, which directly correlates into academic achievement. Hendrix stands ready to provide such data.

Rebecca Chopp
President of Colgate University
(315) 228-7452
cmelichar@mail.colgate.edu
Guidebooks and rankings can be useful tools when searching for a college, if used properly. An effective college search is an analysis of both fact and feel. Students need to be well-informed about a college’s profile and resources – which rankings can provide – but they also need to experience the campus and get a sense for the learning environment and culture, only possible through a campus visit.
 
Guides and rankings can be helpful in identifying colleges that might be a good fit, but students need to begin their search by considering their needs and aspirations. From there, it is up to them – with help from parents and guidance counselors – to explore several campuses and ask good questions. The college experience helps students shape their thinking, establish life skills and build relationships for years to come, and they should use every tool available to them in making the choice.

G. Andrew Rembert
Interim President of Washington & Jefferson College
(724) 223-6000
grembert@washjeff.edu
A number of prospective college students and their families start their college search by consulting the various sources of college rankings.  It's a place to start but not a place to finish.  Rankings are incomplete at best. They do not necessarily answer the most important question; i.e., what are prospective students really looking for in a college or university where they will spend some of their most important living and learning years?

Students should look at the reality, not just the rankings.  No ranking will guarantee that a student will be happy, comfortable, encouraged and challenged in positive ways.  Students should consider what positive attributes they will bring to an institution and what benefits they want to obtain at the institution they attend.  When they have found the best fit, they have found their number one school, no matter what the published rankings say.

John Roush
President of Centre College
(859) 238-5220
jroush@centre.edu
I have some reservations about the validity of ranking colleges and universities in general, and definite concerns about the specifics of how we currently go about rating institutions. Since their inception nearly 20 years ago, rankings have significantly been based on glittering endowments and sparkling reputations but not geared enough on measuring how well we’re producing more-engaged and better-educated young people. Certain ranking methodologies measure resources that enable institutions to deliver quality education, but they are seriously incomplete. The student experience should be a key part of any assessment. When this component is evaluated, we will see institutions asking more of their students and encouraging faculty members to make student learning and growth their top priority. The National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE), which switches the focus from institutional resources to student empowerment, measures how students spend their time. This new focus will best serve our students.

John Strassburger
President of Ursinus College
(610) 409-3000
jstrassburger@ursinus.edu
While the existing methods of pitting colleges against one another can be shallow, it is important to make an informed decision about where to obtain a challenging education. I suggest seeking out The National Survey of Student Engagement. It measures the level of academic challenge and the level of student engagement with learning. It asks students questions such as how the campus environment supports academic success, and how much interaction there is between students and faculty outside of class. The survey has also cited 20 institutions for exemplary educational practices, called DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices).
 
The national survey of students at 648 institutions does not release data to the public, but sends data to each participating school. Prospective students should ask each college to show this data.

The popular guidebooks may be easy and fun to use, but there should be no shortcuts when seeking a challenging education.

Norman Fainstein
President of Connecticut College
(860) 447-1911
nfain@conncoll.edu
Rankings can be valuable to prospective students, but they are narrow yardsticks for evaluating a college. Rankings and irreverent narratives cannot fully measure or accurately describe the educational experience. Connecticut College takes pride in such data as its student-faculty ratio and alumni giving percentage, which typically carry weight in rankings. But rankings cannot quantify the outstanding educational program we offer our students, the quality of our faculty or the strategic planning that ensures that they receive the best education possible. Prospective students must strive to learn if a particular college provides the environment, opportunities and programs that match their needs and goals. Those factors are all difficult to measure, and yet they are predictors of a student's success. Rankings indeed help prospective students make informed decisions, but those decisions must be augmented by information that reflects what actually happens in the intellectual and residential life of the college.

S. Georgia Nugent
President of Kenyon College
(740) 427-5778
britzj@kenyon.edu
As a new college president, I learned last year that I would be taxed with the responsibility of completing the academic reputation survey —called the ‘peer assessment’ -- from U.S. News & World Report.  Should College X receive a higher rating than College Y? Unless I’ve actually studied both institutions, been on both campuses, met students, graduates and faculty from both colleges, how could I possibly make that comparison?  I had assumed that this aspect of the survey was nothing more than an innocuous beauty contest.  I now realize how directly this exercise undermines our basic educational values. We expect our students to make reasoned judgments based on data appropriately analyzed, but U.S. News asks presidents for judgment based on no data, with no analytical rigor. I chose not to participate. I hope other presidents will make that same choice.

Joanne V. Creighton
President of Mount Holyoke College
(413) 538-2000
jcreight@mtholyoke.edu
I have been concerned about the U.S. News and similar rankings for many years. As I wrote for USA Today in 2001:

"U.S. News' numbers fail to add up.  An internal study commissioned by the magazine in 1997 found, according to The Washington Monthly, that 'the weights used to combine various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis.'  U.S. News focuses almost exclusively on input measures -- including institutional wealth, faculty salaries and acceptance rates -- and almost entirely ignores the key question in evaluating a college: how well it teaches its students.

"Not only should educational leaders refuse to give lip service to this specious and oversimplified labeling of our institutions, we should resist labeling our students with numbers, too.  There are insidious parallels between the bogus ranking of colleges and universities by U.S. News and the ranking of students by their SAT scores."

Philip A. Glotzbach
President of Skidmore College
(518) 580-5700
pglotzba@skidmore.edu
It’s true that America loves rankings -- the best Division 1 football teams, most livable cities, least crowded beaches – but college rankings are different for two important reasons:

First, there’s no consistent approach. Each publisher of a ranking devises a different set of rules and different methodology, so even the most dedicated consumer is comparing apples to oranges.

Second, higher education is a complex and variable enterprise. Success for a vocationally oriented institution is quite different from that of a liberal arts college. Measuring success is possible, but it can’t be done by looking just at test scores or student-faculty ratios. Yet that’s essentially what the rankings do.

Society has the right to demand accountability of colleges. And we need to be as critical of our own performance as we are of any social phenomenon that we investigate. But reducing complex and dynamic institutions with different goals and objectives to simplistic and inconsistent rankings is misleading, statistically spurious, and of real value only to publishers’ bottom lines.