Commentary on College Rankings
by Lisa Ransdell, Ph.D., IECA Associate Member (Colorado)
In the Feb 14/21, 2011 edition of The New Yorker there is a great piece by Malcolm Gladwell on college rankings: “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us.”
Gladwell uses the analogy of automobile rankings to illustrate the folly of the one-size-fits-most approach used by U.S. News & World Report. A universal ranking system should no more be used for public / private / selective / nonselective / large / small / urban / rural colleges than for sports cars and SUVs.
Gladwell quotes Robert Morse, the U.S. News college rankings guru on the original intent of the system and its present usage: “In the early years, the thing that’s happening now would not have been imaginable. This idea of using the rankings as a benchmark, college presidents setting a goal of ‘We’re going to rise in the U.S. News ranking,’ as proof of their management, or as proof that they’re a better school, that they’re a good president. That wasn’t on anybody’s radar. It was just for consumers.”
While I am not remotely as eloquent as Gladwell, I recently addressed rankings in my blog (9/13/10):
Lists and rankings that purport to identify the “best” colleges make me uncomfortable. One reason is that as I scan such lists I can always come up with multiple comparable schools that deserved to be included, but didn’t make the grade for some reason.
Take the popular Loren Pope book, Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. I’m familiar with many of the profiled schools that impressed the late Mr. Pope as he crisscrossed the nation back in the late 1990s. I worked at one of them, Denison University, in Granville, OH, for ten years. Denison is a superb school, no doubt about it, and I know many alumni who would say that their attendance did indeed change their lives.
I agree with Mr. Pope that small liberal arts colleges offer an emphasis on teaching and personalized attention that isn’t often available at large universities or even Ivy League schools. And yet, why Denison and not Whittier College in CA, why Kalamazoo College in MI and not Coe College in IA?
My dearest friend graduated from Stephens College, a private women’s college in Columbia, MO. I have visited Stephens several times with Betsy, and met many of her delightful alumnae friends. Virtually all of them cite their Stephens experience as pivotal, and all are doing interesting, worthwhile things with their lives and careers. Yet Stephens isn’t featured in Mr. Pope’s book, nor does it receive a high ranking in the most recent list of national liberal arts colleges from U.S. News and World Report.
One of the major bases for the U.S. News rankings is admission selectivity. I am interested in their published institutional outcomes, but more for the individual statistics assembled by the researchers than for any certitude that the rankings comprise a highly valid list, for the worthiness of colleges in my mind is as variable as the range of interests and learning styles of the nation’s prospective college students in any given year.
I very much agree with a quote by Richard H. Hersch, a past college president and present board member of the American Association of Colleges & Universities from a recent Southeast Education Network publication: “Higher Education is the only industry in America where we rank based on input rather than output.” Precisely!
Ahead of official rankings and standout-40 lists I would recommend building personal lists based on program strengths and alumni reviews, digging deeply into reported institutional strengths and making in-person visits whenever possible to check things out first-hand. Colleges also impress me where faculty members are involved in recruiting and wooing students and where they are accessible to prospective students. Let’s tell school stories more often and look at numbers less frequently!
Related posts:
- College Rankings: Defending the Indefensible
- Students Use of Rankings in the College Search Process: Less or More Than We Thought?
- Rankings, Surveys & Magazines: The Silly Season Begins
- Understanding The Helicopter Parent Phenomenon: A New Book for Educational Consultants Working with Parents and Their College Going Children
- Rankings Rankle
I enjoyed reading your commentary. People who conduct reasearch about colleges and universiteies, particulary people who are professors of higher eduction and members of AHSE (Association for the Study of Higher Education), have been saying this exact same thing for years. This was reinforced in my mind when I was in a different career path. As a university administrator, I was once asked to fill out the US News survey. Upon closer observation, I noted that the things that make up a school’s score for that survey have little to do with what happens in the classroom. Endowment amounts, average SAT scores, and selectivity ratings say nothing about the quality of education received at a school. But people keep buying US News (its their largest annual selling issue) and believing what they say, so schools continue to play the game. Even the schools themselves, when asked about the rankings, call them things like “US Blues and World Distort”, but yet when their schools receive high rankings, they tout them all over the place.
Furthermore, I totally agree with you about Loren Pope’s book. There are a lot of wonderful colleges. Just because Mr. Pope doesn’t list it in his little book doesn’t mean that Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee isn’t a wonderful school. A quality education can be had at most colleges, universities, and even community colleges. Its the responsibility of the student to seek out those opportunities that enhance classroom learning.
Exactly right, Lisa.
The assumption that a higher ranking means a “better” school is a often a clue that a family is focusing on prestige. And if prestige is the centerpiece of their efforts, they are less likely to pay attention to the central questions of their search: What does their student want in a college? Who’s got it?
Just as SAT numbers don’t tell you about a student’s curiosity, energy, motivation, and grit, so a college’s numbers don’t tell you about teaching and learning, ambience, community, and opportunities.
Thanks for pointing out how deeply flawed rankings are as a general measure.
Thanks, Lisa, for alerting me to the Gladwell piece and also for hearing your take on the rankings, which definitely rankle.