A group of college presidents announced plans on Tuesday to help develop an alternative to commercial college rankings.
At the annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, which represents 115 liberal-arts colleges, members agreed to develop a Web-based information system that would provide families with “easily accessible, comprehensive, and quantifiable data” on participating colleges. The organization said it planned to work closely with the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and other education groups that have begun creating such a tool to provide prospective students with more transparent information.
Following its two-day meeting, in Annapolis, Md., the group also announced that a majority of about 80 presidents who attended the event said they would not participate in U.S. News & World Report‘s annual rankings. (The group does not set binding policies for member institutions, which will continue to decide what, if any, information they share with the magazine.)
Katherine Haley Will, chairwoman of the Annapolis Group and president of Gettysburg College, said many of her colleagues’ longstanding frustrations with commercial rankings boiled over this week. “It was really palpable, the dissatisfaction not with U.S. News as a magazine, but with how they’re claiming the conversation about who’s better. We’re the ones who ought to reclaim that,” Ms. Will said. “This isn’t a system we feel comfortable with anymore.”
The meeting heartened presidents who have long criticized U.S. News, and compelled others to see the rankings in a new light. Frances Lucas, president of Millsaps College, in Mississippi, said she previously had paid little attention to the rankings debate because her own institution was rated highly in U.S. News. But after learning more about the magazine’s methodology and discussing the issue with colleagues at this week’s meeting, she concluded that the rankings were based too heavily on measurements determined by institutional wealth.
“The worst tragedy is that leaders like me have been persuaded, oftentimes by external constituencies, predominantly trustees, to manage toward winning in the rankings,” Ms. Lucas said. “I don’t know of a college president that has managed to win who doesn’t regret it in this way: that we have taken valuable dollars and focused way too much on attracting academically meritorious students instead of the poor ones, and that’s just wrong.”
Ms. Lucas said she planned to stop completing the magazine’s reputational survey, which asks academic leaders to rate hundreds of colleges, and that she would talk to Millsaps trustees about the possibility of removing all mentions of U.S. News rankings in the college’s promotional materials.
The heated discussions of rankings in Annapolis echoed the tone of a recent letter by 12 college presidents that excoriated U.S. News for providing misleading data that “degrade the educational worth ... of the college search process.” In the letter, which now has 36 signatures, the presidents urged their colleagues to boycott the reputational survey and stop touting their rankings.
On Tuesday, Lloyd Thacker, the man behind the letter and founder of the Education Conservancy, hailed the Annapolis Group’s actions as a victory for students, and said the group had asked him to help develop an alternative tool for comparing colleges.
“It’s an encouraging sign that college presidents are willing to do the right thing,” Mr. Thacker said, “that they’re going to step up and help this country think its way out from under the influence of the rankings ... and exercise some educational authority.”
In an interview with The Chronicle on Tuesday, Christopher B. Nelson, president of St. John’s College, in Annapolis, and outgoing chair of the Annapolis Group, described the magazine’s reputational survey as “real evil.” The group’s written statement about the meeting contained no criticisms of U.S. News rankings, however. Mr. Nelson said he and his colleagues had chosen to emphasize the group’s interest in devising a new online system, which would allow students and parents to compare colleges’ by enrollments, class size, and majors offered, among other factors.
At the meeting, Mr. Nelson said, “though the language in the room was very strong, there was no desire to make a group statement about the rankings.”
In a June 8 letter to Annapolis Group presidents, Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News, warned them that bowing out of the reputational survey could have “unintended effects.”
“The rankings have brought attention to some smaller and lesser-known schools, some read hidden gems” Mr. Kelly wrote. “However, if fewer peer surveys are completed and returned, the number of respondents rating such small, lesser-known schools could drop below a statistically significant threshold, placing these schools into an unranked category.”
Many liberal-arts college presidents have concluded that there are worse places to be.
Elizabeth F. Farrell contributed to this article.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
