As usual, U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings offered a heavy dose of déjà vu when they arrived in August. Princeton University topped the list of best colleges, just as it did last year, while Harvard remained in second and Yale again took third. And the same institutions as last year rounded out the top dozen spots.
One statistic was new: The overall response rate to the magazine’s controversial reputational survey plunged to its lowest level ever, a possible sign that organized criticism of the rankings has sunk in.
The U.S. News survey is weathering a season of intense scorn. Some college presidents have publicly renounced the rankings and vowed to stop touting them in their promotional materials. In September dozens of higher-education officials plan to meet at Yale to discuss plans for an alternative to so-called commercial rankings that would provide “educationally relevant” data about colleges and universities. “Rankings use a rigid formula, which can be highly misleading,” says Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions and the conference’s host, “but they currently fill a vacuum.”
It’s true that the U.S. News rankings are Coke in a world without Pepsi. That is unlikely to change. One reason is that many presidents and admissions deans continue to support the survey, or at least tolerate it. Despite the passionate rebukes of rankings from some presidents, plenty of others believe academe has far bigger problems than top-50 lists.
Looking back a decade reveals that anti-rankings revolutions are difficult to start. Rewind to 1997, when Gerhard Casper thumbed his nose at the U.S. News survey. Mr. Casper, then president of Stanford University, publicly called the rankings misleading and inaccurate. He announced that he would stop filling out the reputational survey, which accounts for 25 percent of a college’s score.
Mr. Casper also said he would give prospective students a different way to evaluate colleges, data that would not rate colleges like cars or toasters. He directed Stanford to publish various statistics — including its tuition, class sizes, and graduation rates — on its Web site. He urged other college presidents to follow his lead. Then he waited. “Some might have viewed me as Don Quixote,” he recalled recently.
As the leader of one of the nation’s top-ranked institutions, Mr. Casper sparked much talk but little action. A Stanford spokesman at the time told The Chronicle that while other college administrators shared Mr. Casper’s concern about rankings, they could not reach a consensus on “what should be done.”
Ten years later, consensus remains elusive. The man who is now trying to build it is Lloyd Thacker, director of the Education Conservancy and sponsor of next month’s conference at Yale. The former high-school counselor has urged colleges to look beyond rankings and the competitive strategies some institutions use to game them. “We’ve got a chance,” Mr. Thacker says, “to push back against a force that’s hurting us collectively.”
His challenge is to persuade individual colleges, with many different pedigrees and priorities, to act collectively. This year Mr. Thacker circulated a letter that urged college presidents not to complete the U.S. News reputational survey and to stop touting their place in the annual college guide. More than 60 presidents have signed the letter — enough to field a few football teams, but a fraction of the 1,000 who received copies of it. And there are notable absences: The letter contains not one signature of a president of a top-25 national university or liberal-arts college, as ranked by U.S. News.
That’s not a coincidence. As the president of one highly ranked liberal-arts college told The Chronicle, “If you’re at the top of the heap, why do you want to do something that might threaten that?”
Others presidents said deciding to publicly criticize the rankings — or not to — was a complex public-relations move. After all, many alumni and trustees like the bottom-line affirmations of quality that rankings provide, and keeping them happy is part of a president’s job.
William D. Adams, president of Colby College, said he was sympathetic to Mr. Thacker’s letter, but needed to discuss it further with the college’s board members, whom he described as having an array of opinions about U.S. News. (Colby ranked 22nd in this year’s list of liberal-arts colleges). “It’s not just a personal or presidential matter,” he said.
Although the letter has inspired many closed-door discussions, it’s easy to read too much into the list of who’s signed it and who has not. Officials at some high-profile colleges, including Princeton, have said they did not sign it because they were already observing its requirements. In contrast, a handful of colleges that added their names to the letter continue to brag about their U.S. News standing. For instance, Kenyon College’s Web site states that, according to the magazine, it is “among the top liberal-arts colleges in the nation.” The Web sites of Gettysburg and Ursinus Colleges note the same.
A Slew of Alternatives
It’s possible that Mr. Thacker’s letter did have one quantifiable effect on this year’s U.S. News results. Over all, 51 percent of colleges and universities completed the reputational survey, a drop from 58 percent last year. Among liberal-arts colleges, the number fell to 56 percent from 69 percent. U.S. News said that the response rate was sufficient to provide a reliable survey, but that the magazine would find other ways of measuring reputation if more and more colleges stopped rating peer institutions.
Nobody believes the rankings will fade away. Therefore many critics have turned their attention to alternatives that would complement the magazine’s ratings. In response to federal calls for greater transparency, several education associations are building their own databases. Next month, for example, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities plans to unveil UCan, an in-depth online information system for prospective students and their parents. So far, nearly 400 colleges have agreed to provide a range of institutional data to the Web site.
Meanwhile, the Annapolis Group, which represents liberal-arts col-leges, is considering whether to develop a template of its own. “Good capitalism applauds this,” William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, says of the many rankings alternatives under discussion.
But it’s not yet clear how — or if — these and other banks of data would fit together. Some officials worry that consumers will end up with a confusing mess of overlapping statistics, sponsored by an alphabet soup of different groups. That might make the U.S. News rankings seem all the more appealing.
“Raw data is not going to be very useful to most consumers,” says Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News. “It’s not going to be in a form that’s in context.”
Mr. Casper, the former Stanford president, doubts that anything could capture the attention of students and parents the way U.S. News does. But he thinks colleges could benefit from a frank discussion of what can and cannot be measured in education.
He has no illusions, however, about the enduring appeal of the rankings. “The quantification of society,” he said, “we’re not going to stop.”
Reputational Survey Shrinks The overall response rate to the U.S. News reputational survey, in which college officials rate their peer institutions, has declined since 2000. The magazine says the participation rate for the 2008 guide is still sufficient to provide a reliable measure of reputation, which accounts for 25 percent of each college’s overall ranking. | 2008: | | | 2007: | | | 2006: | | | 2005: | | | 2004: | | | 2003: | | | 2002: | | | 2001: | | | 2000: | | | SOURCE: U.S. News & World Report | |
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 54, Issue 2, Page A45
