In U.S. News & World Report’s latest college rankings, Vanderbilt University dropped five spots, from No. 13 to No. 18. One might think that’s an insignificant dip in a list that contains 435 institutions. Nevertheless, the university’s leaders on Monday sent impassioned emails to students, alumni, and faculty and staff members, defending Vanderbilt’s prowess in teaching and research.
The university’s argument essentially boils down to two issues. First, that the rankings’ new measures of social mobility, like graduates’ indebtedness, are “deeply misleading.” And second, that the rankings now do less to “measure faculty and student quality” because they’ve eliminated or reduced the weight of metrics such as the share of faculty members with terminal degrees and the share of students whose GPAs were in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes.
As Vanderbilt sees it, the retooled rankings wrongly conflate social mobility, a “policy concern,” with “education quality.”
The result was a “dramatic movement in the rankings,” officials wrote, “disadvantaging many private research universities while privileging large public institutions.”
The Vanderbilt leaders’ consternation over a relatively small drop in rankings points to how important the lists remain for some institutions. But as the arguments they made butt up against more recent reckonings over whether rankings harm higher education as a whole, the university’s emails quickly circulated, drawing criticism from academics across the country.
“This email is astounding to me both generally as a higher-ed-policy scholar but also as a graduate of Vanderbilt,” said Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University who studies underrepresented students’ access to college. Baker received her doctorate at Vanderbilt.
“This change in our ranking is entirely due to changes in U.S. News’ methodology,” read the emails, which were signed by the chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, and the provost, C. Cybele Raver.
“Because Vanderbilt’s overall percentage of Pell and first-generation students is lower than at many state institutions, U.S. News’ metric for Vanderbilt is lower, affecting our ranking,” Diermeier and Raver wrote later in the message.
The university cited other big names that lost ground in this new era, including the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, and Wake Forest University.
The takeaway, for many readers, was that Vanderbilt is a wealthy institution that educates primarily wealthy students with high grades and test scores, and resented losing rank because of it.
But in an interview on Wednesday, Diermeier said one of his biggest worries is that U.S. News’s methodological changes might actually discourage low-income and first-generation students from applying to the university.
Quirks in how U.S. News calculates average loan debt obscure the fact that Vanderbilt covers 100 percent of students’ demonstrated need and that, as a result, most don’t need to take out loans, Diermeier said. U.S. News reports that the average debt among its graduates who received federal grants or loans is $14,000. “Now, if you’re a family and you’re reading that, what do you think?” the chancellor said. “You think you can’t afford it.”
At the same time, Diermeier defended the importance of measuring incoming students’ test scores and grades. “We know that students thrive if they’re in an environment of students of similar ability,” he said.
“We are an elite private research university,” he said. “We want to create the best possible environment for our faculty and our students to realize their full potential.”
“An education where it’s primarily the wealthy who can access it” doesn’t comport with many Americans’ beliefs about what quality higher education should be.
Despite the sense that readers got from the emails — that Vanderbilt is a rich college for rich kids — that’s not the entire student body. Seventeen percent of students receive Pell Grants, which is much lower than the national Pell Grant rate of 32 percent, but which Vanderbilt has worked to increase over time. According to the university’s Common Data Set, Vanderbilt determined last year that about 48 percent of its full-time undergraduates had financial need, and the university met all of that need. Thirty percent of students pay full freight and don’t get any financial assistance, according to numbers the university shared with The Chronicle.
Diermeier and Raver’s messages tried to get at those facts about Vanderbilt’s low- and middle-income students. They discussed how U.S. News’s measures count only students who receive federal aid but that two-thirds of Vanderbilt students do not get federal grants or loans, because many are covered by institutional aid. They do well, but Vanderbilt doesn’t get credit for it, the chancellor and provost wrote.
At the same time, their emails suggested that the old metrics that U.S. News used, or weighed more heavily in its rankings, were better measures of “quality.” “It is particularly distressing to see the incompetence and lack of rigor that have increasingly characterized the U.S. News rankings,” they wrote.
But what is quality? What does it mean to provide a quality education? U.S. News’s critics have long complained that the old metrics lifted up wealth, rather than the work colleges do to improve underprivileged students’ prospects. Diermeier and Raver’s complaints about U.S. News’s competence coincide with attempts by U.S. News analysts to change their methodology to speak to those criticisms.
Diermeier on Wednesday reinforced the idea that student and faculty quality or preparation are different from colleges’ contributions to social mobility. “Both are valid concerns, and both are very important,” he said. “But you’ve got to separate these because they’re very different concerns.”
Both the old and new metrics have been subject to debate about whether they’re accurate, and what’s worth rewarding. It’s notable that Diermeier and Raver take to task only the new ones, Baker said.
“There is this idea that you can provide a quality education in the United States of America and you can do that with an incredibly small number of low-income students being enrolled,” Baker said. But “an education where it’s primarily the wealthy who can access it,” she said, doesn’t comport with many Americans’ beliefs about what quality higher education should be.
