A critique of the US News & World Report college rankings

<p>I’m not sure whether it is admirable or valuable, but it is interesting and not something i’d particularly miss if one year they stopped publishing the list.</p>

<p>I agree that you absolutely have to look at the data as it applies to your student. It’s all well and good that a school ranks #XX, but what is the rank of the individual department they will study at? From there, what is the four year graduation rate? Of the students that are not graduating in four years, is this because of work-study? Study abroad? Double-major? Can you simply not get your classes scheduled? Which of these might apply to your student? This takes some digging, talking to current students and recent grads. It is well worth it. Statistics only go so far. A guideline, yes. An absolute, I think that is short-sighted.</p>

<p>Conversations with admissions can get you basic information, but your interaction with them will stop (or diminish drastically) once you start school. What is the general attitude of current students? How willing are professors to meet with you and discuss the program? What companies recruit on campus, and how many students are actually hired? This is certainly an personal opinion, but nothing can come close to your student setting their feet on campus…more than once if possible. The feeling they get talking to current students, professors, getting a feel for the campus, puts things in perspective. The ranks between X and XX, or XX and XXX for that matter, start to fade and they make a decision based on what’s important to them, not a suit at USNWR.</p>

<p>There is a famous saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, d a m n e d lies, and statistics”.</p>

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<p>Because I find the US News online data easier to work with than IPEDS for the group of institutions I’m most interested in. And because, unlike some on CC, I actually LIKE the U.S. News PA ratings and find them useful, insofar as they tell me a little bit about what people in academia think about the institution. PA is subjective and not totally reliable, to be sure, but for research universities it usually tracks the NRC rankings pretty closely: schools with the largest number of top-ranked departments in NRC also score highest on PA, so I’m comfortably using PA as a rough initial proxy for faculty strength—which is really about the only thing either NRC raters or PA raters would have any information on. No NRC rankings for LACs, of course, but the same thing seems to be going on there: the LACs with the highest PA ratings almost invariably have the strongest, richest, and deepest faculties across a range of disciplines, while those with lower PA ratings are generally noticeably thinner.</p>

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<p>Well, of course you’re going to make decisions based on what’s important to you.
The thing is, it’s not as though the suits at USNWR are really “insisting” that anyone choose colleges strictly based on the rankings – any more than when Consumer Reports reports the findings of testing all the 4 door luxury sedans in the marketplace, that it is insisting that we all use their criteria too.</p>

<p>I found the US News and World Report college rankings to be very helpful. Yes, there is valuable information about each school but more than that it let me know where an unknown school was in relation to schools we did have some knowledge of.</p>

<p>For example, I had never heard of Northeastern until I saw it mentioned here at CC. The US News rankings let me know at a glance what would have taken a long time to research. Of course, that was followed up by a lot of in depth research on my son’s part and eventually a visit. Now he’s happily attending Northeastern.</p>

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<p>There are many faults one can attribute to Morse and his team, but it would be hard to accuse them of orchestrating a devaluation of “places like Berkeley and Michigan.” There is a limit to what Morse can do with numbers that represent selectivity, financial resources, class sizes, graduation rates, or even alumni giving. In fact, Morse has been clinging to the Peer Assessment as a most useful crutch to “account for intangibles” and “level the playing field.” Nice hollow terms that simply translate to … offering a boost to public institutions. </p>

<p>This is the Peer Assessment that divides people into two clear factions. Critics (including Reed’s Colin Diver quoted above) and objective assessors on one side; and, on the other side, supporters who like the fact that their favorite institutions fare well in the part of the survey that is easily manipulated and prone to highly questionable replies (as was uncovered at Clemson and Wisconsin.) </p>

<p>At the end of the day, the USNews is far from perfect, but it is the best and exceptionally affordable tool to easily look at a great number of schools, and form a VERY preliminary opinion. As annoying as the fact that its methology cannot please everyone and that Morse has (and still is) allowed schools such as Columbia or Middlebury to game the system with incomplete, self-serving, or improbable data might be, the overall results are still positive. </p>

<p>In a “more” perfect world, we should not have to rely on a magazine to help us find the information. We should be able to rely on the timely and accurate releases by the schools. However, considering the “exploits” by Clemson or Wisconsin (among plenty of others) can we really trust the schools to release information with total transparency? One only has to look at the schools that jumped at offering support to hypocritical mercenaries such as LLoyd Thacker to understand that the definition of releasing useful information to students is subject to considerable interpretation. Without the efforts of organizations such as the Common Data Set and … USNews and Peterson’s, what would we have to look at? And this assumes that the schools do publish the form online without restrictions. Something that has yet to happen at many selective schools! </p>

<p>If the USNews were THAT bad, it would be easy for another source to offer a better mousetrap. After all, with the omnipresent internet, it should be a cinch. </p>

<p>I am not holding my bated breath!</p>

<p>In the end, USNews hasn’t built any new universities, hasn’t endowed a single new professorship. The places that were in the top twenty-five or so spots when they first began publishing the poll are still there except that the demand for them keeps growing. One has to ask, what exactly is the point of it all?</p>

<p>^ Absolutely. There were several guidebooks that existed long before the USNWR rankings. They served the purpose well, and continue to do so. The USNWR rankings really haven’t contributed much of anything (apart from standardizing some data categories) and have resulted in much that is harmful.</p>

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<p>Out of curiosity, may I ask what were those guidebooks that were available in 1983, and which one are continuing the serve the purpose well in 2011?</p>

<p>Any of those?</p>

<p>AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES. Hawthorne, NY: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 1983. </p>

<p>BARRON’S GUIDE TO THE BEST, MOST POPULAR, & MOST EXCITING COLLEGES. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series., 1982. </p>

<p>BARRON’S PROFILES OF AMERICAN COLLEGES: DESCRIPTIONS OF THE COLLEGES. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, l982. </p>

<p>COLLEGE-BOUND DIGEST. Northbrook, IL: Who’s Who among American High School Students, 1983. ED 235 710. </p>

<p>Kaye, K. R. (Ed.). GUIDE TO COLLEGES IN THE MIDWEST. Princeton, NJ: Peterson’s Guide, 1984. </p>

<p>Kaye, K. R. (Ed.). GUIDE TO FOUR-YEAR COLLEGES 1985. Princeton, NJ: Peterson’s Guides, 1984. </p>

<p>McClintock, J. ONE HUNDRED COLLEGES: HOW TO CHOOSE & GET IN. NY: John Wiley, Inc., 1982. ED 224 449. </p>

<p>Nicholson, J.M. “A Guide to the College Guides.” CHANGE, 15(1) (l983): 16-21, 46-50. </p>

<p>Straughn, C.T., II and B.L. Straughn, eds. LOVEJOY’S COLLEGE GUIDE. NY: Monarch Press, 1985. </p>

<p>THE COLLEGE BLUE BOOK. NY: MacMillan, 1983. </p>

<p>THE COLLEGE HANDBOOK 1984-85. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1984. </p>

<p>THE INSIDER’S GUIDE TO THE COLLEGES. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981.</p>

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<p>Umm…to sell a lot of magazines, maybe?</p>

<p>I had heard that USNews is a private company, interested in in making a profit, and not a foundation devoted to fundiing colleges or endowing professorships.</p>

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<p>I don’t get this critique. USN is a magazine company – their job is to sell magazines, not reshape the educational world. You might as well ding Consumer Reports for not manufacturing any automobiles, cell phones or washing machines just because they review them and make money doing so.</p>

<p>Good point- the purpose I hope withe consumer advocacy type materials, is to evaluate with transparent criteria so that the money and time searching out and using the product will be well spent.</p>

<p>USNews is not a consumer advocacy publication,& doesn’t justify why they chose their criteria as to it’s importance to the consumer.</p>

<p>We have these discussions in CC over and over and over again. USNWR rankings are flawed, but USNWR keeps generating them and making tons of money. Why? As a society we want to Cliff notes version, we want to determine winners and losers, we want easy comparisons, hence we want rankings. USNWR reduces many qualitative factors to one number, even though you are comparing apples, oranges, banana, pears, pineapples,tomatoes…</p>

<p>And face it, rankings are useful, they give us a starting point. Beyond that, a diligent student will take other pieces of information (like site visits, talking to stakeholders, researching departments) and make an informed decision and USNWR rankings does not matter much. For others, USNWR is all they need to make a decision. Hence there is a segment that wants it and I would hazard a guess, most of them do not participate in CC. </p>

<p>USNWR rankings are not going away, so buyer beware.</p>

<p>“Out of curiosity, may I ask what were those guidebooks that were available in 1983, and which one are continuing the serve the purpose well in 2011?”</p>

<p>Some that I recall were Cass & Birrnbaum, Hawes, Lovejoy, the College Blue Book, and, I believe, Peterson’s and Fiske may have been around, though I could be mistaken on those two.</p>

<p>And, of course, those earlier guides are no longer published, but the genre continued to evolve and there are now many more from which to choose. The point being that such guidebooks provide more in-depth and useful information than the USNWR rankings, imo.</p>

<p>Post #27: “In the end, USNews hasn’t built any new universities, hasn’t endowed a single new professorship. The places that were in the top twenty-five or so spots when they first began publishing the poll are still there except that the demand for them keeps growing. One has to ask, what exactly is the point of it all?”</p>

<p>Post #31: “I don’t get this critique. USN is a magazine company – their job is to sell magazines, not reshape the educational world. You might as well ding Consumer Reports for not manufacturing any automobiles, cell phones or washing machines just because they review them and make money doing so.”</p>

<p>Pizzagirl, I took Post#27 to mean that USNWR rankings haven’t changed much of anything, i.e., the top of the pecking order is pretty much the same.</p>

<p>While that’s largely true, the rankings have contributed to re-shaping other aspects of the educational world, particularly the frenzy surrounding admissions and what students and their parents will do to get admitted to the “right” college.</p>

<p>I always liked this ranking from use-net.
[-</a> college-rankings - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/LF_rank.htm]-”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_rankings/LF_rank.htm)</p>

<p>“Some that I recall were Cass & Birrnbaum, Hawes, Lovejoy, the College Blue Book, and, I believe, Peterson’s and Fiske may have been around, though I could be mistaken on those two”</p>

<p>we used fiske, and it seems lots others do too, including, effectively, as a first screen.</p>

<p>But I’ll be damned if I know fiske’s criteria for inclusion - it makes USNWR look like the model of transparency. No one makes a fuss about Fiske though.</p>

<p>USNWR is an incredible gold mine of useful info for aspiring students. Most of my objections would vanish if they just listed the colleges alphabetically. The only useless bit is that little number in the left-hand column. But of course, that little number is what sells magazines.</p>

<p>Oddly, USNWR basically doesn’t print news or do world reporting anymore. The magazine is a pathetic shadow of its former self, in both size and circulation. The college rankings are about the only thing keeping them semi-relevant.</p>

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<p>Far from it. They don’t test anything; they certainly don’t measure output. In fact, they don’t pretend to have the slightest first-hand knowledge of any of the institutions included in the rankings. The truth of the matter is, if customer satisfaction was ever included as an output, most of the top 100 colleges and universities would score extremely well. But, we’ll never know because, curiously, that really isn’t one of the things USNews is interested in. </p>

<p>To answer my own question at post#27, the point all along has been for USNews to replace the education lobby itself as the sole arbiters of “who’s in and who’s out?” or “who’s up and who’s down?” A generation or two ago, the Carnegie Foundation was probably the biggest player in town. It was always in the middle of publishing some big study; it coined the phrase “megaversity” back in the 1950s when Big Science changed the way we approached teaching and research. Other organizations, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and, COFHE, helped focus the way educators thought about Big Issues like recruitment of women faculty, retention of minorities and the financing of college educations.</p>

<p>Now, not so much.</p>