<p>midatlmom, I can believe that, with a struggle, a college administrator would know your your list of information about her own school. About any other school, outside of one or two prime competitors? It is not going to happen. These people have jobs to do. How do you suppose they spend their days?
I’m also guessing that few CC posters, given the instructions of the survey, would rank 263 schools. It is just dishonest on Machen’s part, and, I’m guessing, on the part of most of the administrators that fill out the ranking. But college and university administrators did not rise in the ranks by being honest. Political skills got them there. Including, in Machen’s case, an assumption from the political realm that ballots are secret. Oops!</p>
<p>If you read the Chronicle of Higher Ed every week you have a very good idea how other schools are doing.</p>
<p>Hawkette, to an academic, I’m sure “scholarship record” refers to research discoveries and publications…after all, they are asked to rate “research universities”.</p>
<p>Academics will “distinguish” academic programs based on this “scholarship record” and “quality of the faculty”. Top faculty is what distinguishes an academic program…if you have a collection of high scoring SATers and faculty that is not prominent in their respective field, you don’t have a “distinguished” program in an academics eye.</p>
<p>danas</p>
<p>I actually asked one of my relatives, a college administrator, what he knew about other schools and these were the factors he mentioned. He didn’t say that he knew all of these facts about every school he was asked about, and I doubt that he responded for every school, but he felt pretty comfortable telling me that he thought that most high level college administrators have a fairly good base of knowledge about many schools (particularly, apparently, about faculty hirings and faculty/administration infighting–it seems there’s a lot of gossip in academia).</p>
<p>^^^^^Imagine that. Just like the corporate world!</p>
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<p>Of course they know these things. Let’s face facts, people: top-level university administration is a small, small world. US News tracks 263 research universities. In those 263 universities there are 526 presidents and provosts. Most of the presidents have previously been president or provost at one or more universities (their own, and/or one or more competitors), and many have served as deans, and/or chairs of faculty appointments committees, of several more. Most provosts aspire to be president somewhere, and keep a close eye out for opportunities—who’s up, who’s down, who’s doing al lousy job and is about to get axed, who’s doing a great job but is itching to step down and leave a plum job to fill. Most presidents are also looking to move up to a more prestigious university to manage, and keeping a close eye out for the most promising opportunities. Many have interviewed for multiple jobs at multiple institutions at the level of dean, provost, or president, and in the course of doing due diligence on how they’d manage the institution and whether the job is worth taking, have been given access to insider information on its internal functioning, its financial model, its strengths, weaknesses, goals, and challenges. Most manage their own institutions in part by setting comparative benchmarks, identifying their closest peer institutions (which requires distinguishing those too far above and too far below them in the pecking order to be relevant) and systematically tracking how their own institution stacks up, department by department and function by function, against its peers. The provost and president at the same institution typically—and ideally—bring distinct experiences and complementary knowledge bases to the task, and they talk to each other and pool their collective knowledge in the course of co-managing the institution. They also draw on the collective knowledge and wisdom of their deans and other mid-level administrators, each of whom is fighting her own competitive battles, faculty member by faculty member, department by department, discipline by discipline; and each of whom brings her own insider’s knowledge of multiple institutions she has served in the course of an academic career. And then, at the peak level, provosts and presidents also get to know each other. Many at their level are former colleagues from somewhere along the way; others are old friends or acquaintances from their “pure academic” days, or even back in grad school.</p>
<p>This is not an information-poor environment, people. If there’s one thing academics know how to do, it’s pulling together the relevant information. And by and large, you don’t get to be a provost or president at a research university unless you’re a pretty smooth and savvy operator with a lot of contacts and skills at milking your contacts for information that’s relevant to successful performance of your job—which in the highly competitive world of university management includes just about any information going to the quality of the institution.</p>
<p>Expertise isn’t everything, but it does matter. It matters in university administration. And it’s time in this context to dispense with the wacky, pseudo-populist notion that only the experts are ignorant, and only the amateurs are truly knowledgeable.</p>
<p>Interesting excerpt from college president at Reed:</p>
<p>Not cooperating with the rankings affects my life and the life of the college in several ways. Some are relatively trivial; for instance, we are saved the trouble of filling out U.S. News’s forms, which include a statistical survey that has gradually grown to 656 questions and a peer evaluation for which I’m asked to rank some 220 liberal arts schools nationwide into five tiers of quality. Contemplating the latter, I wonder how any human being could possess, in the words of the cover letter, “the broad experience and expertise needed to assess the academic quality” of more than a tiny handful of these institutions. Of course, I could check off “don’t know” next to any institution, but if I did so honestly, I would end up ranking only the few schools with which Reed directly competes or about which I happen to know from personal experience. Most of what I may think I know about the others is based on badly outdated information, fragmentary impressions, or the relative place of a school in the rankings-validated and rankings-influenced pecking order. </p>
<p>complete article here: [Is</a> There Life After Rankings? - The Atlantic (November 2005)](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/shunning-college-rankings]Is”>Is There Life After Rankings? - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>1980college grad, thanks. bclintonk can spin it all he wants, and tell us what he thinks is the reality of a college president’s knowledge about other institutions. </p>
<p>And then there is the quote out of Reed. Your post and link sum it up nicely. An honest man’s quote if I ever read one.</p>
<p>sunnyflorida,</p>
<p>If your school (University of South Florida) did better on the rankings, would you in fact have a different opinion about the Peer Assessment portion?</p>
<p>I bet you would…</p>
<p>I have a major problem with the University of South Florida. Namely that none of it’s campus’ are in south Florida. What’s up with that?</p>
<p>Ring of Fire:
How does Florida’s ranking increase if Machen gives Brown and Dartmouth 3s instead of 4s? If Brown and Dartmouth fell 10 spots each they would still be ranked far ahead of Florida and Florida’s ranking wouldn’t be affected. Let’s pretend he does have an agenda against those two schools. Maybe they rejected him for undergrad or for jobs or maybe he dislikes Rhode Island. Whatever the reason, it makes little sense as to why any sensible President of a school ranked between 40 and 60 would target and undercut top 20 schools in order to improve his ranking while not undercutting direct rivals. People are just using a few outliers in Machen’s rankings to say that PA and US News are complete BS and should be thrown into the depths of hell. PA should be reformed and isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t say that Machen is manipulative and gaming the system.</p>
<p>You people also realize that most Americans and college Presidents don’t care about Machen’s ratings? Most SEC and other big time schools are more concerned with the NBA and how it revises its one-and-done rule or the athletic scandals that happened at places like FSU or USC or the lack of funds from the recession. Only on CC would people debate US News till the cows came home.</p>
<p>“I would trust Hawkette and other informed posters on this site over 99% of college provosts and deans. Machen gave Brown and Dartmouth a marginal rating in comparison to American colleges generally while giving UF an exceptional rating. Does that sound like an informed man to you?”</p>
<p>LOL. I can’t believe this statement. Totally ridiculous!</p>
<p>See novi, I told you it’s entertaining.</p>
<p>^^^^Yeah i guess. But I think I’ll still keep my ignore list in tack.</p>
<p>(SSo)Bick,</p>
<p>Hey, we are still waiting on the answer on “less than steller undergraduates”</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-miami-florida/732689-university-florida-president-cooks-rankings.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-miami-florida/732689-university-florida-president-cooks-rankings.html</a></p>
<p>You and Bernie “Big” Mac still together at McUF? C’mon, we have to know. I am glad Occidental, Columbia, Harvard and the American people don’t share your view…</p>
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<p>LOL. The “honest man” who now presides over Reed College was a law professor and law school dean for about 30 years, first at Boston University and then at Penn, before going into semi-retirement as President of Reed College a few years ago, with basically no prior exposure to the LAC world before taking on that job–a most unusual career move, both for him and for the institution. So here you have probably the single most clueless President of a top LAC being quoted publicly as saying he’s clueless about LACs other than his own. And that’s supposed to discredit the views of college presidents generally? I don’t think so. It might suggest Reed made a mistake in hiring someone who had no prior experience teaching in or managing LACs as its president, probably because they were dazzled by his Ivy League credentials. Precious few other LACs have gone down that path. I’m sorry, you’ll have to do better than that, guys. This guy is far from typical. He’s the exception that proves the rule. Ask him instead what he knows about law schools, and he’ll wax on at length. I’ll bet he never, not once, declined to fill out the US News PA survey about law schools, because that’s the world he knew, the world he came up in, the world he had devoted his professional career to. That he now says he doesn’t know squat about LACs is indeed honest; but it’s a statement singularly about him, not about what college presidents in general know.</p>
<p>^ Who is clueless? Check out the Annapolis Group and find out why 124 other LAC presidents agree with the president of Reed College.</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Group[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Group</a>
<a href=“http://www.annapolisgroup.com/[/url]”>http://www.annapolisgroup.com/</a></p>
<p>vossron, if memory serves, only half of the Annapolis Group presidents signed the “President Letter”, none of them from a top 30 LAC. Why didin’t top LACs like Colby, Bates, Macalester etc… (to say nothing of the likes of Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Davidson, Grinnell, Middlebury, Swarthmore and Williams) join in the effort I wonder?</p>
<p>And those who did sign were not merely complaining about the Peer Assessment score, but were also calling for complete transparency in the reporting and sharing of all data.</p>
<p>Because they want to stay in the top 30? ;)</p>
<p>Hehe! Actually vossron, it is only natural that the ones who are complaining are the ones who do not benefit from the Peer Assessment score…and vice versa.</p>