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Earlham’s Critique of the
U.S.
News & World Report Rankings
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On
May 5, 2007, Earlham President Doug Bennett and 11
colleagues sent a
letter to hundreds of liberal arts college presidents
and asked them not to participate in the U.S. News and World Report rankings
survey.
Regardless of whether the boycott takes off, Bennett said, “this is an issue of professional integrity,” in that colleges need to share their doubts about a set of rankings that has gained too much influence. “The rankings are a distraction from the most important issues we face in higher education, which are access and quality,” he said.
— Inside
Higher Ed on May 7, 2007 |
Basically, USNWR’s approach draws
together data of several different kinds and blends them
into a single set of rankings for various kinds of institutions.
Essentially, the approach makes use of data about inputs, reputation and outcomes.
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Several of the indicators employed by
USNWR measure an institution’s inputs — the
college’s or university’s financial resources, particularly
how much an institution spends on each student’s instruction.
Colleges that charge more or that have larger endowments (or
both) rank higher because of these measures. Other input measures
include faculty resources (salaries, percentage of full-time
faculty, percentage of faculty with terminal degrees, student/faculty
ratio, and class size) and student selectivity (SAT/ACT
test averages and high school ranks for entering students). |
The USNWR annual
rankings focus on one kind of outcome measure: retention
and graduation rates. They measure what percentage of an institution’s
first-year students return for a second year and what percentage
of students graduate within six years. “I believe that these
measures are the best aspect of the USNWR rankings,” comments
Earlham’s President Douglas C. Bennett. “But I also
believe retention and graduation rates are a very primitive outcome
measure; they beg the question of whether, and what, students
have actually learned.” (President Bennett’s article,
“Assessing
Quality in Higher Education” is available online.)
The final component of the
USNWR
rankings attempts to measure reputation.
The magazine surveys presidents, provosts and deans of admissions
at institutions
of similar types, asking them to rate dozens of colleges
and universities on a five-point scale from marginal to distinguished.
This “peer assessment” is heavily weighted in
the magazine’s controversial ranking formula, accounting
for 25% of a school’s ranking. According to USNWR,
of the 4,098 top academics who were asked to participate
in this year’s survey, only 57% responded. How much
any one college official really knows about the quality of
education at many other colleges can certainly be debated.
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Last year a number of college presidents from the Annapolis
Group, an association of selective
liberal arts colleges, compiled their opinions on a variety
of aspects of the USNWR rankings.
(Please note: Macintosh users should use Netscape or Safari browsers
to access the Annapolis Group’s
Web site.)
USNWR employs
a similar opinion-based approach to another part of the rankings.
The editors ask college presidents,
chief academic officers, deans of students and deans of admission
to nominate 10 schools that offer “stellar examples” of eight “Programs
to Look For,” programs “believed
to lead to student success.” Through this nomination process, Earlham
was pleased to be included among schools known for excellent programming
in two of the categories this year, “Study Abroad” and “Service
Learning.”
At Earlham we encourage prospective students and their families
to use the rankings as only one factor of their college decision-making
process. We ask you to consider both quantitative and experiential
information about colleges, to research and compare information
about not only about
colleges’ inputs but also about outputs. Students’ experiences
with Earlham’s long-standing programs in collaborative undergraduate
research, strong first-year programming and within the day-to-day
life of our learning community provide more meaningful evidence of academic
quality
than a numerical rank. We believe that data collected through the
National Survey of Student
Engagement provides this worthwhile information. |
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