U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, College Confidential -- it often seems that there are as many university rankings as there are universities to rank. But rankings' popularity does not insulate them from attack. Deriding these lists has become something of a pastime both inside and outside the world of higher education. For instance, in a major story printed last year in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell chastised the U.S. News and World Report's famous rankings, writing that is "an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous."
Whether critics are taking on the methodology or, like Gladwell, the entire practice itself, they share the concern that U.S. News, Forbes, Washington Monthly and their ilk play an unhealthy role in the college selection process.
I disagree. Nearly all but the most frivolous rankings provide some level of useful consumer information. When approached with care, these rankings provide a useful tool to prospective students and universities alike.
With more than 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States, such a tool is an absolute necessity, particularly for uninitiated students. Promising students are inundated with view books, college fairs, and emails from an intimidating number of universities. Rankings are a great place for education seekers to start sorting out which of these offers they should be paying attention to. Even as a blunt instrument, they allow prospective students to zero in on which institutions offer the best education as well as the best fit for them.
Rankings not only drive students towards the better institutions, but they drive the institutions themselves to improve. The better university lists focus on certain key measurements like student-to-faculty ratio, alumni involvement, and graduation and retention rates. While these measures cannot by themselves lift the quality of a university's offerings, it would be folly to ignore their impact. These are areas on which every university should focus their attention. The result? When schools improve what needs to be improved, they are rewarded with a rankings boost.
Even when critics accept that rankings might have some value, they often worry that these lists are essentially misleading, making students think that they alone are the sole, true evaluators of a university's worth. Yet in seeking to support prospective students, this argument undercuts their intelligence, assuming our best and brightest are not intelligent enough to judge a given list and give it appropriate weight in their deliberations. Those who reject rankings for this reason seem to believe that our applicants have neither the savvy nor the logic to process the admittedly imperfect information presented by college lists. That would be a sad statement of our view of our future students. The truth is that students are indeed smart enough to digest this information with the necessary grain of salt, ultimately benefiting as consumers from the greater degree of institutional transparency the rankings demand.
To this last point, it is important to note that there is no single master list, no infallible indicator of The Best University. Different publications and services employ different methodologies, emphasizing different measures and algorithms. And there is more than a grain of truth in Gladwell's critique: it is very unlikely that one ranking will capture and synthesize everything a student is looking for. It is important for prospective students to look at many different rankings, and not just a single list.
Although rankings make an easy target, they are not going away -- and that is good news for students and parents. Better still, the New York Times reported recently that an effort to rank colleges by educational efficacy is gaining steam. Joined with other systems that emphasize other key qualities of universities, this new measure will ensure that prospective students will continue to get a clearer view of what they can expect from higher education.
Other schools try to boost yield by courting students with likely letters before official acceptances or by artificially raising yield with ED, a program under which students are bound to attend. This inflates yield in a way that non-ED schools can't.
Extend this kind of thinking to all the things calculated by these rankings, and you see how your argument fails: Schools aren't trying to improve their institutional quality but rather their ranking, and because they can do the latter without committing to the former--well, they do.
Rather than ranking colleges on the basis of data for preordained criteria and voodoo algorithms for manipulating these data, College Straight Talk will enable aspiring college students to develop their own completely personalized rankings on the basis of 1. the various college characteristics that are most important to themselves and their families combined with 2. how highly (or not!) recent grads have rated their alma maters on those same factors.
College Straight Talk will also enable college intenders to supply detailed personal profiles for themselves and then read survey findings - including extensive text responses to various open-ended questions - for alumni from their best-fit colleges who have similar personal profiles. They will then also be able to receive personal, real-time mentoring from these "Affinity Alumni" via College Straight Talk's private Google+ and Facebook networks.
I commend the new site to your - and Mr. Van Zandt's - attention.
Tom Benghauser
303 861-4716
http://www.lulu.com/alastingwill - Read. Grow. Thrive. Resources For Teachers.
If you are well educated in math, science, or engineering, the process is very simple.
1. Pick the field of study first. Pick the college second.
2. Talk to people who went there. Go to the blogs for that school. Read them all.
3. Google for people with the selected degree from that school. See what they do.
4. Check out tuition costs. Talk to the school counselor about financial aid.
5. Have a second and third pick. These should not be hold your nose picks.
On the immediate home front.
1. Stop reading ANY edu-reform horsecrap about evil teachers.
2. Take time next week and write an e-mail to your child's math, science, and english teacher and begin a constructive relationship with them.
3. Never become confrontational with them. NEVER.
4. With the first low test score, ask the teacher for available tutors.
5. Talk to your child about his or her grades. Do not set standards or goals or requirements. Sit down and talk, and be nice about it. And do it often.
6. Never ask this stupid question again, " What did you learn in class today." Ask this question, " What do you understand in your math, science classes.' Open a discussion, NOT a performance appraisal.
Honestly it works. It WORKS.