While prospective students spend their last weeks before decision day clogging college campuses and filling out financial-aid forms, U.S. News and World Report released its America’s Best Colleges 2007 list, but some top-ranking universities and leading student research groups say the country’s leading college-ranking reference may not accurately gauge premier colleges.
“The U.S. News and World Report list is basically a list of selectivity with little to do with good practices and higher education,” said professor Ernest Pascarella, the Mary Louise Petersen Chair in Higher Education of the University of Iowa. “The things an institution has to do to improve their rank have nothing to do with the quality of an undergrad education.
“They’re concerned with what an institution looks like, not what they do,” Pascarella continued.
Pascarella said many flaws, such as an almost-annual rise or fall for colleges, diminish the legitimacy of the company’s ranking system.
“How can a college change in ranking every year?” he said. “Maybe they should do a report every 10 years.”
Pascarella suggested employing the National Survey of Student Engagement, a nonprofit educational research organization, to give the rankings greater validity.
The NSSE takes a different approach toward assessing higher-education practices, only allowing participating universities to view ranking information instead of making it available to the public. By not releasing the information to the public, the report allows universities to focus on improving instead of worrying about competition from other schools, said NSSE spokeswoman Jillian Kinsey.
“Schools use the data to assess the effectiveness in terms of widely known practices,” Kinsey said. “An institution wants to know how they’re doing against their peers. How are they doing in the things that matter to them?”
Despite the reputation of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, Kinsey said she questions the motives of many colleges that solely abide by the company’s report.
“I wonder who highly regards them,” Kinsey said. “The people who are interested in the listing are interested in maintaining their rank.”
Kinsey criticized criteria U.S. News and World Report uses to grade schools — such as student-to-faculty ratio — and said she favors categories geared more toward quality of education, such as completion of professional and licensing exams and graduate-acceptance rates.
U.S. News and World Report rankings are based primarily on peer assessment and graduation rate but also include factors such as average freshman retention rate, class sizes, percentage of full-time faculty, average SAT and ACT scores of admitted students, acceptance rate and alumni-donation rank, U.S. News Data Research Deputy Director Sam Flanigan said.
Flanigan refuted the common misconception that universities pay to be included in the company’s rankings, adding the rankings are only designed to be a tool to help students jumpstart their college searches.
Harvard University sunk to the ranking’s number-two school after serving in the top spot last year, but Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn said the university does not give much weight to the results. Princeton is ranked first.
“We don’t have a sticker on the website,” Wrinn said. “I don’t know that we even do a story about it.
“In theory, we always say if they are going to be lists, it’s good to be at the top or near the top,” he continued. “But the main thing for us will always be that students find the university that’s best for them, and leave it at that. The rankings change all the time, but all the good schools are good schools.”