The prospect of applying to college is daunting for many high school students. In an attempt to deal with complicated questions about admissions, they often seek answers from apparently authoritative and straightforward experts on the subject: college ranking guides.
These guides, the most prominent of which is produced by U.S. News and World Report, rank the quality of higher education institutions nationwide. The 2007 U.S. News guide ranks Boston University 57th among national universities. U.S. News’s ranking process considers a number of factors: peer assessment, student retention rate, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate and alumni giving rate.
Many people in higher education, however, question both the methodology used by college guides and the value that quantitative rankings have for students and parents in the midst of the college search process.
“The numbers really mean nothing,” said Andrew Johnson, assistant director of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, which holds the number three spot in the 2007 U.S. News rankings.
The quality of 300-year-old institutions is not changing in 12-month intervals, Johnson said, adding that colleges and students need to take the rankings “with a grain of salt.”
“They exaggerate the differences between colleges,” he said.
THE IMPACT OF RANKINGS
U.S. News’s college guide is widely thought to be the best-selling issue of the year for the magazine.
Although a spokesperson for U.S. News declined to comment on sales of a specific issue, noting that the magazine’s circulation is generally 2 million, Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said the rankings issue caters to a widespread American interest in rankings.
“You can’t fight City Hall. They sell a lot of magazines,” he said.
Johnson said he has personally encountered students who intend to apply to the five most highly ranked universities, “whichever top five.”
“Students and parents are more concerned with [rankings] than we would like,” he added.
Harriet Brand, a spokesperson for The Princeton Review, said college guides are necessary for students facing the monumental task of choosing where to apply to college, let alone where to attend.
According to Brand, the purpose of Princeton Review guides such as The Best 361 Colleges, the company’s most popular guide, is to make the number of colleges that students consider manageable.
“Our book helps students … narrow down their lists,” she said, noting that it is often expensive for students to travel to all campuses and that it may be embarrassing for them to ask questions about such issues as religious activity and the openness of sexuality on campus.
Brand said The Princeton Review’s college guides are the only ones based on an extensive survey of students.
For The Best 361 Colleges, the company surveyed 115,000 students from 361 schools. The questions ranged from basic student information to such issues as drug use, ease of transportation on campus and student interest in current events.
“If you were going to buy a used car, who would you trust more: the dealer or the person who owns the car?” Brand asked.
According to an August 2006 press release preceding the release of the guide, the company does not rank the schools 1 to 361. The book does, however, order the colleges based on specific quality-of-life factors, such as campus food and dormitories, as determined by student surveys.
DETRACTORS AND ALTERNATIVES
Some organizations have emerged in response and opposition to U.S. News and similar rankings.
Brad MacGowan, a high school career counselor and an advisory board member for the Education Conservancy, an organization established to address problems with the college admissions process, said the focus of college admissions has drifted away from education.
“A lot of the practice in college admissions is being driven by market forces, rather than educational forces,” he said. “The word that you keep hearing is ‘frenzy.'”
MacGowan said colleges contribute to their own problems.
“Colleges get wrapped up in [the rankings],” he said, explaining that because the variables affecting the U.S. News rankings are most easily manipulated by admissions offices, responsibility falls on them to improve their schools’ positions.
As a high school counselor, MacGowan said, “I don’t dismiss [rankings]. I just tell [students] to look at the variables being used.”
Riley said the process by which the U.S. News rankings are determined is flawed, especially because of the emphasis on peer review, which accounts for a quarter of a college’s score in the ranking system.
According to U.S. News’s explanation of its methodology, the ranking formula “gives greatest weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school’s undergraduate academic excellence” by surveying presidents, provosts and deans of admissions. U.S. News reports that it distributed 4,089 questionnaires for the 2007 rankings and received 58 percent back.
Riley said those who respond to the questionnaire are not likely to have visited the college campuses they are evaluating during the year in question.
In addition, he said, the difference between highly respected universities is minimal, and the quality of the universities U.S. News ranks in its top 25 is not likely to change overnight.
“[The top 25] are not going to fall off that page … Harvard isn’t going to drop out of the top 25,” he said.
Other magazines have stepped forward to offer an alternative to the U.S. News system.
The Washington Monthly College Guide bases its rankings on “how well [a college] performs as an engine of social mobility … how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country,” according to the publication’s September 2006 issue. Public universities and those private universities that accept students from low socioeconomic backgrounds score high on the list. Its top spot goes to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while U.S. News’s number one for 2007, Princeton University, ranks 43rd.
RANKING BOSTON UNIVERSITY
In the world of collegiate prestige, “reputation lags behind reality,” Riley said, explaining that the increasing quality of incoming classes attests to the improvements BU has undergone over the years.
BU President emeritus John Silber, known for his opposition to the U.S. News rankings during his tenure, said in an email that the rankings are “essentially popularity contests.”
“The president of Southern Methodist University may well know the quality of his own physics department, but what does he know about Boston University’s? What does he know about our music department? Does he know enough about the hundreds of departments that make up Boston University to judge the whole? Of course not. Honest presidents and deans therefore refuse to fill out the U.S. News survey. Last year, 42 percent of those asked refused to. I always refused.”
Silber said BU does not deserve to be ranked 57th.
“Consider federal research grants,” he said. “In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, Boston University won $203 million in federally-funded, peer-reviewed research grants … Boston College was 34th in the U.S. News rankings but won only $31 million in federal grants. That’s about 15 percent of our federal research funds. Are we really supposed to believe that a university that wins eight times more research grants than Boston College is the lesser institution?”
Still, Silber said not all college rankings are worthless. The Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance ranks universities by “substantive criteria” such as federal research dollars won and peer-reviewed grants won, he explained.
“Because some of the Lombardi Program’s rankings are based on genuine academic achievement, they should be taken seriously,” Silber said.