C. Peter Magrath

A hot topic of debate and disagreement within higher education is the question of how colleges and universities should be ranked in relationship to each other. The prime example of the collegiate rankings enterprise, of course, is U.S. News & World Report, which about 25 years ago initially based rankings on a reputational survey of college presidents. The annual survey has expanded to rank the 100 top universities and 110 top liberal arts colleges and now uses criteria that also include such factors as student selectivity based on the average standardized entrance examination scores of incoming students, the percentage of alumni who donate money to the institution and the student/faculty ratio.

It is also USN&WR’s best seller when the issue comes out every fall — a testimony to the enormous importance of college education in the United States, and a reflection of our obsession with rankings and ratings. It is, I think, reasonable to raise the question of whether this obsession is benign or bad. The editors of USN&WR suggest that they didn’t ask for this job of ranking higher education institutions, but that “it has fallen to us.” Since this is a private entrepreneurial magazine, it is fair to rhetorically ask why they decided to undertake this chore that has become a best seller — and, not coincidentally, made USN&WR number one in the ranking industry.

Having said this, the editors of that magazine constantly adjust their criteria and database, which nevertheless are still fundamentally input driven, and do not take into account the educational outcomes and value of the education received by students at the graded colleges and universities. Prospective students and consumers of what are the products of higher education have a natural interest in information about colleges and universities; how they operate; and what students can reasonably expect in the way of facilities and faculty, not to mention the costs of attending and the requirements for admission. The disturbing danger is that the rankings system, with its imperative that a particular college or university move up on the list so that it can be in the top 10, distorts the ultimate purposes of higher education, which do not lend themselves to mechanistic rankings based on statistical data.

Yet the pull of the rankings game is so strong that Baylor University openly states that its goal is to enter the top tier of institutions as determined by the USN&WR college rankings, and has developed a strategic plan to meet its statistical criteria. Similarly, Arizona State University’s president will, thanks to a decision by the Arizona Board of Regents, receive a bonus if that university can be freed from its current status as a “third-tier” institution and moved up in the magazine’s rankings. There are sharp critics, including many presidents of liberal arts colleges who refuse to participate in the USN&WR survey on the grounds that it devalues education and is based on false premises. And this fall, the Education Conservancy convened a meeting at Yale University to develop alternatives for providing students and families with useful information about colleges—without any rankings. There are also interesting alternatives to the formulaic
USN&WR survey, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, known as Nessie, based at Indiana University that is growing in popularity. It measures the involvement of students in academic and campus activities while providing prospective students and families with useful information about the quality of colleges based on student and faculty interaction, the
richness of educational experiences available and the level of academic challenges. A counterpart Community College Survey of Student Engagement was created by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Competition is healthy, and every college and university should aspire to improve itself. And realistically, reputational or opinion assessments are inevitable, even if purely informal. But to enshrine numerical rankings as the real measure of the value of a college and university given the rich diversity of institutions in the United States — ranging from community colleges to research-intensive universities to four-year colleges and universities with diverse missions and circumstances — strikes me as a distracting and false value. There is an old saying that “some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing”; perhaps it could also be said that, while we may know how a select number of schools are ranked, the real value of a particular school to its students and the society it serves depends on countless factors that will never appear on a list of the so-called best. For example, it is not in the best interests of our society for schools to seek students through merit scholarships, thereby ignoring highly qualified students from low-income backgrounds. As University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kirwan has commented, a line is crossed “when in the pursuit of excellence, our financial aid gets distorted in a way that high-achieving, low-income students who are qualified to go to our best public institutions can’t.” The imperative to achieve excellence must not come at the expense of providing diverse educational programs for all facets of our nation’s population.

Love or loathe rankings, they are here to stay.  They are a worldwide phenomenon. Recently, the Institute for Higher Education Policy convened a conference in Berlin that produced 16 principles of good practice for ranking higher education institutions. The intent was for all organizations that produce rankings to hold themselves accountable for the quality of their data in its collection, methodology, and dissemination. They were also expected to particularly recognize the
diverse mission of institutions and be transparent in how the rankings are created. We need to acknowledge the limitations of rankings and the value of providing good and practical information to prospective students and the society at large, while insisting that the core value of any school is the education that it helps its students obtain.

In the final analysis, what counts is not who is today’s number one, but whether our colleges and universities are open and accessible to students of all ages and social and economic circumstances, and whether the American society is improving its total education system. The driving objective should be an educated and skilled citizenry that can compete in a world with those eager to overtake America’s educational and economic leadership. An America with perhaps 25 percent of its population relatively poor and educationally unprepared in mathematics, writing, science and technology will not be number one in anyone’s rankings — regardless of the methodology.