LAST WEEK, with the usual accompanying level of brouhaha, the U.S. News & World Report's rankings on the best graduate schools in the country came out. This was followed, as it is every year, by much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth as administrators fretted over the results. And, as happens every year, there was the usual protest as people decried the rankings as arbitrary, meaningless and generally a waste of time. In reality, for all the hoopla and craziness that can accompany them, school rankings are helpful in a number of ways.
For one thing, the rankings are for students what SATs are for colleges. For students, knowing a school's ranking gives them a general idea of the school's quality, just as SATs give colleges a general - albeit imperfect - idea of a student's level of verbal and math skills. Of course, just like colleges don't use SATs as the sole deciding factor of admission, students usually don't base their entire decision on where to apply based on a school's ranking. Because both the rankings and SATs are based on hard numbers, they provide a good objective measuring stick, something that is constant across all schools and all students. Like the SATs, the rankings aren't everything. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive whole. Just as schools consider personal statements, recommendations and transcripts in addition to SATs, a student considering a school looks at the strength of its programs, its size and surroundings and, ultimately, whether or not they can see themselves spending four years there.
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Rankings also can be constructive in that they give schools feedback on how they're doing. They allow schools to see where they stand in respect to other schools, and give them an indication about areas in which they need to improve.
The best thing about school rankings is that they make universities strive for greatness in academics. Rankings are the academic version of the Rose Bowl. They come around every year, and every year schools do their best to improve so that they can get closer to the top next time. Having schools compete for academic recognition is important in an age when colleges are focusing a lot of their attention on things besides education. This is especially true at a school like the University, where sports sometimes take precedence over academics. One needs only to look at the way funding gets allocated - Scott Stadium receives an all-out renovation while the classrooms in Cabell Hall are falling apart - to see that academics are sometimes left on the wayside.
The rankings are a yearly wake up call to administrators to keep their eye on what's important, namely, academics and not guys in tight pants trying to stop one another from getting an oddly shaped ball. As entertaining as sports are and as lucrative as they can be, it's also nice to have schools competing over academic excellence and not football for a change.
Furthermore, a lot of people wrongly argue that the rankings are completely without meaning. Just because the rankings are based on statistics doesn't mean that they're worthless or that they don't indicate anything substantial about the school. In fact, statistics can indicate a lot. One of the things taken into account when ranking schools is their freshman retention rate. This can be an indication of the quality of life at a school by showing how many students like it enough to stay on after their first year.
Likewise, the student-to-faculty ratio lets students know how often they can expect to have face time with a professor and how big their classes are going to be. Even alumni giving rates reveal something. The level of loyalty and gratitude a school can inspire in its alumni says something about how good of an experience the alumni had at the school while they were students. Presumably, people who feel bitter about how bad their college experience was won't be giving their alma mater any money.
Of course, rankings, like SATs, are only useful when they are not turned into a big, overly inflated deal. They're not very helpful when people get obsessed with them, perverting them so much from their original causes that they don't even mean anything anymore. This can be said of SATs because of the way they've become an all-consuming focus of high schoolers' lives. It can also be said of college rankings, when people take them a bit too seriously and declare that they simply won't consider a school if it isn't in the top 10. All in all, rankings are just a compilation of some general statistics about schools and a general indicator of quality. For students to find the school that is truly right for them, they'll have to expend a little more energy than it takes to flip through the latest rankings list.
(Laura Sahramaa is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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