OUTSIDE the world of sports, the country rarely finds itself consumed with college rankings. One of those occasions came in August, when the newest edition of U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges" issue was published.
The purpose of a university is to educate students, and so the best universities are the ones that provide the best education. The U.S. News and World Report ranking does a disservice to both students and universities by basing its formula largely on irrelevant or unreliable statistics. While the University cannot single-handedly change the ranking system, there are concrete steps that our admissions office could take to apply pressure. Reforming the system would benefit not only prospective applicants but the University itself, which stands to gain a great deal from joining efforts to change the system.
Claiming that one single formula can define the quality of a university is quite bold. The U.S. News and World Report's formula is especially bold, and its influence even more disturbing, for its reliance on several baffling statistics. Take, for example, graduation rate performance, which is five percent of a college's score. This is not, as one might think, simply a measurement of the actual graduation rate. This category measures the difference between the school's actual graduation rate and the "expected" rate, which U.S. News picks. Essentially, a university is better if its graduation rate exceeds the editors' prediction, and worse if it falls below. It is beyond me how one magazine's expectation has anything to do with a school's quality.
Equally indefensible is the "reputation" category, which forms 25 percent of a college's score. The magazine calculates this by asking university officials to rank other universities on a scale of one to five. Any reasonable person can understand that one cannot define a university's reputation on a simple scale of one to five, or any other numerical scale for that matter. There are all kinds of components that contribute to a university's reputation -- famous professors, quality departments, architecture, etc. -- and seeking to reduce this to a single measurement is absurd. One might also point out that opinions from officials of other schools have little bearing on the educational value of a university.
Critics have been pointing out flaws like these in the rankings since their inception, but a recent development has brought the strongest opposition yet. In May 2007, Lloyd Thacker, president of an educational non-profit organization called The Education Conservancy, sent a letter to university presidents across the country. The so-called President's Letter asks university presidents to commit to two things: refuse to fill out the reputation survey and promise not to use the rankings in any promotional efforts. So far, 61 universities have signed the pledge. While many of them are quite respected, none are in the top 25 of the U.S. News ranking.
This presents the University administration with a historic opportunity. If President Casteen were to sign the President's Letter, the University would be by far the most prominent signatory so far. The University would be naturally poised to become a leader in the rankings reform movement. It might lead to a drop in U.S. News's reputation assessment, but becoming the first elite university to join such an important campaign could not but improve our real-world reputation.
The move would produce tangible benefits for the University as well. U.S. News tends to undervalue public universities: They will inevitably score lower in categories such as class size, faculty-student ratio, and acceptance rate (which combine to be 10.5 percent of the score) simply because they are required by the government to admit larger numbers of students than private universities. If a public university were to severely decrease the number of students admitted (and, of course, raise tuition to make up the deficit), its ranking would significantly rise. It takes a truly perverse system to count such steps as progress.
Stephen Parsley's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at sparsley@cavalierdaily.com.
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