College students and administrators throughout the nation will engage in one of higher education's most well-known traditions when they delve into U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings, which will be released today. Although this event is enjoyed by those students who gain a year's worth of bragging rights, it nevertheless highlights a major flaw in the U.S. higher education system.
Specifically, the methodology U.S. News uses when compiling its rankings is skewed heavily against institutions that emphasize academic variety and cost effectiveness. This undermines both the long-standing principle that colleges and universities should provide a holistic brand of education for their students, as well as the more recent goal to keep costs related to higher education in check so as to expand access. Therefore, regardless of where the University finds itself in today's rankings, students, administrators and policymakers should judge it according to a different set of criteria that account for how well it is realizing the important social aims of higher education.
The U.S. News rankings are a poor benchmark because of the factors considered when determining an institution's quality. According to last year's methodology, the indicators that were measured for national universities including the University were undergraduate academic reputation (weighted at 22.5 percent), graduation and freshman retention (20 percent), faculty resources (20 percent), student selectivity (15 percent), financial resources (10 percent), graduation rate performance (7.5 percent) and alumni giving rate (5 percent). These categories fail to provide a nuanced look at various institutions, and emphasizing them tends to incentivize universities to engage in practices that can be wasteful and counterproductive.
For example, U.S. News only measures faculty resources in the aggregate rather than taking into account interdepartmental equity. Thus, a university would not be penalized for pouring money into a particularly popular program to raise faculty salaries and cut down class sizes while simultaneously neglecting other fringe academic offerings. This is troubling at a time when the federal government is cutting the support that has kept afloat specialized programs related to cultural studies and foreign languages.
In the coming years, universities will have to decide whether to fill in the funding gap for these programs at the expense of larger, more financially stable departments. They should gain special recognition for doing so, since it will attract students from historically underrepresented demographic groups and serve the national interest by providing all students with diverse perspectives and academic skills that will allow them to function in an increasingly internationalized economy.
The U.S. News rankings' current structure, however, incentivizes universities to do the opposite. This is because an institution's alumni giving rate is considered "an indirect measure of student satisfaction." Unfortunately, this means universities that produce a high proportion of degrees in lucrative fields are likelier to score well in this category even if they objectively do not provide students with a more enjoyable collegiate experience. Hence, universities are tempted to shortchange departments related to certain cultural, foreign language and social sciences programs that produce degree holders with less earning potential since they need to generate graduates with the most disposable income if they hope to maximize their score in terms of alumni giving.
Finally, the most serious flaw with the U.S. News rankings is the financial resources category discourages universities from operating efficiently. "Generous per-student spending indicates that a college can offer a wide variety of programs and services," the publication wrote in last year's methodology. "U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services, and related educational expenditures." This is hardly the optimal way to measure quality, though, when state and federal funding to universities is declining and tuition is skyrocketing at both public and private institutions.
Rather, U.S. News should consider how cost-effective universities are with the funds they possess and use metrics such as degrees produced per $100,000 to rank their performance. This would buoy public institutions that are doing more with less, and would drive private universities to provide lower-cost degree options that would be accessible to more students. Ultimately, it will return money to tuition-paying families and taxpayers as universities discover they can improve their rankings by implementing efficiency-based reforms such as online classes and accelerated degree programs rather than funneling more money into projects that are tangentially related to providing students with an education.
Until U.S. News changes its standards, however, administrators are caught in a bind. If they attempt to counteract the system independently, they risk causing their universities to be downgraded. This, in turn, will impact how they score in the largest single U.S. News category - undergraduate academic reputation. This amounts to a catch-22 that may serve the interests of U.S. News but harms those of the institutions it ranks and the students it aims to inform.
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