Georgetown University ranked 20th on an Atlantic Monthly college survey that was created to compete with the widely read U.S. News & World Report ranking system. The rankings were created to support The Atlantic’s claims that a school’s selectivity is an inaccurate measure of the quality of its education.
The Atlantic’s rankings were based on the schools’ admission rates and the students’ average SAT scores and high school class ranks-categories that most college admissions officers consider the best indicators of a school’s performance, the article said. Each of these categories was weighted equally.
Dean of Admissions Charles Deacon said that the new rankings will not have an effect on Georgetown admissions. “If sometime Georgetown ends up miraculously ranking in the top five somewhere, that would have an effect,” he said.
Deacon added that while the rankings intended to reveal the inadequacy of such hard data-based systems, it was not meant to be a serious ranking.
While more selective schools do generally rank higher, the correlation is not perfect. The United States Coast Guard Academy, for example, is the most selective of the top 50 universities, with an 8 percent acceptance rate, but it is only ranked 47th.
In several articles which accompanied the rankings, the magazine also criticized the widely read U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for weighing a school’s resources more heavily than the educational experience it provides.
The Atlantic more explicitly criticized the U.S. News & World Report rankings in the survey. “What U.S. News-style data actually measure is an institution’s wealth in resources,” one article said. “For several years now there has been a strong consensus among top education researchers that many colleges, partly because of rankings, are focusing to little on what really matters-what goes on in the classroom.”
The Atlantic offered the National Survey of Student Engagement as a better alternative. The survey asks freshman and seniors from more than 730 schools questions about faculty interaction, assignments, and intellectual stimulation at their schools. This year about 150,000 students took part in the survey.
The Atlantic said that the National Survey more accurately evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of universities. Unfortunately, however, most schools do not want the results of this survey released, and they are not widely available.
Deacon sees some value of such rankings in spreading information. He compared knowledge about a university to a pebble being thrown into a large lake. A student who grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to Georgetown Preparatory Academy would get the first ripple of information, he said. “But the seventh ripple is the poor Latino kid in the Central Valley in California. How is he going to know about Georgetown?” Deacon said. “That is where the rankings are useful.”
However, he believes that rankings do not fully represent the quality of Georgetown education. He notes that while on the U.S. News list Georgetown is 23rd, on the Wall Street Journal’s rankings, which looks at success in graduate school admission, Georgetown comes in much higher at 17th.
Moreover, he notes that the sheer number of such ranking systems only adds to the chaos of the college process. “All of these things are creating kind of a muddle,” he said.
