What do the numbers 9, 23 and 76 have in common? They’re all rankings Georgetown has received recently. College counselors surveyed by U.S. News and World Report ranked Georgetown ninth, tied with seven other schools; the actual U.S. News ranking kept the University in its 23 spot; and Forbes, the newcomer in this year’s ranking bonanza, sent Georgetown crashing down to 76, behind the likes of Wabash College (12) and Kalamazoo College (57). No, I haven’t heard of them either.
However trivial, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing your school ranked above the alma mater of your high school rival; and fortunately, with publications jostling to get the final word on which is the best place to pursue your higher education, most students can find a survey that allows them to claim victory. (Except for those who go to Harvard and Princeton – they beat basically everyone else, no matter who you ask – U.S. News puts the schools at one and two, respectively, and Forbes ranks them three and one.)
This is the first year that Forbes has decided to challenge the near monopoly U.S. News has had on college rankings since 1987. Excluding Princeton and Harvard, the Ivies and the top universities took a big hit from the business magazine, and the editors are clearly proud of themselves: “Competition is good,” Richard Vedder and Michael Noer write in the introductory article. “And for too many years, information about the quality of American higher education has been monopolized by one publication, U.S. News and World Report. We offer an alternative.”
That alternative is to combine universities, state schools, liberal arts colleges and military academies into one big list of 369 schools. Then the magazine rates them on five criteria: how many alumni were listed in 2008’s Who’s Who in America; students’ evaluations of professors on ratemyprofessor.com; four-year graduation rates; the number of faculty and students who receive awards like the Rhodes scholarship; and the average student debt accumulated over four years.
It’s fine to challenge the status quo, but Forbes is not being very smart about it. Although most criticism about U.S. News’ ranking methods is warranted, it at least attempts to grasp the quality of a school, using criteria like retention rates and student-to-faculty ratios.
Rather than actually evaluating the value of “best of” lists and the effect they have on higher education, Forbes simply plays into the rankings game, creating new rules and criteria so as to deliver a radically different result from U.S. News’s. And Forbes delivers, with a list that is at best preposterous. The amount of debt someone accrues over four years of college may be disheartening, but it is not indicative of the quality of education one receives at a particular institution, and even students don’t take ratemyprofessor seriously.
Valerie Youmans of Georgetown’s admissions office wrote in an e-mail that “the U.S. News rankings has far more effect on [high school] seniors,” and she dismissed Forbes as a “maverick” in the college rankings business, although a few “CEO parents” might be affected.
Last year at a June meeting of the Annapolis group, a majority of the 80 liberal arts college presidents in attendance agreed to essentially boycott the U.S. News ranking exercise by not submitting peer evaluation surveys and statistics. Reed College had taken the same action twelve years earlier, in 1995.
It is not realistic to disband the cash cow that is college rankings – a 2009 edition of the U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” cost a whopping $10, and according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, last year about 50,000 people dropped $14.95 for U.S. News’ online in-depth college guide. But at least there are schools standing up to the system instead of sniveling.
University President Jack DeGioia, for his part, seems to have taken the Forbes beating and the absurdity of the college rankings in stride.
“Well I can show you ones that rank us 250,” he said yesterday.
