Reaming College Rankings (by Marty Kaplan at HuffPost)

[marmar]

Marty Kaplan

Reaming College Rankings

Scores of American college presidents kicked U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings in the nuts this week; this follows the wedgie delivered to the magazine by a dozen college presidents last month.

A quarter-century ago, U.S. Snooze, as it was once known, devised a brilliant marketing strategy to escape its own somnolent reputation as the reading matter of choice in mid-western dental waiting rooms: it would become the premier ranker of the reputations of the nation's colleges and universities. By devising a kind of Consumer Reports for higher education, the magazine not only solved its own branding problem; it also created a cash cow for the company. And speaking of cows, until now America's colleges and universities have been remarkably bovine in their acquiescence to this system.

The problem with U.S. News' college rankings isn't that institutions of higher education shouldn't be held accountable for the quality of services they provide. With prices approaching $50,000 a year at some places, it's perfectly reasonable for families to wonder whether the brand name they're purchasing - a prestigious merit badge to monetize in the job marketplace - also delivers a decent education. The problem is that the fierce competition among colleges to raise their rankings torques the priorities of colleges toward the criteria that U.S. News uses. "Leadership" is a quality routinely invoked in academia, but when it comes to exerting educational leadership - meaning, for example, an institution's bravely deciding for itself how to define and measure excellence - American higher education has since 1983 been largely content to outsource that job to a for-profit magazine's monopoly cottage industry.

Example: The U.S. News formula rewards colleges with smaller class size, which creates pressure from administrators to get rid of large lecture courses, no matter how popular they are. There's nothing wrong with intimate learning settings, but who says there's no magic to be had in a packed lecture hall where an intellectual giant holds hundreds of people rapt?

Example: Many colleges have become slaves to SAT scores and high school GPAs - not because admissions officers think they're such reliable indicators of intelligence or achievement, but because U.S. News weights them so heavily. Despite lip service to diversity and individuality, it is more difficult than ever to make a successful case for admitting a dazzling but academically eccentric kid whose so-so numbers pull down the average and jeopardize a school's U.S. News ranking.

Example: In its formula, U.S. News uses the percentage of a class's alumni who give money to their college as a proxy for student satisfaction with their education. The actual size of a donation doesn't matter, nor the reason (football pride?) for their gift. A college that games this system -- say, offering graduating senior ten dollars, coupled with a request to "check this box, pledge two dollars a year to your alma mater, and for the next five years you'll be automatically enrolled in your alumni association" -- may not swell its endowment, but it could boost its ranking. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/reaming-college-rankings_b_52995.html