This is the kind of spontaneous publicity — your name in print — that makes people!
Steve Martin, from The Jerk (YouTube clip).
The new U.S. News & World Report annual college rankings are here! And for the eighth year running, Princeton is again at the top of heap. No big news there. What is the big news about this year’s rankings is what one media report calls “a swirl of controversy.”
The controversy has been brewing for months. It began with a group of presidents from U.S. liberal arts colleges banding together to protest U.S. News’ methodology for compiling the rankings. The protesting presidents, known collectively as the Annapolis Group, object to the “flawed” approach to ranking colleges and universities, especially the subjective reputational survey. The group plans to create an alternative to the U.S. News and other commercial rankings, and many of its members have opted out of this year’s rankings.
But not everyone has joined the cause. Many of the highly ranked liberal arts schools apparently see no need to protest.
And, even as the number of schools opting out of the U.S. News rankings has risen, and the number refusing to complete the magazine’s reputational survey has “plunged to its lowest level ever” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, subscription required), some of the campuses that pledged to end the relationship with the annual rating ritual are having a tough time of it. Breaking up is hard to do, it seems — especially when the ratings help an institution’s reputation.
As the Associated Press reports (“Colleges Struggle to Quit Rankings Habit,” via the Washington Post):
Sixty-two colleges have enlisted in an anti-rankings campaign led by education activist Lloyd Thacker. But a quick Web search shows even some of those schools haven’t fulfilled a pledge to stop using their rankings to advertise themselves. And none of the highest-ranked schools have formally signed on.
Interviews by The Associated Press with top officials at about a dozen elite colleges confirm a fault line in the rankings debate that’s more than coincidence: It irks educators everywhere to see colleges ranked like basketball teams. But it irks educators at the top-ranked colleges a lot less.
If the battle against the ratings game is to be won, it “‘must be led by the beneficiaries,’ Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in upstate New York, wrote in a recent letter to U.S. News and to fellow college presidents, saying he would sign on to the protest if schools like Harvard, Princeton and Williams do so first. [Way to step up to the plate there, Leon. – Ed.] ‘To end a corrupt and misleading game, the winners, not the losers, have to call it quits.'”
At some of the highest-ranked colleges, officials declined to comment. Some that did said they are sympathetic to Thacker’s case (many already refrain from advertising their rankings, at least in their own publications). And some are cooperating, at least partially. …
But they also say the rankings are a fact of life — and not an entirely bad one.
“In some respects, colleges and universities may have been too immune in the past to any kind of accountability for our practices, and students and families deserve to know as much as possible about the educational investment that they are about to make,” said Robert Clagett, dean of admission at Middlebury College in Vermont, wrote in an e-mail.
This morning’s New York Times offers a similar take on the rankings (“College Ratings Race Roars on Despite Concerns“). “[T]here is little sign that the rankings race is diminishing,” the Times reports, adding that “virtually none of the most select and highly ranked colleges signed on” to protest the rankings.
Indeed, the rankings are so influential, two decades after they were started, that one clause in the contract of Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, promises a $10,000 bonus if he can raise its standing. Frustrated college officials and high school guidance counselors say the magazine is not only reporting on how colleges perform, but is also changing their behavior as they try to devise gambits to scurry into the top ranks.
Despite the criticism, and even as U.S. News faces increasing competition in the higher ed ratings game from the Princeton Review (due out Monday), Fiske, Kaplan’s, Kiplinger’s and a slew of other publications, U.S. News remains at the top of the rankings game. And, just like Princeton, it’s likely to keep its spot at the top for quite some time.
Andy writes! 