Anyone interested in the college rankings game will want to catch this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle offers a mother lode of articles — much of it freely accessible from the website.
The package includes the following free, no-subscription-required articles:
The main story: Playing the ratings game. Subhead: “Many college officials are asking hard questions about the methodology and effect of the ‘U.S. News’ rankings. One complaint: The survey overwhelmingly favors private institutions.”
What the rankings do for U.S. News. “Last year the U.S. News college issue was among 17 perennial ‘moneymakers,’ according to a list compiled by min: Media Industry Newsletter. Only one other U.S. News issue (‘America’s Best Hospitals’) made that perennials list, which also included the likes of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, People‘s ‘Sexiest Man Alive,’ and Forbes‘s ‘400 Richest Americans.’ Neither Time nor Newsweek had a cover on the perennials list.”
College rankings catch on overseas. “Last year Ms. Hazelkorn surveyed 202 institutions around the world and found that many had tried to improve their places in national or international rankings. ‘You see areas [of study] being dropped and other areas being bought together for greater critical mass,’ she says. ‘At Irish and British universities, there has been a big push in the last 12 months to hire Nobel Prize laureates.'”
Fixing a fatal flaw in ‘U.S. News’ rankings. “[T]he editors state ‘the rankings can be a powerful tool in your quest for college.’ But how valuable is that assistance if it gives a relatively high ranking to a college that closes before the end of a student’s freshman year?”
Lots of meaty reading here. Kudos to the Chronicle for making it available for free.
Related: Rank this, U.S. News — a piece by one of the dozen college presidents who is urging fellow college and university leaders to boycott “the magazine’s equivalent of the ‘American Idol’ voting process” (via University Business).
Andrew Careaga 