Category: college rankings

Friday Five: higher ed odds and sods

Important stuff about Twitter, LinkedIn, Unigo, rankings and geeks

While I slack, other higher ed bloggers and news outlets have been cranking out some good stuff. Here are five recent posts you should check out:

  1. 10 reasons to monitor Twitter. Fellow Twitter junkie Brad J. Ward‘s list is solid. And he offers examples, straight from the tweeters.
  2. A case study on setting up a LinkedIn alumni group. Last spring I posted about Caltech’s use of LinkedIn to connect with alumni. Kyle James picked up and ran with the idea. Here, he details how Wofford College set up their own LinkedIn group.
  3. Creating the college anti-rankings. Inside Higher Ed reports on the Education Conservancy‘s creation of College Speaks, “an explicitly anti-rankings system for the college search.” A prototype was presented Thursday at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling Conference in Seattle. (The Education Conservancy is best known for campaigning against the “reputational” surveys used by U.S. News & World Report for its rankings.)
  4. Sam Jackson extols the virtues of Unigo. Unigo is the latest player in the college search game but it leverages the power of social networking by involving students. It launched last week with 225 colleges and universities and 30,000-plus reviews. Jackson was involved in its creation so he has an insider’s perspective.
  5. MIT: We’re not all geeks. Really. This MIThBusters video protesting the MIT nerd stereotype may have had the opposite effect. According to the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, “the video frustrated one of MIT’s most-famous geeks, Henry Jenkins, a co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.” He ranted on his blog: “Most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

A ranking that might really matter

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that aerospace giant Boeing is poised to enter the college rankings business. According to the (password-protected) Chronicle report, “The Chicago-based aerospace giant has spent the past year matching internal data from employee evaluations with information about the colleges its engineers attended. It has used that analysis to create a ranking system, which it plans to unveil in the coming month, that will show which colleges have produced the workers it considers most valuable.”

With a 160,000-person work force that includes 35,000 engineers worldwide, Boeing may make a mark where the government and others have not — raising the possibility that employers could become a major force for college accountability.

“We want to have more than just subjective information” for evaluating the colleges that Boeing visits to recruit and hire, said Richard D. Stephens, the company’s senior vice president for human resources and administration. “We want to have some concrete facts and data.”

Boeing plans to keep the rankings confidential, much to the chagrin of college administrators who hope their institutions make the top grades. “Self-promotion is especially likely because some lesser-known institutions will be revealed as having done an ‘excellent’ job of producing high-performing Boeing engineers, Mr. [Richard D.] Stephens [Boeing’s senior VP for HR and administration] said, without identifying any such colleges ahead of their expected notification.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays. For a school like ours, with a heavy emphasis on engineering, a good grade from a company like Boeing would be well worth trumpeting. Verification of our programs from a major employer of our graduates would carry a lot of weight with the parents of prospective students, especially in these tough economic times. But there’s always a down side to playing the rankings game. No matter whose doing the ranking, there’s always a chance that you won’t make the grade next year.