My suspicion of academic rankings was long ago solidified by a letter from U.S. News & World Report that addressed me as an engineering educator and asked me to rank schools of engineering. As a repeat student in remedial trigonometry during far-gone undergraduate days, I was neither interested in nor capable of engineering studies. I wouldn’t know a good engineering department from a bad school for plumbers’ assistants. Obviously a mixup — request ignored. But I’ve always wondered whether I could have skewed the tables — even a little bit — with my ignorance-based rankings. No way of knowing. But I’ve also wondered why anyone should have confidence in the rankings of organizations as complex, diverse, and evolving as institutions of higher education, even assuming high-minded expertise.
This old and well-worked-over question arises anew because of the latest word on the purported gold standard of ratings for graduate programs, “Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States,” a $5-million production based at the elite National Academy of Sciences. First produced in 1982, and followed by an edition in 1995, the new edition, originally due in 2005 and then rescheduled for last September, is now promised for spring 2008. Thus, there’s time to abort the mission and enter the data in an educational archive, where it can harmlessly reside and perhaps someday provide fodder for a dissertation or two.
The final product will surely reflect great care, knowledgeable assessments of various university programs, and basic statistical minutiae. It will even eschew the horse-race aspect, replacing numerical rankings with ranges. But before this enterprise comes to fruition, consideration should be given to an important but neglected matter: Will graduate education benefit from the big book? There’s obviously a widespread expectation that it will, given the groans of disappointment at the publication delays. But there’s plenty of reason to think not.
Given the voracious attention lavished on U.S. News’s celebrated rankings, the coming product from a far-more prestigious source is guaranteed to land with even greater impact and potential for even greater pernicious effects. Consider that several dozen highly respected colleges are so fed up with the magazine’s ratings game that they refuse to supply information. No matter. The U.S. News rankings continue to feed the admissions frenzy. Participating schools routinely mine it for nuggets that enhance their image but have little or nothing to do with academic quality. To conjure up an appearance of exclusiveness in admissions, more than a few notable institutions shamelessly hint in straight-faced letters to college-bound seniors that you look like our kind of student, thus drawing more applications, which make possible more rejections — a key ingredient of the “hot school” image.
When the graduate school report finally emerges, academe’s swelling breed of merchandisers will swarm over the pages to extract the best possible image for the home team. The academic race for glory and prestige will intensify, though with no necessary connection to academic worth. The winners will feel that the surveyors got it right. The lesser-ranked schools will indict the survey methodology or find other grounds for claiming a bum decision. The New York Times and a few other papers will profit from the new phenomenon in higher education —full-page ads from universities asserting academic distinction, even greatness.
Presidents, provosts, deans, and graduate students are generally tuned into the informal grapevine of academic ratings. The big book is superfluous; its contents are soon out of date and easily put to purposes that distort, rather than enhance, sound academic values. Still another delay in publication is warranted — an indefinite delay.
