It’s 85 suspenseful days to the November election, but only 11 days until the election that generates an even greater mix of hope, anxiety, joy, and despair in higher ed circles. The first election is for president of the United States. The second, according to the U.S. News & World Report Web site, is a week from Friday. It’s the election in which U.S. News will announce which schools have made its Top 50 for 2009 in the categories of national universities and liberal-arts colleges.
The stakes are high, which explains the nail biting. Despite the rankings’ well-established imperfections, high school seniors and college counselors take them seriously (fair payback, I suppose, for our taking standardized test scores so seriously.) Climb into the Top 50, or rise within it, and it stands to reason that the quality of your college’s applicant pool will rise as well. Fall down or — God forbid — fall off that list, and equal and opposite consequences may follow.
For Rhodes College, where I teach, the stakes seem especially high this year. When I came here in 1991 Rhodes had, with good reason, been named the No. 1 “up-and-coming” national liberal-arts college in the country two years in a row, based on U.S. News surveys of college presidents and deans. Ten years later, when the magazine decided to extend its roster of ranked colleges beyond the previously listed Top 40, Rhodes debuted at 38 (based, as best I can tell from the Web site, on data from 1999). Since then, we’ve been sliding downward — to 45 for for several years and then to a three-way tie for 49 last year. A three-way tie for 49 is, of course, also a three-way tie for 51.
I’ll be staying up late on election night in November. But I’ll be getting up early next Friday and, if anything, rooting even harder for my candidate to do well.
