In a couple of weeks, I predict, the media will be filled with articles on rankings of colleges. Already, Princeton Review has come out with its effort, with attention focused on their “party schools of America” ranking. As a professor at a school that ranked #2 in those rankings (to the chagrin of the university administration), I must say I think they in a rough way convey good information to students as to schools that do not take learning overly seriously, emphasizing the socialization/consumption dimension of higher education. It is good for kids considering the University of Georgia and the University of Chicago to know that Georgia is a school that emphasizes academics far less than Chicago. Decades ago, Sigmund Romberg wrote a song for the musical “The Student Prince” with three words in its title: “Drink, Drink, Drink.” That describes the agenda for many students these days, so the Princeton Review serves its purposes.
But the more serious rankings will soon be released. Full disclosure: I am involved heavily in the construction of one of them, by Forbes, in conjunction with my Center for College Affordability and Productivity. However, I maintain friendly relations with Bob Morse and others at the leading US News & World Report ranking.
I predict that many in the Education Establishment will trash the rankings as soon as they are released. They will be labeled as non-scientific, elitist, poorly constructed, etc. etc. etc. Yet they will sell magazines, and Web-site hits for the sponsoring organizations will soar—because they are meeting a human need. People paying perhaps $100,000 or more over several years for college want to know what they are getting for their value, and they want that assessment to come from neutral third parties, not the promotional materials of the schools themselves. When you buy a house, usually you have a third party inspect it. When you buy a car, you read the rankings by J.D. Power or Consumer Reports. The same principle applies with colleges. The rankings give a sense of the relative quality of schools, imperfect as it may be.
I agree the rankings are imperfect. Moreover, I believe that the best rankings conceptually are “do-it-yourself” rankings that evaluate colleges on the criteria important to the would-be student, not the variables adjudged important by some organization. Yet the publishers of rankings hit on factors most individuals think are important, so, in a rough way, they convey very valuable information. If you are paying $50,000 a year to send your kid to either Harvard or George Washington U., other things equal, the quality of education is likely to be superior at Harvard, assuming the student can gain admittance. So the complaints of colleges are completely bogus. The main problem with the rankings is that colleges resist providing the kind of information that is important in assessing institutional quality:
- Do students learn a good deal while in school? Do seniors know more than freshmen?
- What is the probability that a freshman will graduate in four years?
- Do graduates of the school get good jobs upon graduation, or get into good graduate schools?
- Do students LIKE their institution—the classes and professors, the social dimensions, etc.
- Is the campus a safe environment—is there a lot of crime?
These are merely a few critical questions, but ones that colleges provide relatively little information about (there has been modest progress in answering these and other questions in recent years, but the key word is “modest.”) The Forbes/CCAP rankings have, in my humble and highly biased opinion, gone the furthest in getting at least partial answers to questions like those above, but even Forbes is stymied by the failure of schools to release information from instruments like the Collegiate Learning Assessment or the National Survey or Student Engagement. Great new web sites are finding ways to fill in some gaps, but more needs to be done.
In a perfect world, “accreditators” would become “information providers”, sort of like Consumer Reports or Underwriters Laboratories, giving potential users of college services good information that is consistent across institutions that would allow consumers to make informed choices. In the mean time, I, for one, applaud the rankers for doing their best to fill a real human need.
9 Responses to In Defense of College Rankings
dickhersh - August 9, 2010 at 9:31 am
Come on! This is the most self-serving piece I have seen in a long time.
rlsmith1994 - August 9, 2010 at 10:47 am
Here is the problem with Vedder’s perspective. Rankings, as they currently stand and as Vedder proposes, will not measure quality. If one were to take the freshman class at Harvard and put them in the woods for four years, they would probably still turn out pretty good. That’s the advantage of a lifetime of access to wealth, one-on-one tutors, exclusive private schools, not having to work as a teenager, and SAT summer camps. Would we say the forest is better at educating students than, say, a non-selective institution or one without the enormous resources at the disposal of a Harvard? Of course not. And that is the central problem with rankings and with Vedder’s perspective. They don’t measure institutional quality. They measure the degree to which a college or university doesn’t mess up.
dodgejohnson - August 9, 2010 at 12:23 pm
I can’t agree with much in this article, except that the rankings are popular and that they sell. And I’m happy to be among those who will trash them, but not for Mr. Vedder’s reasons that they are non-scientific, elitist, poorly constructed, etc. but rather because they are pernicious.
Colleges do not lend themselves to consumer-reports-style rankings, where measurements of quality are known in advance and can be quantified: for example, how clean a washer will get your clothes and how often on average it will need repair.
But much of what makes colleges effective cannot be quantified, and all the right questions are not known in advance. Like the students who apply, each college is a unique amalgam with its own personality. This is something rankings are not equipped to measure, let alone make comparisons – just as most colleges don’t base admissions decisions on quantifiable factors alone.
Let’s take Mr Vedder’s example: “If you are paying $50,000 a year to send your kid to either Harvard or George Washington U, other thingsequal, the quality of education is likely to be superior at Harvard.”
How so? Is teaching better? Rankings won’t tell you that, because good teaching depends on a blend of factors, many of which are subtle and many of which can’t be quantified. Just ask the colleges; they’ve struggled forever to measure teaching effectiveness as part of tenure and promotion.
Yes, rankings sell. People believe that because they are popular they are also a good indication of where they ought to apply. Rankings are not imperfect merely because they are unscientific or whatever, but because they are not a good tool to help answer questions that at bottom matter most to a student: which schools will be the best match in terms of my needs and plans.
None of these considerations would matter much if college rankings were a harmless pastime. But they are not. They have transformed how trustees and the public judge a college’s effectiveness. And they are the bedrock of the marketing engine driving multi-million dollar enterprises that have transformed admissions from a “best match” process into a trophy hunt.
Dodge JohnsonEducational Consultant
jesor - August 9, 2010 at 1:57 pm
The problem I have with this article is the assumption highlighted by this one sentence: “If you are paying $50,000 a year to send your kid to either Harvard or George Washington U., other things equal, the quality of education is likely to be superior at Harvard, assuming the student can gain admittance.”The quality of education obtained by a particular student is so subject to variables that are either difficult to measure, not reported, or out of the institution’s control that even the use of the word “likely” is laughable in this case. In a typical insitution (and even atypical ones like Harvard or GWU), there is much more variance in academic quality between departments and majors than there is between schools. Harvard and GWU, highly selective as they are, both fail students who came to them with 4.0 GPAs and perfect SAT or ACT scores, and I doubt that most of the students that failed out of these institutions were hiding something or somehow cheated to obtain their admissions credentials. This is a clear indicator that selectivity does not equal educational quality, it just is a reflection of a combination of public perception and pricing. It is also an indicator that there is a possibility that smart highly qualified students can have problems outside of the college’s control.There is one point that I do agree on though. Colleges, with the ever increasing price tag, do need to make more information available on the actual educational quality of various institutions. As more information is shared on what works and what doesn’t, the side benefit is that colleges can learn from each other and improve their quality and not just live off of a selectivity assumption generated when only 2% of the US even attended college.
digitalangel - August 9, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I’m shocked by the extremely negative reactions to this article. As a college senior beginning the process of applying to graduate programs in bioinformatics, I would love to have a list of ranked programs as a place to start my search. As Vedder acknowledges, such a list is somewhat subjective and the institutions providing these ranking do not have access to all relevant information. This does not, by any means, make ranking worthless. From having spoken to friends at other institutions I feel very safe claiming that higher ranked programs have higher workloads and more challenging courses. Whether this leads to better learning is debatable, but the rankings definitely measure something relevant to me. More importantly than what rankings do offer, is what they could offer. Students have a right to know what sort of institution they are choosing to attend. With greater cooperation from colleges and accreditors, more student opinions and more detailed information about specific degree programs could be made available to prospective students. I think something similar to CollegeProwler would be the best sources of information for prospective students (http://collegeprowler.com/) because it bases all rankings on student responses. And speaking from experience, there are some things you really can’t find out about an institution until you’ve been a student there.
11147066 - August 11, 2010 at 11:52 am
Self-serving is a kind characterization of this defense of rankings. The rankings compile subjective reactions and lack any real context. Worse, the colleges, so concerned with the results, use their potential rankings to manipulate students in order to obtain the desired results of low admissions and high yields. In order to do this they present small sets of minimally relevant data without offering any real transparency about either the admissions process or actual academics at the college. Asking kids if they like their school or their professors may be a fine way to start a productive conversation but it cannot claim to have any real validity. Most consumers have no idea how these rankings distort such different factors as number of faculty publications and faculty awards in order to falsely promote their undergraduate programs, which may be unaffected by these numbers. I would grant that a party school rating of number one is probably fairly accurate. To obtain information that broad and obvious one doesn’t even need access to “official” ratings. All colleges should refuse to cooperate with these bogus ratings and instead publish much more significant data about their insitutions in an open and transparent manner.Emily
saraid - August 16, 2010 at 4:44 pm
It’s true that rankings sell.I also know that psychics, fortune tellers, and magic 8-balls also sell quite well and definitely fill a human need.It’s not that I feel these things are comparable… except on the basis you’ve offered.
adelel - August 16, 2010 at 6:05 pm
It is true that prospective students have little to go on from college ranking reports. The reality of their college experience can be quite different, however. Colleges do not share important information, especially concerning the fifth point concerning campus crime. The issue of attention to rape on many college campuses is long overdue by ranking publications. It should be a specific factor in the rankings and noted if colleges do not report. Unreported and difficult for prospective students and families to find data, it has become the elephant in the room for female students that attend many highly rated schools. My daughter graduated from a small ivy college with great academics in 2006, was not a victim, but it fell to students to draw attention to the issue and to launch prevention campaigns. Colleges are not transparent for obvious reasons, preventing prospective students from comparing statistics as one factor in their decisions. A safe environment is a growing issue in America and should be treated more seriously. The college ranking media should take the lead on this most important safety issue.
marka - August 17, 2010 at 4:20 pm
5. digitalangel – August 09, 2010 at 03:31 pm – Right on!I too am appalled by the negative comments – as if because measurements are imperfect, there shouldn’t be any.I sincerely doubt that any of the nay-sayers eschew ratings or other measurements in their own lives. For example, what is the ‘quality of life’ at the workplace, or home town? Is that doctor/lawyer/plumber any good? How about the local K-12 schools for our kids?If we can – and do – use measurements or metrics of some sort to evaluate these kinds of decisions (do I move or stay? Do I go to one professional or another? Do I send my kids to the local public school, or a private school, or move?) – why shouldn’t we use such measurements for colleges? And can’t we do better than simply asking our colleagues, family & friends for thoughts?Sure we can – crime rates (although many campus ‘fudge’ the data on this, not wanting to be transparent & honest about rape/drugs), graduation rates (again, often fudged), placement rates, success after graduation (say, 5, 10, 20 year intervals? we do this kind of social research all the time, why not apply to colleges?)