In August, Mark Parkinson, Kansas’ Democratic governor, said that within 10 years at least one of his state’s public universities should be among the top 50 in U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings and that a second state university should be in the top 100. Now the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies college accountability, has released a policy brief urging lawmakers not to make changes in higher education based solely on those kinds of rankings.
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One Response to Report Warns Lawmakers About College Rankings
jeff1 - September 11, 2009 at 7:12 am
I think the rankings system devised by U.S. News has serious methodological flaws given the weight of opinions of provosts, presidents and adminissions officers. That said, the general pecking order that it produces is relatively consistent from year to year and it is rare to see institutions move very much either up or down the scale. It is therefore probably as good a tool as any, among other institutional measures, to push change as the governor argues (I am in my 10th year as an academic administrator). Let’s face it the rankings are what they are, one data point, that many people, including students and parents pay attention to.