The criteria used to determine college rankings in publications like U.S. News and World Report are flawed and should be restructured, four East Coast scholars proposed in a recent paper.
The researchers — who are professors at Harvard University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania — devised a new ranking method based on students’ final enrollment decisions.
Using the professors’ criteria, Northwestern ranked 21st in the nation. By comparison, U.S. News and World Report’s 2004-05 college rankings had NU tied with two other schools for 11th place.
The recent report’s authors surveyed counselors at 420 high schools nationwide to obtain data from more than 3,000 students, all of whom were in the top 10 percent of their classes. They recorded which schools admitted the students, as well as the student’s eventual enrollment decision. The authors then used the information supplied to come up with a new list of rankings.
Carol Lunkenheimer, NU’s dean of Undergraduate Admissions, said the report’s data is not comprehensive.
“Their sample is really small, and I think that they said it was mostly people in the east, also,” Lunkenheimer said. “I think it’s sort of skewed geographically. I don’t see how you would draw any firm conclusions from it.”
Lunkenheimer added that many high schools lack appropriate college counselors and it would be “impractical” to collect information on a national level.
The method probably will not be applied nationwide because it would be too time-consuming and expensive, said Mark Glickman, one of the report’s authors and a professor of health services at Boston University.
The proposed method does not necessarily rank colleges more accurately than annual publication rankings similar to U.S. News and World Report, but it has a more direct methodology, said Chris Avery, another author and a public policy professor at Harvard.
“I think we’re really clear about what it is we’re measuring,” Avery said. “I think U.S. News is purportedly taking a very scientific approach and yet picking really arbitrary factors.”
Critics of traditional college ranking methods say the emphasis on selectivity and yield rate — the percentage of students accepted who actually attend — puts pressure on colleges to rely more heavily on early decision students or distort their admissions processes.
Richard Folkers, director of media relations for U.S. News and World Report, said the magazine stopped factoring in yield for last year’s rankings.
Selectivity still remains part of the magazine’s college ranking equation, which Avery said is a problem.
“They had a publicity blitz when they did it, but they haven’t completely eliminated the incentive to admit early students,” Avery said.
NU sociology Prof. Bernard Beck said ranking colleges is “silly” because it oversimplifies a complex decision. Still people are likely to take note of the rankings regardless, Beck said.
“Once you have rankings like that, it’s hard not to pay attention,” said Beck, who has taught at NU since 1965. “There’s all sorts of reasons why we criticize the SATs, but when the numbers come out it’s hard to avoid looking at them and giving them some kind of weight.”
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