Entries for November 2007

U.S. News has launched its first-ever list of America's Best High Schools, which has been in development for around two years. The analysis of nearly 19,000 public high schools in the United States is available starting November 30 here and on newsstands as of December 3 in the weekly magazine issue dated Dec. 10, 2007.

The effort has been led by Brian Kelly, U.S.News & World Report's editor, who was responsible for our teaming up with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's. SES developed the comprehensive methodology, which determines how well high schools serve all their students, not just those who are collegebound.

The headline says it all: "Boycotting Rankings Is Not the Answer." In his editorial published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Anthony G. Collins, president of Clarkson University, says he was asked by another college president whether he was going to join the boycott of the peer assessment survey that is part of the annual U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings, in particular because U.S. News put his school on our list of "A+ Schools for B Students". Collins answered he wasn't joining the boycott because it would be inconsistent with the mission of Clarkson for him to be against the rankings.

Public colleges have a golden opportunity to make a statement on the importance of releasing their educational data to the public. All they have to do is participate in a plan called the Voluntary System of Accountability, developed by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which combined represent 600 public schools that enroll 7.5 million students and award about 70 percent of U.S. bachelor's degrees each year.

In recent years, the phenomenon in which higher education institutions around the world aim for the status of "World-Class Universities" has spread across the globe.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, tried to explain this movement in the article "The Costs and Benefits of World-Class Universities." He points out that a world-class university goes beyond the dictionary definitions of "ranking among the foremost in the world; of an international standard of excellence." He says a world-class university has to excel in research and needs adequate facilities for academic work, plus it must have academic freedom, an atmosphere of intellectual excitement, and a significant measure of internal self-governance. Of course, funding must be available to support its research and teaching along with the other functions of the university.

Almost always lost in the ongoing American debates about college rankings is that over the past decade, education rankings have become a worldwide phenomenon. Today in at least 20 different countries, there is some form of higher education ranking published regularly, and more of these lists are being created each year. There are numerous types of rankings that are produced by the media, academic institutions, individuals, and governmental agencies.