Entries for June 2007

College rankings have expanded internationally over the past decade and are currently being published in many countries besides the United States, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Russia, Greece, Canada, Australia, China, and Australia. One clear explanation of this trend comes from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, which recently published "College and University Rankings: Global Perspectives and American Challenges."

U.S. News' editor Brian Kelly discussed the college rankings with critic Lloyd Thacker during an interview for Inside Higher Ed on Friday.

The U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings have been in the news a great deal this week. On June 19, an organization of independent liberal arts colleges called the Annapolis Group released a statement about some of its members' positions on participating in the peer assessment survey we use in the rankings. The statement says the majority of the college presidents attending the group's annual meeting "expressed their intent not to participate in the annual US News and World Report ranking exercise. The Annapolis Group is not a legislative body and any decision about participating in the US News rankings rests with the individual institutions." It also says the members agreed to offer their schools' data to the public in an alternative, common format: "The Web-based initiative, to be developed in collaboration with other higher education organizations, will provide easily accessible, comprehensive, and quantifiable data. The Annapolis Group members will work with the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), among others to develop this common instrument."

On Tuesday, I met with Michael Ruffner, a spokesman for Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge, which is ranked in the Third Tier of National Universities in the 2007 edition of the America's Best Colleges. Ruffner and I discussed his belief that that some public universities don't fare as well in the rankings because they are Land Grant Colleges or Sea Grant Colleges, which means that they have to be more open in their admission policies since that is their mission. This makes it harder for them to compete against private schools that can be more selective.

On Monday, Samuel Flanigan (deputy director of data research) and I met with the leaders of the Center for Measuring University Performance. The center, located, at Arizona State University, focuses on competition among major research universities and has its own widely read rankings. But its rankings are mainly based on research expenditures—not quite the total picture that prospective students and parents need to know. We met with John V. Lombardi— who is the University of Massachusetts-Amherst chancellor—and Elizabeth D. Capaldi—executive vice president and university provost of Arizona State University.

I just returned from the AIR's 2007 Annual Forum "Choice/Chance: Driving Change in Higher Education," held in Kansas City, Mo. The association members work at almost every U.S. college and university where, among other things, they study higher education trends on their campuses, conduct surveys of students, fill out surveys (including the one used for the U.S. News rankings), and do comparisons among peer schools.

The purpose of grouping colleges into ranking categories is to compare schools with similar missions: national universities against national universities, liberal arts colleges against liberal arts colleges.