Rankings Road Trip, From Seattle and Taipei

I frequently go to important education conferences around the country and the world to discuss the America's Best Colleges rankings with higher education experts. Next week, I'll be in Seattle for the Association for Institutional Research's 2008 Annual Forum: "Adapting to Meet New Challenges." This is a national meeting of institutional researchers who work at colleges and provide their schools, external agencies, and governments with data to support decision-making efforts. These researchers also fill out many of the U.S. News America's Best Colleges statistical surveys. I will be making a presentation there entitled "U.S.News & World Report's America's Best Colleges—What Will Be New in 2008 and What Changes Were Made Last Year and Why?"

After that, I head to Taipei, Taiwan, to attend the 2008 International Symposium—Rankings in Higher Education on the Global and International Stages sponsored by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan. This one-day symposium will discuss recent developments in rankings of universities around the world and the impact of these rankings. The focus is on technical and methodological challenges and on new approaches. At that conference, I am going to give the keynote speech about U.S.News & World Report's America's Best Colleges rankings.

I'll be back in early June and will report on what happened and what I learned.