Entries for January 2009

There is now more evidence to refute the myth that U.S. News's America's Best Colleges rankings are the main reason that students choose one school over another. The recently released "UCLA Freshman Survey: Fall 2008," a highly respected national survey of 240,580 first-year students at 340 colleges, provides a scientific basis to disprove the notion. It also shows that the cost of college is now far more important than rankings.

The survey asks students to rate which factors were "very important" in influencing their decision to attend a particular college. The college rankings finished in 11th place, down from 10th place in last year's survey, out of the 21 reasons. So, at least using a nationwide sample of freshmen, students are using the rankings responsibly—as just one factor in the college search process.

How important are rankings in determining which school a student chooses to attend? This question is always widely debated, but there are rarely empirical data to make a firm conclusion. There is now more evidence to suggest that the U.S. News graduate school public-affairs rankings are not the driving force in admission decisions but are a key source of information to help decide the right school to attend.

The results of a 2008 student poll of about 3,200 master's degree graduate students in public administration and public policy at 265 schools shed some light on how influential the U.S. News rankings are to this field. Officials at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, which conducted the survey, point out that the poll was not conducted under strict social science standards, but they have no reason to think the results are not representative of students' views.

We're currently working hard on number crunching, validity checks, and data analysis in order to be able to produce the upcoming 2010 edition of our America's Best Graduate Schools rankings. The statistical and peer assessment data collection for business, law, engineering, medicine, education and the rest of the programs that are being ranked began in late October 2008 and is now complete. The 2010 edition will be published in April 2009 online at usnews.com.

What's will be new this time? For the 2010 edition, we're doing new peer-assessment-only rankings for Ph.D. programs in English, history, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and criminology and criminal justice. In addition, we will be publishing new rankings for master's degree programs in library and information studies.

Richard Vedder, economics professor at Ohio University, recently published an essay ("Going on a Diet," in Inside Higher Ed) that lists 10 ways the current economic downturn might affect colleges, including "bigger teaching loads, more unionization, a truce in the athletics arms race, and a slowing in college presidents' pay." Vedder says the deepening recession will likely mean that colleges will have to cut costs since it's unlikely, in his view, that revenue shortfalls can be made up via tuition increases.

One of Vedder's ideas is a call for a slowdown in the "Academic Arms Race":

"It seems the president of every mediocre American college wants buckets of money to allow that institution to get to 'the next highest level,' an impossible dream for all but the very few. Financial exigencies will scale such cost drivers as building luxury quasi-country club-like facilities and hiring superstar prima donna professors who teach little but demand a lot. The abatement will be temporary, however, until such time as we find a better means of measuring institutional performance than the U.S.News & World Report rankings."