Entries for July 2009

It's getting very close to the launch of the new America's Best Colleges rankings. The 2010 edition will be published on Thursday, August 20, which is the day the new rankings go live on our website. The site will have the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists, plus extensive profiles on each school. The America's Best Colleges website also will have wide-ranging interactivity as well as a newly upgraded search feature to enable students and parents to find the school that best fits their needs.

These exclusive rankings will also be published in the magazine's September 2009 issue and in our newsstand guidebook, both of which will go on sale around August 20. The main rankings include the national universities, liberal arts colleges, master's universities, and baccalaureate colleges by region. In addition, there will be one new ranking to show which schools have the greatest "commitment to undergraduate teaching." For the second year in row, we will publish the very popular list of "Up-and-Coming Institutions"—the colleges making innovative improvements. In addition, we will have our third annual ranking of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

There will also tables on:

Just how honest are law schools when they report their data to U.S. News for our 2010 Best Law Schools rankings? Each year, we ask law schools to report the same data to us that they report on the American Bar Association's annual accreditation questionnaire. It turns out the schools are pretty reliable in their data reporting. (Of course, there were some notable exceptions and data errors that I have written about in my blog: Updates to Some Grad School Data and What Happened With Brooklyn Law School.)

The basis for this assessment comes from a study by Tom Bell, a law professor at the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif. He has just published A Model of the 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings on his blog, Agoraphilia.

Professor Bell says of his work:

"As in every year since 2005, I this year again built a model of the law school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Figuring out the rankings—the '2010' rankings, as USN&WR's calls them—proved especially trying this time around. USN&WR changed several parts of its methodology this year and the ABA, which distributes statistical data on which my model depends, fell far behind its usual publication schedule. Finally, though, the model ended up generating scores gratifyingly close to those that USN&WR assigned law schools."

Is there an impact on a college's admissions indicators as a result of its position in the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings? Is the influence of the rankings different depending on whether the school is a large research university or a smaller liberal arts college? How big could these effects be, and are they statistically significant?

In "Getting on the Front Page: Organizational Reputation, Status Signals, and the Impact of U.S. News and World Report on Student Decisions," recently published in Research in Higher Education, Nicholas A. Bowman of the University of Notre Dame and Michael N. Bastedo of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor analyzed the U.S. News college rankings to try to answer those questions for top college administrators. Their article joins a rapidly expanding body of literature on college rankings and the impact the rankings might have on colleges and universities.

Their article's three key points are:

If you are one those in waiting for the National Research Council (NRC) to release its new rankings on U.S. doctoral programs, you will have to be patient a lot longer. The NRC doctoral ranking project, which began in 2003, just released A Guide to the Methodology of the National Research Council Assessment of Doctorate Programs. The guide offers a sophisticated, 191-page explanation of the methodology that the NRC will use when it does publish the rankings, which will cover doctoral programs in 61 doctoral fields at 222 institutions.

The NRC makes it very clear that it is not setting a date for the release of the rankings. Why, after all this time, is the NRC unable to set a firm date for when the new rankings will be published? The NRC's website says:

Since their beginning in 1983, the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings have used a peer assessment survey as one of the indicators of academic excellence. By gathering the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic quality, the peer survey allows top academics—presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions—to account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. On the survey, each respondent is asked to rate the quality of peer schools' undergraduate academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). A respondent who is unfamiliar with a school's academic quality can mark "don't know."

In order to maintain the integrity of this peer assessment survey, U.S. News has always ensured complete confidentiality to those academics who have responded. In our cover letter to the survey, we promise confidentiality with the pledge that we "will not publish your individual response." We believe that by offering and maintaining this confidentiality, we receive the most honest opinions of those participants who share their time and expertise.

While we understand that there recently has been a surge in interest in how individual respondents have rated other peer schools surveys, as an editorial policy, U.S. News does not share copies of completed peer assessment surveys with anyone. We recognize that universities, both public and private, might occasionally want to request copies of surveys completed by their respective officials for their records. And we understand that some public universities might receive requests for copies as a result of public records and freedom of information laws. However, U.S. News does not make exceptions to this confidentiality policy. This is not to inconvenience respondents or their respective universities, but rather to manage and maintain the credibility of the peer assessment surveys. We see this as part of our duty to protect our sources.

We value the participation of the higher ed community and invite you to share your thoughts about our policy with us.