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Seeking Input on Online Degree Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook February 2, 2012 Comment (1)Following the inaugural release of the Top Online Education Programs rankings, U.S. News reached out to the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) to answer questions from their members and to establish an ongoing dialogue with the organization. This was done to initiate a process that potentially will improve the degree program rankings and program-level data collection in future years.
WCET—an organization that works to advance and evaluate the most effective uses of technology in higher education—had authored a review of the new rankings in January. The review presented critiques that bear resemblance to many cited elsewhere in specialized media that cover online education. U.S. News believes these critiques often rest on faulty assumptions about the rankings methodologies.
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Claremont McKenna Misrepresents Test Score Data
Tweet Share on Facebook January 31, 2012 Comment (3)Claremont McKenna College announced yesterday that it had falsely inflated its SAT scores of incoming freshmen that it annually reported to U.S. News from 2005 through 2011. These scores are used in the annual Best Colleges rankings and have a weight of 7.5 percent. The school also misreported the same SAT data to the U.S. Department of Education; its regional accrediting body, Western Association of Schools and Colleges; and many other publishers, such as College Board and Peterson’s.
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Students: Rankings Aren't Main Reason in College Choice
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2012 Comment (2)Once again, a large scale social research study has contradicted the belief by many in higher education that the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings are the primary factor in the average student's choice of college. That conclusion comes from UCLA's just-released "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2011," a highly regarded annual survey. This year's data is based on the responses of 203,967 entering first-year students at 270 U.S. four-year colleges and universities.
The UCLA survey asks new students to rate which factors were "very important" in influencing their decision to attend a particular college. Incoming fall 2011 freshmen could choose as many of the 22 reasons listed as they wanted. For the second year in a row, the college rankings finished in 11th place. At least, based on this large nationwide sample of freshmen from all types of colleges, students are consulting the rankings, but not as the most powerful force in their college search process.
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Key Stats About Ranked Online Education Degree Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook January 19, 2012 Comment (3)Last week's blog post emphasized the paucity of online master's in business degree programs that reported tracking their students after graduation (25 percent). Not mentioned was that all other online graduate disciplines surveyed had rates equal or even lower, except for nursing at 56 percent. But even respondents to the nursing survey provided limited specifics on post-graduate outcomes.
[Learn more about the Top Online Programs rankings.]
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Examining Reactions to the Online Degree Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook January 12, 2012 Comment (3)The most comprehensive and detailed listings of online education degree programs and rankings went live on January 10 on usnews.com. All the ranked bachelor's and master's online degree programs on usnews.com are regionally accredited and disclosed a significant amount of information about their offerings.
Consequently, any online degree program with a presence on U.S. News's revamped online education site has instantly distinguished itself from programs that are not truly online or do not have the most rigorous accreditation. Not surprisingly, since the release of the rankings, a flurry of schools rushed to publicize them, and some even expressed their approval via E-mails.
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U.S. News Online Degree Program Rankings Launch January 10
Tweet Share on Facebook January 3, 2012 Comment (5)U.S.News & World Report will launch its first-ever ranking of top online education degree programs. The rankings will be featured exclusively on usnews.com starting Jan. 10, 2012.
U.S. News has redesigned and expanded its online education section to not only develop top degree program ranking lists, but to also build online degree program profiles and advanced online program search functionality.
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U.S. News Holds Annual Meeting With Deans of College Admissions
Tweet Share on Facebook December 22, 2011 Comment (3)U.S. News editors and staffers met in early December with a cross section of deans of admissions and enrollment management from U.S. colleges to get their input on various education issues and to get feedback on the Best Colleges rankings and methodology. U.S. News has held an annual meeting with an independent advisory board of admissions deans since 1992. As in the past, we found this meeting to be highly beneficial.
Here is a sampling of the topics from this year's meeting:
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Latest Acceptance Rate Data Not Inflated, U.S. Naval Academy Says
Tweet Share on Facebook December 15, 2011 Comment (1)A recent article in the Navy Times, titled "Professor says academy overstates applicants," claimed that the U.S. Naval Academy "is artificially inflating its number of applicants to boost its status among other colleges, according to an academy professor who based his accusations on the school's own documents."
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U.S. News Presents at Institutional Research Annual Meeting
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2011 Comment (1)I just returned from Boston and the North East Association for Institutional Research's 2011 annual conference, "Leading the Charge for Institutional Research." This annual meeting of college researchers and analysts from colleges and universities in the Northeast was among the largest in its history.
I was joined at the conference by two U.S. News colleagues—Evan Jones, strategic analytics; and Chris Petrie, education analyst—who are in charge of the some of the new data products U.S. News has released in 2011.
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Iona College Admits to Inflating Rankings Data for 9 Years
Tweet Share on Facebook December 1, 2011 Comment (1)Given the degree and magnitude of Iona College's recent revelations of its data misreporting, U.S. News has evaluated how Iona's ranking in the current Best Colleges rankings would have changed. In the current, 2012 edition, Iona College is ranked 30th overall in the Regional Universities—North category. U.S. News estimates that Iona College's ranking would have fallen by approximately 20 places in that category, had we used accurate data instead of the data Iona first reported to us in April 2011.
Iona College posted a report on its website on Nov. 8, 2011, that said "we recently discovered inaccuracies in student performance data reported to external agencies. In response, we subsequently initiated a thorough investigation by outside legal counsel with the assistance of a third-party independent auditing firm."
