The Public University Rankings Are Here

orbital percent app forcings

alecamurr of ID 1:19AM January 28, 2010

I want admission into your school.am a Ghanaian boy.

OPOKU BONSU DANIEL 11:48AM October 29, 2009

Where are the rankings for Citrus College???

midnight of CA 9:22PM January 26, 2009

As a young college freshman (in 1993) I was deeply influenced by your rankings and, indeed, began to see the problems of my own school I attended at the time because of them. I had thought your ranking considered percentage of classes taught by full-time faculty (although I have often questioned the accuracy of the statistics as presented there). This year, and I'm not sure when this change happened, I realized that your rankings don't take into account the percentage of classes taught by full-time faculty, that is, really taught by full-time faculty (universities will say that the instructor of record is a full-time professor but often, at least half the time, that instructor is not teaching the class or only teaching a small part of it in a large lecture room).

At a school like NYU, for instance, in 2005 50 to 60 percent of classes were taught by part-timers (Washburn 200), and yet this has no effect on actual rankings. This is troubling, because such part-timers cannot put as much time into their teaching as full-timers (see Washburn's "Paying More for Less" chapter in *University Inc.*), because they're cobbling together often five or six jobs just to eat. Further, part-time faculty's classes often become fairly easy in order to get good student evaluations (which, usually are given to professors who are less than very rigorous--for more on this see Peter Sacks *Generation X Goes to College* and also Washburn 203-204) which, in a part-time culture, are much more important than whether students actually learned a lot. Frequently, part-time faculty are seen as simply a “warm body,” without a concern for whether their students learn deeply in the classes (Washburn 201).

Finally, perhaps most seriously, if schools can hire a majority part-time faculty and still get a very high US News ranking, then this discourages students from entering the professoriate, because they know their job prospects are incredibly dismal. Those that do go into the professoriate know they must be popular at all costs instead of a goal of the students learning as much as possible.

Sob, sob, sob (just kidding), but do you see how this is amazingly important? Without such a change, one must assume that the US News rankings only rank the veneer of a college without what actually happens inside of it.

True blessings upon you (especially if you realize how many people's lives in the United States you could improve moving toward intellectual integrity and true quality--but blessings otherwise and anyway as well).

Dr. Mark Hamilton

Assistant Professor of English

Liberty University

mhamilton@liberty.edu

Mark Hamilton of VA 12:58PM September 03, 2008