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Do Endowments Have an Impact on a College’s Ranking?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2010 Comment (10)The National Association of College and University Business Officers just released its annual study of the latest trends in college endowments 2009 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments . This was not a very good year for the performance of college endowments. According to the NACUBO study, the endowments of the 842 institutions that were surveyed had an average decline of 18.7 percent in the year ended June 30, 2009. In certain circumstances, a steep decline in a college's endowment can have a negative impact on the school's budget.
What role does the size of a college's endowment or the annual performance of a college's endowment play in the methodology that is used to calculate the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings? The absolute size and the annual performance of a college's endowment are not factors in the college rankings. In fact, college endowments are not used in the rankings at all.
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‘America’s Best Law Firms’ Rankings Are Coming in 2010
Tweet Share on Facebook January 28, 2010 Comment (3)U.S. News and Best Lawyers, the leading survey of lawyers worldwide, announced last year that the two publications have teamed up for an expansion of U.S. News's signature "America's Best" series to include new rankings of "America's Best Law Firms" and "America's Best Law Firms to Work For."
We want to give an update on the status of these new rankings. The ranking projects continue to make progress on the collection of client references and associate references from law firms. The vast majority of America's major law firms have provided the requested information. As with other rankings published by U.S. News, we believe that we will be able to secure from various sources quantitative data concerning those law firms that do not provide the requested statistical data directly to U.S. News and Best Lawyers. Combined with the qualitative reviews of the firms by clients—more than 50,000 client references have already been accumulated—and qualitative peer-reviews by leading lawyers, this will enable the publication of valid rankings for all major law firms, both large and small, across the United States in the inaugural year. In time, it is expected that an increasing number of the ranked law firms will participate in the process.
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Do the U.S. News Rankings Play Key role in Determining a School’s Academic Reputation?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 21, 2010 Comment (4)"The more that the reputations of colleges are affected by the ranking, despite other evidence to the contrary, the more the U.S. News rankings become college reputation."
That's one of the conclusions of "U.S.News & World Report College Rankings: Modeling Institutional Effects on Organizational Reputation," an article published recently in the American Journal of Education. In it, Michael N. Bastedo of the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and Nicholas A. Bowman of the University of Notre Dame analyzed the U.S. News college rankings to determine their key effects and their impact on schools' peer assessment scores. Their article joins a rapidly expanding body of literature on college rankings and the effect the rankings have on colleges, universities, prospective students, and their parents.
Regarding the ramifications of the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings for colleges, the article notes:
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U.S. News, NACAC Meet to Discuss Rankings, Other Higher Education Topics
Tweet Share on Facebook January 14, 2010 Comment (101)The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), an organization of more than 11,000 high school counselors and college admission officials from around the world, and U.S.News & World Report agreed last fall to hold a series of meetings to discuss U.S. News's America's Best Colleges undergraduate rankings guide and other higher education issues.
Why does U.S. News want to have these meetings with NACAC? U.S. News strongly believes it's very important to have an open dialogue with members of NACAC, since the organization plays a leading role in college admissions both at the high school and the college level. U.S. News fully understands that the annual America's Best Colleges rankings have an impact on prospective students and their families as well as the colleges and universities themselves. U.S. News believes that these meetings with NACAC can help us more fully understand NACAC members' perspectives. They will enable NACAC members to voice their views about the rankings and other issues, including U.S. News's efforts to educate the public in how the rankings work and the accuracy of the statistical data and the quantitative and subjective information used in the rankings. These discussions will also enable U.S. News editors to seek feedback from NACAC's members on how our print and Web products can be improved, how to communicate with NACAC's members and the public about the rankings, and how to gain insight into new developments and trends in admissions from the college and high school counselor perspective.
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U.S. News Investigates Data Discrepancies in the Best Colleges Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook January 4, 2010 Comment (5)The New York Times earlier this week ran a story within Education Life, "The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor," about the growing use of part-time and adjunct faculty at U.S. colleges. The article said, "This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate."
U.S. News has investigated the fall 2009 claim by the American Federation of Teachers. U.S. News contacted a large number of institutional researchers who work at colleges, and they felt that the faculty definition was very clear and unambiguous. The definition that U.S. News uses to collect full-time and part-time faculty counts at colleges is very precise, and it was developed by higher-education experts. It's the agreed-upon higher education standard contained in the Common Data Set, and it's publicly available for all to read. The experts U.S. News talked to felt that it was clear that the faculty definition meant that if colleges employed part-time or adjunct faculty, they should report that fact to U.S. News and that there was no wiggle room in the definition. In other words, if a university told U.S. News that the definition means that adjuncts should not be counted or that they were not reported, that particular college was consciously misreporting its faculty data or was on purpose deciding to understate its adjuncts for its own reasons.
