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How the Rankings Affect State Education Spending
Tweet Share on Facebook February 11, 2008 CommentAre the U.S. News college rankings influencing higher education policy? The answer appears to be yes. The article "The Power of Information: Do Rankings Affect the Public Finance of Higher Education?" by Ginger Zhe Jin from the University of Maryland and the National Bureau of Economic Research and Alexander Whalley from the University of California-Merced says that "While there are now over 100 college guidebooks, the market is still dominated by U.S.News & World Report." The paper then examines "whether public colleges respond to one incentive provided by U.S. News: increasing expenditure per student."
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Why Comparison Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook February 4, 2008 Comment (2)Can higher education in the U.S. have real accountability without comparability? Should each college be in charge of determining its own standards for student success? Is the tuition- and tax-paying public best served by having thousands of student learning and accountability systems, virtually one per college? The answer to all of these questions for prospective college students, their parents, and the public is a resounding no. Accountability needs to be comparable for it to succeed. The public needs to be able to use the information to gauge one college against another. If schools are internally measuring whether they are doing a good job for their students, then the public also should be able to use that data as part of the college search process. Applicants need to be able to readily compare which schools are doing the best job in terms of student outcomes. Without such comparability between universities, there will not be real accountability.
Yet, higher education appears to be going in the opposite direction, backing principles of accountability that will turn the entire process into one that creates one assessment tool for each college and doesn't even include the requirement for comparability, according to the article "Calling Out Colleges on Student Learning" in insidehighered.com. The lack of a mandate for comparability was made clear at the 2008 annual meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) when leaders of CHEA and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and other heads of higher education associations representing more than 3,000 colleges and universities put out a statement of principles of student learning outcomes.
It can be hoped that over time leaders in higher education will come to believe that being open and comparable is in the best interests of those that they say it's their mission to serve: students.
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Meeting and Working With NAGAP
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2008 Comment (6)I just returned from the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals' (NAGAP) Winter Institute for Advanced Graduate Admissions Professionals, held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
I gave a presentation titled "America's Best Graduate Schools Rankings: How They Are Done and What's New." My talk covered the methodology and processes used in the medical, law, engineering, business, education, Ph.D., and the other graduate rankings done annually by U.S. News. The new graduate school rankings will be published at the end of March.
Attending these professional conferences is very important because we get feedback—both positive and negative—about the rankings. Being at these meetings also enables us to learn more about what is going on in higher ed from those who work directly in those fields and provides us with an opportunity to explain how and why we do the rankings. One idea that came out of the meeting was that NAGAP is considering creating an advisory committee to work with U.S. News on the various grad school rankings. NAGAP's members are uniquely qualified to play such a role, since they work in admissions in all the disciplines that U.S. News ranks. We welcome the creation of such a committee by NAGAP and look forward to working with its members in the future.
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Getting Some Guidance From Counselors
Tweet Share on Facebook January 23, 2008 Comment (2)Editors from U.S. News met today with a cross section of high school counselors to get their input on various education issues. We found this meeting highly beneficial and heard many new ideas that we are studying.
The high school counselors who attended were:
- Shirley Bloomquist, Great Falls, Va.
- Jayne Fonash, Academy of Science, Sterling, Va.
- Marjorie Jacobs, SAR Academy, Riverdale, N.Y.
- Jim Jump, St. Christopher's School, Richmond, Va.
- Annalee Nissenholtz, Ladue Horton Watkins High School, St. Louis
- Susan Rexford, West Springfield High School, Springfield, Va.
- Missy Sanchez, Woodward Academy, Atlanta
- Brian K. Smith, Baylor School, Chattanooga, Tenn.
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About That Article on Washington and Jefferson College...
Tweet Share on Facebook January 17, 2008 Comment (5)I've got a few corrections I think I should make regarding Inside Higher Ed's thesis in its "Potemkin Rankings" article. That story argues that recent changes in Washington and Jefferson College's academic data should have resulted in the school rising in the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings instead of falling slightly as it did (from 91st in the 2004 edition to 106th in the 2008 edition in the liberal arts colleges category).
Washington and Jefferson raised its tuition significantly from $23,260 in 2003-2004 to $29,532 in 2007-2008, an increase of 27 percent. The college also showed gains in its admissions data, including its acceptance rate and SAT scores as well as a small rise in faculty resources. All of these factors are input measures into the college process.
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In Defense of College Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook January 16, 2008 Comment (2)Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., education policy think tank, has now become an advocate of college rankings, based on his recently published In Defense of College Rankings. Carey has been both a critic of the U.S. News college rankings and author of Washington Monthly's best community colleges rankings, which are based on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE).
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What Secretary Spellings Thinks of the College Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook January 9, 2008 Comment (6)U.S. News and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings share an important goal. We both believe that there should be considerably more transparency at colleges and universities so prospective students and their parents can be informed about the costly and very important decision of which college to attend. In fact, U.S. News has been a leader in the drive for increased accountability among higher education institutions, and our rankings have been one of the factors that have pushed schools to publish more evaluative and consumer-friendly information about themselves.
Spelling cited the success of the U.S. News America's Best Colleges rankings in a December 2007 speech to a group of higher education accrediting officials as evidence of the public desire for meaningful information on how to choose and pay for college. She said:
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Responses to More Questions on the 2008 America's Best High Schools Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook January 3, 2008 Comment (34)These are some of the questions that have been posted on my blog recently. If you have other queries about the 2008 America's Best High Schools rankings, please continue to post them in the comments part of this blog, and I will try to answer them.
I was fortunate enough to have taught in both International Baccalaureate and AP mathematics programs over a nine-year period. While I absolutely love the AP Calculus AB syllabus, I have never seen anything that prepares students to think critically like the IB program...Will IB be included in the rankings next time?
U.S. News has been in contact with some of the top officials who run the IB program in the United States, and we plan to meet with them in early 2008. Our goal continues to be that we will work with IB officials so that we will be able to factor in IB statistics on participation as well as some indicator of IB success in the next America's Best High Schools rankings. -
Best High Schools: Frequently Asked Questions
Tweet Share on Facebook December 12, 2007 Comment (31)What have been the two most frequently raised issues since the America's Best High Schools 2008 list was launched?
First: Why was our school not good enough to earn a bronze medal when we are similar to others in our state that were?
Answer: There are three steps to the methodology. The first two (which must be cleared to earn a bronze medal) focus on the students' performance on state tests and are used as screens to determine eligibility for evaluation on the third step, which focuses on college readiness.
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The Best High Schools Ranking Roundup
Tweet Share on Facebook December 5, 2007 Comment (13)Our recently published America's Best High Schools 2008 has triggered a debate about how to rank high schools and what factors should be used. So far, numerous articles have been written about our new rankings. I have picked some of the more notable ones I've read.
Samuel G. Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, wrote a New York Times article titled "Putting a Curious Eye on a High School Ranking System." Freedman said that "the factors the ranking used appear sensible and supple—overall student achievement, academic performance of the most disadvantaged students, college readiness as reckoned by results on Advanced Placement tests." Freedman's article also has extensive commentary on the U.S. News strategy of publishing rankings.
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