Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings

In recent years, the phenomenon in which higher education institutions around the world aim for the status of "World-Class Universities" has spread across the globe.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, tried to explain this movement in the article "The Costs and Benefits of World-Class Universities." He points out that a world-class university goes beyond the dictionary definitions of "ranking among the foremost in the world; of an international standard of excellence." He says a world-class university has to excel in research and needs adequate facilities for academic work, plus it must have academic freedom, an atmosphere of intellectual excitement, and a significant measure of internal self-governance. Of course, funding must be available to support its research and teaching along with the other functions of the university.

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It's generally thought that a diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil, and U.S. News provides a way to find schools that are most ethnically mixed. A diverse campus means that you have a high probability of meeting, going to classes, participating in activities, and living with students from a different racial or ethnic background from your own. A school is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have close to the same percentage of students enrolled. So, if a school has one ethnic group that makes up a large percentage of its student body, it's not very diverse, even though there may be other ethnic groups on campus.

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I recently returned from the 2007 Southern Association for Institutional Research Conference in Little Rock, Ark.

I go to these conferences in the States and around the world to give talks on the U.S. News rankings, find out the latest trends at universities, determine what new higher education data U.S. News should try to collect, and get feedback. This was a meeting of institutional researchers, individuals at colleges and universities who collect and analyze college data for campus decision making and planning. Many of them also fill out the U.S. News surveys. I gave two presentations: “America’s Best Colleges Rankings: What Just Happened and What's Ahead” and “America's Best Graduate Schools Rankings: How They're Done and What's New.”

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The hottest issue at National Association for College Admission Counseling's (NACAC) 2007 annual conference last week was the debate whether some aspects of the college admission process are unfair to many students. The high school counselors who attended had numerous issues with the SAT and ACT, particularly that these tests are given too much importance in admissions decisions. Counselors generally resented the fact that for students to "succeed" on the SAT, one had to "teach to test." Many counselors suggested that all colleges should be "test optional."

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