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How Successful Are Colleges at Graduating Low-Income Students?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 4, 2012 CommentUpdated 1/25/13: This post has been updated to remove Florida Atlantic University, which has notified U.S. News that it incorrectly reported its graduation rate of students who received a Pell grant.
U.S. News often receives feedback that we should collect and publish more information about how colleges and universities are serving their entire student populations. For the first time, we are able to answer the question of how schools are doing at graduating their low-income students receiving Pell grants relative to the rest of their student body.
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U.S. News Launches New Reputation Surveys for Online Education Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook September 20, 2012 CommentU.S. News is going full speed ahead on data collection for the upcoming Top Online Education Programs rankings to be published in early 2013. New this year is our first attempt to do a reputational survey for all online degree programs we are surveying: bachelor's degrees, and master's degrees in business, computer information technology, education, engineering, and nursing.
Schools that were ranked or too new to be ranked in the U.S. News 2012 Top Online Programs rankings received postcards last week soliciting their participation. The online reputation survey questionnaire asks respondents to rate the overall excellence of other schools' online degree programs on a 1-5 scale.
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Emory University Confirms Accuracy of Data Used in 2013 Best Colleges Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook September 10, 2012 CommentEnsuring the accuracy of our data and rankings has always been a top priority for U.S. News.
In August 2012, Emory University publicly acknowledged that it had intentionally supplied incorrect ranking data, including average SAT scores, ACT scores, and high school class standing of incoming freshmen, to U.S. News and a number of other sources from 2000 through 2011. This reported data were reflected in the 2002-2012 editions of the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings.
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Emory University Misreported Admissions Data
Tweet Share on Facebook August 17, 2012 CommentEmory University acknowledged today that it had intentionally supplied incorrect ranking data, including average SAT scores, ACT scores, and high school class standing of incoming freshmen, to U.S. News from 2000 through 2011. The data reported in 2011 were used in the current 2012 edition of the Best Colleges rankings and were given a weight of 13.5 percent in the rankings methodology.
The school also misreported the same data on other surveys, including to the U.S. Department of Education and many other publishers, such as College Board and Peterson's.
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Data Collection to Start for Online Education Programs
Tweet Share on Facebook August 16, 2012 CommentStarting August 21, U.S. News will be commencing its online data collection for our second Top Online Education Programs rankings in both the bachelor's and graduate levels for all disciplines. As was done in 2011, we will send questionnaires to a pre-selected number of regionally accredited bachelor's degree programs (1,766), as well a number of master's degree programs in business (958), computer information technology (313), education (1033), engineering (292), and nursing (473). We'll ask whether the programs administer their programs online, and if so, to report statistical and profile information that U.S. News will use to rank them and construct searchable individual profile pages.
If you would like to know which programs at your school will be receiving surveys or who at your institution is currently set to receive them, contact OnlineEdOfficial@usnews.com.
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Newest Edition of Best Colleges Rankings Coming Soon
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2012 CommentThe 2013 edition of U.S. News's Best Colleges rankings will go live on usnews.com on Wednesday, September 12. National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges are included in these rankings.
Our website will have the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists. It will have extensive statistical profiles for each school as well as wide-ranging interactivity and a college search to enable students and parents to find the school that best fits their needs. These exclusive rankings will also be published in our Best Colleges 2013 edition guidebook, which will go on sale September 18 on newsstands and at usnews.com.
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U.S. News Weighs In on Marketing Firm Survey
Tweet Share on Facebook August 1, 2012 CommentFor college presidents and other participants in the peer assessment survey used as part of U.S. News's upcoming Best Colleges rankings, U.S. News wants to clarify any confusion stemming from a new survey.
AIM, a marketing research services network, is conducting a new survey that has absolutely nothing to do with U.S. News. AIM-Chicago, the corporate name at the bottom of the introduction to the survey, says, "Our firm is conducting a study among 2012 U.S. News and World Report Survey participants to better understand the criteria used to assign Peer Assessment ratings."
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Law Schools Taken to Task in New Book
Tweet Share on Facebook July 26, 2012 CommentA new book on the current state of legal education is generating a lot of buzz. Failing Law Schools, by Brian Tamanaha, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, provides a detailed look at the things that are wrong with today's law schools. He contends that behind the facade of high paid professors and the key role that lawyers play in all parts of the judicial system, business, government, and politics, the law schools are failing.
One of the book's key themes, according the University of Chicago Press, is that going to law school is a raw deal for many of today's students:
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Final Adjustments to Best High Schools Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2012 CommentAs discussed in detail in my May 30 blog post, "Adjusting the Best High Schools Rankings for Government Data Errors," the federal government found that data from the 2009-2010 school year for a small number of schools that appeared in the U.S. News 2012 Best High Schools rankings was incorrect. The information came from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects data from states for all public elementary and secondary schools annually and publishes that data on the Common Core of Data (CCD) website.
As a result of these errors in the federal government data, the U.S. News rankings for a few schools with these data errors were not correct. The federal government has now finished rechecking all public high school data; it has issued a final tally of which schools had incorrect data in 2009-2010 and has removed that data from the CCD website.
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New Paper Examines Growing Importance of Global University Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2012 CommentCollege rankings have become a powerful force both on the national and global levels over the last 25 years. A major concern for some university administrators around the world is how to use both the national rankings in their countries and the global rankings wisely in their mid-term and long-term strategic planning in order to build their institutions into world-class universities.
I was a co-author of a recently published paper, "An analysis of mobility in global rankings: making institutional strategic plans and positioning for building world-class universities," which joins a rapidly expanding body of literature on the impact of college rankings. The other authors on the paper were Angela Yung Chi Hou and Chung-Lin Chiang, both from the Faculty Development and Instructional Resources Center at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan.
