Universities Use Rankings, Too
Colleges may not like being ranked, but they've long ranked students
In the world of higher education, the U.S. News rankings are perennially controversial. Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford, which is tied for fourth place among national universities this year, has written that "much about these rankings--particularly their specious formulas and spurious precision--is utterly misleading." Alan Stone, the president of Alma College in Michigan, has tried, without much success, to drum up interest among college presidents in a national boycott of the rankings.
Yet American higher education itself regularly uses numerical rankings, especially of potential students, as a basic tool. Before the Second World War, the university system was small; it was for the few, not the many. During and after the war, higher education began transforming itself into a mass institution through which all future white-collar Americans have to pass. Big, modern institutions require numbers, and universities rely on an array of them--student test scores, departmental rankings, and government funding formulas. If ranking is a sin, then colleges and universities aren't innocent of it.
So why are they so touchy about being ranked? Historically, higher education reaped the benefits of rankings that it controlled while remaining largely exempt from numerical assessment by outsiders. The U.S. News rankings are the kind of consumer-oriented evaluation that is pervasive and popular in American culture, but our rankings reverse the natural order: They're supposed to rank us.
Colleges object to the whole enterprise of ranking schools "like automobiles or toasters," in Casper's words, and they are especially distressed that the rankings matter. Outside a handful of highly selective institutions, most private colleges are undersubscribed: They need good students who can pay much more than such students need them. Annoyance at the rankings is partly a mask for fear that a bad ranking will lead to a drying up of applications, and perhaps also of alumni contributions and government funding.
Still, colleges have instituted an elaborate system of rankings that gives them a clear sense of where they stand on all sorts of fronts. The president of the University of California-Berkeley can find out where every academic department under his supervision ranks nationally, where Berkeley ranks on various measures against the other schools in the UC system, where each prospective faculty hire ranks among the applicants for the job and against peers all around the country.
Universities also use standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, to help them to make nationwide comparisons among applicants. If you apply to Harvard, a computer will analyze your test scores, your grade point average, and the quality of your high school to come up with a number predicting your college GPA, which is used in admissions decisions.
Most of the arguments made by colleges against the U.S. News rankings have an ironic ring, because universities have for decades vocally defended themselves against similar charges. Students have long argued, for instance, against colleges' ranking them, saying that reducing life's complexities to numbers inevitably distorts and oversimplifies. When faced with such complaints, universities have often responded: You can trust us to put our numbers in context; we aren't slaves to statistics.
Now, the universities share the students' discomfort. Vagaries of data gathering--a wrong guess here, a minuscule difference there--become falsely enshrined as science, they say. Inherently soft factors, such as judgment about reputation, are made to appear hard.
The fact remains that colleges know (and care) where they stand comparatively. Employers and graduate schools know (and care) where the colleges stand. So it's important for students who are choosing a college to know as well. The rankings do not have the mystical power to destroy all independent judgment on the part of students. In fact, they can help sharpen it. According to one of the few studies of how the rankings are actually used, by Patricia McDonough of UCLA, they are consulted most closely by the highest-achieving, best-informed students--those least likely to be the rankings' obedient servants.
Universities ought to assume that students and their families will use the U.S. News rankings with the same wise restraint that they themselves employ when contemplating the scores that students are required to submit if they want to go to college today.
This story appears in the August 31, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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