‘Best Colleges’ List Released Amid Criticism

For years, college presidents have sweated over the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, aware that college-bound students and their parents devour the magazine issue and often direct applications accordingly.

But now, a growing contingent of critics, including a former research director at U.S. News and many college leaders, are raising questions about the list’s basic validity. And some are asking whether a national newsmagazine is really the best arbiter of the nation’s “best colleges.”

The annual rankings, which were released Thursday on the magazine’s Web site and will hit newsstands Monday, group schools by categories. In each category, the top 50 schools are ranked according to perceived quality.

Princeton University tops this year’s national university category, as it did last year, followed by a tie by Harvard, Yale and Caltech.

U.S. News vigorously defends its findings.

“We believe there is a great deal of useful and accurate information in here,” said Peter Cary, editor of special projects at U.S. News. “The criticisms aren’t fair.”

But skepticism about the rankings, brewing for some time, is boiling over among some top educators.

USC President Steven B. Sample, whose school tied for 34th on this year’s “national universities” list, calls the rankings both “silly” and “bordering on fraud.” UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl, whose school ranked 20th among national universities but first among public colleges, said they were “highly questionable.”

Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College in Eagle Rock, which ranked 44th among liberal arts colleges, said the list ensures that he and the heads of other institutions must spend hours explaining school rankings to alumni, parents and trustees.

At best, Mitchell said, the rankings are “a distortion of an institution’s character and, at worst, a kind of tyrannical tool to get institutions to chase after a single vision of what good higher education is.”

One of the most vociferous critics is Steven Koblick, former president of Reed College in Oregon who is now president of the Huntington Library.

“Virtually nothing about it is very convincing,” Koblick said. “I don’t know of one single educator who is likely to defend it. The data [are] not very accurate, and it varies from year to year in order to sell magazines.”

Reed refused to send U.S. News the information it required in 1994. The next year its ranking plummeted into the lowest tier of national liberal arts colleges.

Others questioned the magazine’s ability to fairly evaluate schools. “If it has to be done, I think it should be a not-for-profit organization, not one devoted to selling magazines,” said Pamela Gann, president of Claremont McKenna College, which tied for 17th on the liberal arts college list.

This year, a former director of data research at U.S. News fanned the flames of discontent by publicly criticizing the list’s most basic criteria.

In the September issue of Washington Monthly, Amy Graham--an economist who oversaw the list’s data collection and analysis for two years until she resigned in 1999--argues that the way in which the magazine gathers its data is misleading and produces invalid results.

The article, which Graham co-authored with Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Washington Monthly, says that the annual guide pays too much attention to certain criteria and not enough to “measures of learning and good educational practices.”

For example, the article says, too much weight is given to SAT scores, alumni giving and the opinions of university presidents. The latter counts for 25% of an institution’s overall score.

“None of that makes sense,” Graham said Thursday. “It doesn’t measure anything that actually occurred while a student was attending the school or any learning that took place there.”

Cary, who oversees the annual “best colleges” issue, defended the rankings and the factors used. SAT scores, he said, indicate the “braininess” of the student body. A school’s overall reputation is valid too, he said, while alumni giving is a good “proxy” for alumni satisfaction.

Graham, now a statistical researcher for the state of Virginia, said that she wrote the article because she wanted to see U.S. News conduct additional research among students to form a more accurate picture.

“My concern is that students are taking this information and are being steered to the wrong kinds of institutions,” she said.

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute and a former vice president of the university, has studied the effects of the survey at 35 national research and liberal arts colleges.

He found that when colleges improved their rankings, the next year they received more applications, became more selective, the average SAT scores of freshmen improved and more of those who were accepted decided to attend. He also found that the amount of financial aid the institutions had to give out to attract students declined.

Ehrenberg also said he found evidence that colleges manipulate the data they report to U.S. News.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Top-Ranked Colleges

U.S. News & World Report uses its own formula to rate more than 1,400 four-year institutions. The magazine sorts schools into several categories. The scoring system produces ties.

Best Public and Private National Universities, 2002

1. Princeton University

2. Harvard University

Yale University

4. Caltech

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stanford University

University of Pa.

8. Duke University

9. Columbia University

Dartmouth College

University of Chicago

*

20. UC Berkeley

26. UCLA

31. UC San Diego

34. USC

41. UC Davis

UC Irvine

*

Best Public National Universities, 2002

1. UC Berkeley

2. University of Virginia

3. University of Michigan-

Ann Arbor

4. UCLA

5. University of North

Carolina-Chapel Hill

6. College of William and Mary

7. UC San Diego

8. University of Wisconsin-Madison

9. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

10. Georgia Institute of Technology

UC Davis

UC Irvine

28. UC Riverside

UC Santa Cruz

Source: U.S. News & World Report