Should You Trust College Rankings?

A college president says don’t be swayed by one-size-fits-all lists.

from newsweek.com

(Page 1 of 2)

Imagine a magazine that claimed to rank all of the year’s music releases in descending order of “quality.” No. 1 might be the latest album by a popular hip-hop artist; No. 2, a Beethoven symphony; No. 3, a movie soundtrack; No. 4, an R&B collection. What an obviously silly idea! But it gets worse. Suppose the basis for these rankings turned out to be an arbitrary mathematical formula dreamed up by the magazine editors, and the data used to compute the rankings all came from the record companies themselves.

You would throw the magazine in the wastebasket. Yet that, in essence, is a description of the most popular college rankings. They gloss over crucially important variations in the curricular, pedagogical, philosophical, and social characteristics of different schools. They rely on a magazine editor’s guesswork about the factors to consider and the relative weights to assign to those factors. And they depend on information—much of it unverifiable—that is supplied by the very institutions whose ranking will supposedly determine their reputations in the marketplace.

Choosing which college or university to attend is a very big decision. Think of choosing a college as the equivalent of buying a very complicated product. The “product” is a package of services including classes, courses, academic advising, tutoring, athletic programs, entertainment, social experiences, accommodations, and food. This complex package provides not only four years’ worth of experiences, but also a gateway to future graduate schools or jobs, a lifetime network of friends and connections, and a lasting professional and personal credential. Whatever the price you actually pay, the value of that package of services may be as much as several hundred thousand dollars.

Making a decision of that magnitude cannot be reduced to a formula. So, having thrown the rankings in the wastebasket, what should you do? Start by asking a few hard questions about yourself and be ruthlessly honest with the answers. What have you liked, and what have you disliked, about your educational experiences? How do you learn best: by listening to lectures, in small-group discussions, by sitting in front of a computer, by hands-on application? How do you feel about academic work? Do you enjoy it for its intrinsic value or do you do it because you feel you have to? Do you learn best when you take subjects that you choose or when you discover new things that have been chosen for you? What kind of person are you, and what kind of person do you want to be: how intellectual, how creative, how social, how athletic? How much do you care about prestige and bragging rights? Do you need lots of structure or do you thrive with lots of freedom? How important is it to be surrounded by people similar to you or different from you? What kind of setting do you find most supportive and stimulating: large or small, urban or rural, near to home or far from home? What kinds of extracurricular opportunities are important to you? And the big question: how difficult will it be financially for you to attend college?

Having compiled answers to questions like these, begin your search for colleges or universities that seem likely to fit. Of course the best resource might be a college counselor, if you are lucky enough to have access to one. But, even if you don’t, you can glean useful information from this guide as well as college search sites like U-Can, College Navigator, College Search, Peterson’s, U.S. News, Princeton Review, and College InSight. Surf these sites, not for rankings, but for search variables that seem like good measures for the things you really care about. For example, if finances are really tight, focus on average undergraduate debt at graduation. (By the way, don’t focus on published tuition because schools with the highest tuitions also tend to have the most generous financial-aid programs.) If you learn best in small settings, focus on measures of class size, such as average class size or percentage of classes with enrollment below 20, or on student-faculty ratio. If you really care about diversity, check the racial, ethnic, and national breakdown of the student body. And if you—be honest!—care most about prestige or reputation, focus on rankings, because that is all that most of them really measure.

Having narrowed your search in this way, take virtual tours by going on the Web sites of the schools you find attractive. Recognizing that Web sites are a form of advertising, you can still pick up a lot of information about what a school values by how it presents itself. If you can afford to do so, there is no substitute for personal visits to campus. Make an appointment with the admission office, and go when school is in session. Follow the canned tour and information session, but then wander off to talk to students and faculty. Spend a night in the dorms. Sit in on two or three classes. Check out the library and the sports center and the student union. You are looking for the place you’ll call home for the next four years. If, after all this, the college feels right, you know you have found that home.

Or, to return to my musical metaphor, you will know which college is playing your tune.

Diver is the president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Having compiled answers to questions like these, begin your search for colleges or universities that seem likely to fit. Of course the best resource might be a college counselor, if you are lucky enough to have access to one. But, even if you don’t, you can glean useful information from this guide as well as college search sites like U-Can, College Navigator, College Search, Peterson’s, U.S. News, Princeton Review, and College InSight. Surf these sites, not for rankings, but for search variables that seem like good measures for the things you really care about. For example, if finances are really tight, focus on average undergraduate debt at graduation. (By the way, don’t focus on published tuition because schools with the highest tuitions also tend to have the most generous financial-aid programs.) If you learn best in small settings, focus on measures of class size, such as average class size or percentage of classes with enrollment below 20, or on student-faculty ratio. If you really care about diversity, check the racial, ethnic, and national breakdown of the student body. And if you—be honest!—care most about prestige or reputation, focus on rankings, because that is all that most of them really measure.

Having narrowed your search in this way, take virtual tours by going on the Web sites of the schools you find attractive. Recognizing that Web sites are a form of advertising, you can still pick up a lot of information about what a school values by how it presents itself. If you can afford to do so, there is no substitute for personal visits to campus. Make an appointment with the admission office, and go when school is in session. Follow the canned tour and information session, but then wander off to talk to students and faculty. Spend a night in the dorms. Sit in on two or three classes. Check out the library and the sports center and the student union. You are looking for the place you’ll call home for the next four years. If, after all this, the college feels right, you know you have found that home.