College rankings are crap.
There. I said it and it felt good. Another example of the corporate merchandising of higher education.
Of course, that does not mean I don’t pay attention to them either, and I have habit of ranking everything myself. So I am not a “ranking-hater,” just not a fan of collegiate rankings, which are probably one step better than collegiate football rankings.
I am sure a good majority of us have purchased a copy of one U.S. News and World Report’s annual collegiate rankings. After gaining popularity among potential college students and their parents, universities and colleges started paying more attention to the annual rankings. There are more than enough cases where institutions have catered toward the USNWR annual rankings – the gold standard among collegiate ranking programs.
In true entrepreneurial fashion, USNWR began other rankings – graduate and professional schools – while also getting specific to individual academic programs and college departments. Meanwhile the proliferation of other companies trying to get a piece of the ranking bounty followed.
We are quite obsessed with collegiate rankings. While a handful of mostly liberal arts colleges have turned their noses to USNWR and other rankings, the overwhelming majority of college and university leaders eagerly look forward to the annual rankings. Admissions officers will proudly convey their campus rankings, which also dominate the campus Web sites’ front pages. I remember when I interviewed for my master’s at the University of Florida a banner in the reception area declared the department number one in the nation. Sure I was impressed, but rankings only measure one point in time and often they are conducted about a year before actual publication. At the time, USNWR only ranked departments, and I highly doubted my program was top dog. Two years later the department had dropped to number three, which still seemed pretty good to me, but the graduate students seemed disappointed.
As any graduate student knows, a lot can change in a department in mere weeks. Faculty leave (with their research grant money) or retire, budgets freeze or are cut or the applicant pool dwindles in size or quality.
Right now I know many of you are using those rankings for graduate school or have younger siblings considering college. Now, how many of you changed your major as an undergraduate student? You have to look at the bigger picture – the school’s overall fit; if you like the campus as a whole, changing majors might not be detrimental. Graduate and professional school are more about the department or program, so you have to scrutinize those rankings even more closely than overall college rankings.
There are some good things about the rankings, assuming truth in the information – the test score and GPA averages do instill some realism in potential applicants and it makes finding schools with certain departments or programs an easy one-stop shop. Despite all the flaws in the ranking criteria and constant criticism from the professoriate and colleges that refuse to participate, we still look forward to finding out the results of the annual rankings.
But, in the end, they’re mostly bark and little bite.
Seth Fishman can be reached at [email protected].
