Spring Break
Colleges boycott 'U.S. News' rankings
By: Chris Sannino
Issue date: 5/11/07 Section: News
Originally published: 5/11/07 at 2:51 AM EST
Last update: 5/11/07 at 5:45 PM EST
Originally published: 5/11/07 at 2:51 AM EST
Last update: 5/11/07 at 5:45 PM EST
Colleges across the country have been taking a stand against the college ranking surveys administered each year by U.S. News and World Report. Efforts are now falling into place for a collective boycott.
Though there have been individual complaints in the past, a growing number of colleges are now banding together against the ranking system in the wake of recent events.
The president of Sarah Lawrence College claimed that the magazine threatened to use fabricated numbers in place of real SAT statistics since Sarah Lawrence stopped evaluating students on their SAT scores.
Executive Editor of U.S. News Brian Kelly called the incident a "miscommunication" and said that the magazine had no intention of cheating on their data.
"The reason the rankings are popular is that there is a great hunger among consumers to have some tangible data to use. Some universities are unwilling to give people the information they want," said Kelly in The Christian Science Monitor.
The "reputational survey," which is distributed every year, asks college administrators to rank the quality of hundreds of schools on a scale of 1 to 5. These rankings end up accounting for 25 percent of the data used by U.S. News when compiling its list.
"We know each other through reputation, but that's different than having the kind of intimate knowledge you should have when you are making a ranking," Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, said in The Christian Science Monitor.
A prime point of argument that continues to surface is the influence that the U.S. News' rankings could be having on prospective college students. Educators are worried that while making some expensive decisions, students could be swayed by the rankings when the factors on which they are based may not match up with particular student and parent priorities. For instance, after survey input, a highly ranked college may just be the winner of a popularity vote and have nothing to offer a student in his or her area of interest.
Though there have been individual complaints in the past, a growing number of colleges are now banding together against the ranking system in the wake of recent events.
The president of Sarah Lawrence College claimed that the magazine threatened to use fabricated numbers in place of real SAT statistics since Sarah Lawrence stopped evaluating students on their SAT scores.
Executive Editor of U.S. News Brian Kelly called the incident a "miscommunication" and said that the magazine had no intention of cheating on their data.
"The reason the rankings are popular is that there is a great hunger among consumers to have some tangible data to use. Some universities are unwilling to give people the information they want," said Kelly in The Christian Science Monitor.
The "reputational survey," which is distributed every year, asks college administrators to rank the quality of hundreds of schools on a scale of 1 to 5. These rankings end up accounting for 25 percent of the data used by U.S. News when compiling its list.
"We know each other through reputation, but that's different than having the kind of intimate knowledge you should have when you are making a ranking," Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, said in The Christian Science Monitor.
A prime point of argument that continues to surface is the influence that the U.S. News' rankings could be having on prospective college students. Educators are worried that while making some expensive decisions, students could be swayed by the rankings when the factors on which they are based may not match up with particular student and parent priorities. For instance, after survey input, a highly ranked college may just be the winner of a popularity vote and have nothing to offer a student in his or her area of interest.
