Another day, another college ranking. Or so it seems.
Last year at least three new rankings emerged from national publications or major companies, joining a long line of magazines that have entered the rankings game since U.S. News & World Report started publishing its list annually, in 1985.
With the August 2014 debut of Money magazine’s Best Colleges, the ranks of rankers now include Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Forbes, and The Washington Monthly, along with employment-focused companies like LinkedIn, which introduced its University Rankings in October, and PayScale, which will release its sixth annual return-on-investment ranking in March, just before U.S. News publishes the latest edition of its Best Graduate Schools.
And all the activity doesn’t even count the ratings proposed by the Obama administration.
To Corbin Martin Campbell, an assistant professor of higher education at Teachers College of Columbia University, who studies rankings, the proliferation reflects "a bizarre paradox": There are more rankings than ever, but "they really don’t speak to the education core of an institution."
At the same time, she notes, colleges possess "this incredibly rich data" about learning—thanks to accreditation, curriculum reviews, syllabus analyses, and creative ways of assessing college teaching—that never make their way into any kind of consumer ranking. "The public is really left wanting," she says.
For other rankings skeptics—and they are legion—the proliferation is easier to understand. "It’s click bait, basically," contends Richard A. Hesel, principal at the Art & Science Group, a consulting company that works in higher education.
But it’s apparently click bait that resonates. Since 1995 the company has conducted three surveys of prospective college students. Early on, the rankings weren’t that significant a factor in students’ application decisions, but by December 2012 its StudentPoll found that two-thirds of students bound for four-year colleges were taking rankings into account. Among students with the highest SAT scores, it was 85 percent.
Mr. Hesel blames "all the media hype about the rankings, higher education’s own pandering to them, and the intense competitive landscape of college admissions" for the seeming influence of college rankings, even as he argues that most institutions would be better off spending less time worrying about their ranking and more time ensuring they’re providing a valuable student experience and innovative teaching.
According to StudentPoll, which is done in collaboration with ACT, U.S. News was far and away the most influential: 58 percent of those who used a ranking cited it, followed by 21 percent for Princeton Review, 9 percent for Forbes Top Colleges, 5 percent for Thebestcolleges.org, and 8 percent for all others.
For that reason, Mr. Hesel, for one, says he doubts the influx of new rankings will substantially influence students’ college choices or unseat established players like U.S. News.
"People have in their head an idea of where the well-known places stand," he says. Newer ones "won’t have currency."
The newer entrants, however, see themselves not as also-rans but as innovators. They contend that their approaches do a better job of measuring the impact a college has had, versus rankings that often merely reflect the quality of those who applied and enrolled, because they focus on how students fare after college and, in some cases, try to account for the socioeconomic status of the student body.
We’re entering either rankings overload or Rankings 2.0.
'Perverse Incentives'
Money’s Best Colleges ranking was developed in collaboration with the company College Measures and its founder, Mark Schneider, an expert on higher-education data. The rankings take into account affordability, graduation rates, student debt, and how students fare after graduation.
Kim Clark, a longtime reporter at U.S. News who moved to Money four years ago, says she appreciates the "accountability" that her former publication introduced into the higher-education market but over time also worried about the "perverse incentives that the U.S. News rankings kind of created." (Among them, colleges gin up applications so they can appear more selective.)
It was her idea that Money do its own. "My motivation was to do something better" than U.S. News, she says. Ms. Clark says she consulted with several higher-education experts in deciding what data to measure and how to weigh the 18 factors in three categories. The ratings use data from PayScale, which collects information on salaries via crowdsourcing from individuals. It also relies on teaching evaluations from RateMyProfessors.com and federal loan-default data adjusted to take into account the economic diversity of the student pool.
The result, says Ms. Clark, is a rating weighted heavily toward affordability and return on investment. "The name of the magazine is Money," she says. "That’s our brief." Though a competitor, Forbes, already does a ranking with similar goals, Ms. Clark says that Money editors feel they’ve found a niche.
In the vein of the approach that The Washington Monthly takes with its rankings—rewarding colleges for what they do to promote social mobility and societal good—Money also developed a separate list that it calls "Value All Stars," for the 25 colleges that exceed their peers in outcomes of their graduates, considering the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations. "To me the ‘value-added’ schools are really important," says Ms. Clark. "They’re knocking it out of the park." Social mobility also plays heavily into the formula for the general rankings.
PayScale, while making its data available to others—it has collaborated with a software company called CollegeNet to produce a Social Mobility Index ranking of colleges—also develops two of its own rankings focused on value added from a very dollars-and-cents point of view. Its five-year-old College ROI Report calculates the value of 1,000-plus colleges based on their cost relative to the salaries of their graduates, and its PayScale College Salary Report, which began in 2008, ranks colleges based on the starting and midcareer salaries of their graduates.
"Students entering college weren’t doing a ton of research about what they’ll be making after graduation," says Lydia Frank, director of editorial and marketing at PayScale, explaining the company’s rationale for developing the rankings.
She says PayScale considers itself not so much in the rankings business as in "the higher-education information business." And that, she says, is because "ultimately we’re a compensation-data company"—one that can benefit greatly by getting more colleges to enlist more of their alumni to submit their salary information to the PayScale database. "The data is really valuable to us," says Ms. Frank.
To that end, PayScale has conducted an experiment with seven colleges offering free, detailed reports on alumni, in some cases broken down by major, showing how their salaries compare with graduates of other colleges. (One of them, Wittenberg University, even posted its reportonline.) In return, the participating colleges encourage alumni to submit their salary data to PayScale.
The underlying premise of the PayScale rankings, particularly its College Salary Report, may seem antithetical to many in higher education who decry the notion that the value of college can be measured by how much its alumni earn. But Ms. Frank says the company is finding growing acceptance—both from consumers and from colleges themselves. That coincides with the increasing pressure colleges face to show how their alumni are faring, says Ms. Frank. "Now we get, ‘Why aren’t we on the list?’ Before it was, ‘Take us off the list.’"
College rankings are also a means to an end for LinkedIn, the online networking and job-recruiting site that now contains profiles of more than 350 million people. "Today’s students are tomorrow’s professionals," says Crystal Braswell, a manager in its corporate-communications office.
In October, a year after it lowered the minimum age for members and introduced University Pages, where colleges can display information to be shared with prospective students, employees, and alumni, LinkedIn unveiled the first version of its University Rankings. As of now, the rankings cover only eight fields of study—investment banking, marketing, design, and accounting among them—for colleges in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Colleges with the most-successful alumni in those fields rank the highest.
Ms. Braswell says the company plans to expand the rankings to include additional fields of study, graduate schools, and universities in other countries. "Rankings are not a stand-alone thing," says Ms. Braswell. "Students need to do other kinds of research when they’re choosing a school."
LinkedIn also offers other college-oriented services, including the Decision Board site, begun in the fall of 2014, where students can solicit advice about colleges from others in their LinkedIn networks. For a site that becomes more and more valuable to recruiters as it demonstrates a growing and engaged base of members, the college strategy makes sense. Ms. Braswell says the site has about 40 million students and recent graduates as members.
The magazines that produce rankings are also looking at them as a means to another end: profits, for one.
At Money, says Diane Harris, the magazine's editor, "we really did it with really pure journalistic ambitions," but it wasn’t looking to lose money on the project either. The rankings did well. In the first 10 weeks, they accounted for about a third of all the traffic to Money’s website, she says. As a result, the magazine plans to invest more to improve them, in particular developing a better search tool. She says editors also plan to mine the data to expand the magazine’s coverage of higher education throughout the year.
In a similar vein, next month marks the debut of The Other College Guide: A Road Map to the Right School for You, a 400-plus-page resource for college students based in part on The Washington Monthly’s college ratings. (The book, published by New Press, is written by Jane Sweetland, a former dean and journalist; the Monthly’s editor, Paul Glastris; and the magazine staff.) It too sees rankings as the basis for new business opportunities.
Any College Can Achieve
The rankings universe appears to be ever-expanding. Which means that just about any college can find some list in which it’s a high achiever, even as officials often trash the whole enterprise.
"Colleges are ready to trumpet whatever they get," says David Hawkins, executive director of educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Meanwhile, he says, "there’s a significant body of our members who think rankings shouldn’t exist at all, that education is such a personal experience that you can’t generalize about it."
Richard H. Hersh isn’t a Nacac member, but he’s solidly in that "shouldn’t exist" camp. A former college president (of Hobart & William Smith and of Trinity College, in Connecticut) and co-author of the book We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education, Mr. Hersh is dismissive of all the rankings because, he contends, what they measure is at best correlational: They gauge "the quality of the people who applied to colleges," he says, and use that to suggest the quality of a college itself. People are just avoiding the question, "What is actually being learned?"
When he was a college president, he says, he tried for seven straight years to get his fellow presidents in the Annapolis Group to boycott U.S. News.He says only two were willing to sign on.
Mr. Hawkins, of Nacac, says he does see one silver lining in the proliferation of rankings. They could help change the general perception that U.S. News rankings are "almost official." The more the other rankings catch on, he says, they can help "make the point that its methodology is not sacred."
Ms. Harris, the Money editor, says the rankings satisfy needs at several levels. For one, parents want to be sure that they and their children are getting real value, and that students will leave college prepared for a successful life.
Rankings are also appealing because anybody who went to college has some kind of personal stake in seeing how their college stacks up, Ms. Harris says. "And," she notes, "everybody likes a good list."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ever-Growing-World-of/190437