<p>Of course many smaller, less well-known colleges will get on the bandwagon because joining the boycott at this juncture will indeed act as yet another sort of a badge of distinction. Don’t think there is anything cynical about it at all since much of the jockeying to get off, sit on or straddle the fence has to do with marketing and enrollment management strategies as in Moore’s “The rising tide: “branding” and the academic marketplace”.</p>
<p>More interesting comments on the inside higher ed site. include one from Joseph Soares. I completely agree with Carolyn that “Colleges can do better”. Let’s hope they will.</p>
<p>There’s also some very thoughtful discussion on the threads that have been linked from the insidehighered article. (No offense to CC posters ;)</p>
<p>Maybe the most fascinating is a rating scheme for graduate programs that I’d never seen. It allows the user to assign their own importance to various factors and have an algorithm produce a rating based on their own fit-profile. Kind of like the sleep-number bed. Fun, ingenious, and at least a step in the right direction:</p>
<p>and Business Week dishes out some interesting new tidbits with “More Opposition to U.S. News Rankings: The number of college presidents coming out against the annual list has doubled as a new survey using new methods is bandied about”</p>
<p>FWI, The American Association of Colleges and Universities site is a rich repository for resources on trends and key debates in undergraduate liberal education. In particular, an article in the Peer Review, Winter/Spring 2002 “Looking Where the Light Is Better: A Review of the Literature on Assessing Higher Education Quality” addresses head on many of the topics bandied about on this thread.</p>
<p>Also of interest when it comes to the national conversation on assessment and ranking alternatives is the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia Univeristy which “exists to equip journalists with the knowledge and skills they need to produce fair, accurate and insightful reporting”. </p>
<p>Special free report in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Playing the Rankings Game: Many college officials are asking hard questions about the methodology and effect of the ‘U.S. News’ rankings. One complaint: The survey overwhelmingly favors private institutions.” by Elizabeth Farrell and Martin van de Werf. Article does address the pesky question “who really cares what the rankings say”.</p>
<p>The first two entries are not very dramatic, one on the CDS and another on NSSE (with a link to USNews’s useful site of NSSE surveys from colleges that have made them public).</p>
<p>Good update from Bloomberg news - the number of college president signatures is now 60 and include Holy Cross, Lafayette, and Trinity College, CT. According to the article, at this time Williams College is still “pondering” whether or not to sign the boycott letter - not a surprise since the college derives a tremendous benefit from the US News line-up. Apparently, however, the college does plan to downplay the rankings game no matter how it is played- and in future will not mention survey results in its sports information or admissions brochures. Wellesley College has not signed on but will continue to sit out on the peer review as it has done for over a decade. Last month Barnard College opted out - Barnard’s president Judith Schapiro agrees with the gist of the boycott letter but at this point she finds it prudent to play the waiting game a while longer. Swarthmore is “actively reviewing” its position and future participation in the peer review.</p>
<p>Good point made about the publicity angle of all of this touched on a few posts back on this thread:</p>
<p>Of course, for the many schools that have joined Lloyd Thacker, any publicity is better than none at all. Haven’t the schools discovered that making a statement about joining the “movement” might be the only way to garner a bit of national exposure. </p>
<p>Others such as Reed have made a career of broacasting their resistance to the mighty USNews. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I was floored to read that “Wellesley College has not signed on but will continue to sit out on the peer review as it has done for over a decade.” Since I routinely included Wellesley in my lists of PA abusers (geographical and gender cronyism) I’ll have to change my tune. From now on, I’ll assume that Wellesley receives praise better than it doles it out. Could it possible that the leftovers of the “Seven” Sisters might review their scores in 2008? Tits for tats?</p>
And the results are positive, if indeed linked. Far from committing the predicted suicide, Reed has thrived since first taking the public stand in 1995. Perhaps some schools now see that resisting one-size-fits-all rankings is not dangerous.</p>
<p>But it could have been different had USNews merely granted Reed’s wish of NOT being listed. A wish I also wish USNEWs would honor, and in the same vein, give the boot to all the manipulators and complainers. </p>
<p>Were USNews to provide a mere listing of the unrankables, it would make the yearly editions so much fun to read. Especially, reading how colleges would scramble to get out of that list would be worth the 15 bucks.</p>
<p>Fun to read indeed and at this point in the game, I won’t be at all surprised if USNWR sales soar when the college edition hits the newsstands next month. After all, it is not just the colleges that are making hay when it comes to free publicity. While some college presidents are playing the waiting game to see what the alternative will be, parents and student consumers are also waiting, and at this point, either disengaged and/or not just a little confused by all of this. We can only hope that clear points will be made with the proposed alternatives that aim to eschew rankings and honor accountability and transparency as we await the appearance of the rankings alternatives that are in the works - such as U-CAN, announced to be ready to launch in Sept. All in all, USNWR is holding up quite well in this national rankings/nonrankings conversation. Case in point, a recent article in the Philly Inquirer online which neatly features a direct link to USN webpage.</p>
<p>Maybe the most interesting is a quote from a U. S. News spokesperson: " if certain schools aren’t ranked [via the peer assessment] by enough other institutions, they’ll be moved to a separate unranked category, the magazine says." That represents a change in the party line, which used to be along the lines of “we’ll just get the PA from guidance counselors, or some group other than college administrators if the PA response rate falls too low.”</p>
<p>It’s hard to know whether to read that statement as an admission that the boycott could actually have a significant effect on next year’s rankings or whether it implies exactly the opposite, essentially a challenge: “if you second tier LACs want to pull out, you take a chance that the free advertising you get from being among our top 100 may go away.”</p>
<p>In the AACU article cited above, one methodology used to assess the quality of higher education was a direct assessment of student learning. Awk! Does that mean standardized testing??? Oh no!!!</p>
<p>Joking aside, in my undergrad days all students in our CivilEng departmentwere expected to take the Engineering in Training examination administered by the Ohio State Board of Professional Engineers. Department records indicated that we had a 100% pass rate four strait years and I think my class aced the exam as well.</p>
<p>I have always thought that was a good measure of the quality of education which I received.</p>
<p>On the eve of the great unveiling of the 2008 edition of the US News rankings I just can’t help posting this little blast from the past - 1998- when Barnard President Judith Shapiro compared the ranking service “to the proverbial drunk who looks for his car keys under the lamppost, not because he has lost them there, but because that is where the light is good.”</p>
<p>FWIW, according to the barrage of articles blitzing the media this past week, the number of colleges signed on to boycott is up to 62.</p>
<p>One thing is for sure in all of this - a lot of folks will be checking out the new edition no matter what side of the fence they may be standing or sitting on.</p>
<p>highly subjective peer assessment and questinable weighting of a questionable set of factors is not journalism…well, Maybe it might be yellow journalism.</p>