<p>Hawkette:</p>
<p>That’s all just circular in nature. USNEWS Peer Assessment, revealed preferences, endowment – it’s all measuring the same thing: brand name.</p>
<p>I agree. I just would like to have others involved in making that judgment, including students, alumni and employers. They are the ones who actually buy the product. The results very well may come out very similarly to what they currently are in PA and the other measures, but it sure would be a lot more palatable, hopefully more transparent and undeniably more supportable.</p>
<p>hawkette, you seem to believe (and you’re not alone) that if only we could get more data, if only the methodology were more sophisticated and multi-layered, if only . . . then someone could come up with a single number and ranking that would capture the quality the undergrad educational experience. </p>
<p>That’s the premise that the most thoughtful critics of U. S. News reject. The presidents who advocate the boycott believe that they need to stop acting in way that appear to validate what is essentially a flawed and deeply commerical enterprise. Information galore will still be out there since schools will continue to supply much of the same information to the College Board, the National Center for Education Statistics, the NCAA, et al.</p>
<p>ok. the rankings aren’t perfect, but they’re geneerally alright. those colleges are simply insecure.</p>
<p>“The presidents who advocate the boycott believe that they need to stop acting in way that appear to validate what is essentially a flawed and deeply commerical enterprise.”</p>
<p>The college presidents are upset because the rankings impact their own commercial enterprises. A move p or down in the rankings affects how many applicants you get and how qualified those applicants are, their likelihood of accepting an offer of admission and the price they are willing to pay. Drop in the rankings and yield goes down and the discount rate goes up so certainly these presidents are unhappy. They are unhappy because they don’t rank higher. If Sarah Lawrence suddenly moved ahead of Swarthomre and Williams the president of SL would quickly change his opiion of the efficacy of the rankings.</p>
<p>My question for the president of Sarah Lawrence is this. When you have 10 slots left in the freshman class and 20 qualified applicants do you rank them or toss dice to chose the winners? Does the kid with the glowing recommendations move ahead of the kid nobody seems to know?</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s already been brought up…but I think the fact Mr. Kelly says this…</p>
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<p>…and this…</p>
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<p>…is quite troubling.</p>
<p>Since when were students consumers and colleges competitors? Yes, I know that in a literal sense they are…but when you look at colleges in the same way as shopping for a car, then you’re just bring the wrong attitude with you to the process.</p>
<p>An education is an education is an education, and a degree is a degree is a degree. You can get them anywhere if you work hard enough…yes, it will cost money, and yes, there will be differences in what you learn and the environment you learn it in. But if you work hard enough, you’ll still learn, so what’s the big deal anyways?</p>
<p>ETA: Sorry, seeing the above poster’s post made me want to post about Sarah Lawrence for a little bit.</p>
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<p>All I’m going to say is dude, you OBVIOUSLY have not visited Sarah Lawrence. Trust me on this one: If SL were ranked higher than Williams and had a peer-assessment score of 5.0, the president would still hold his opinion and not give a dang. They are very liberal, very activist, and therefore in turn very anti-commercialism and very pro-liberal arts and “the experience” of college.</p>
<p>Besides, SL is in the top 50 for Liberal Arts colleges…it’s not like it’s a low ranked school or is having trouble getting applicants or anything.</p>
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<p>Considering that SL asks applicants to submit 3 letters of rec and doesn’t require SAT scores…yes, they would go with the glowing recs any given April 1st.</p>
<p><a href=“hawkette%20wrote:”>quote</a> on virtually any product they buy-electronics, automobile, apparel, any type of service, etc. … consumers have a large say in the evaluation of the product. Why should it be any different for college education?
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<p>Because for the other products the standards of performance are relatively clear and uniform across consumers, so we know how to interpret other consumers’ opinions. This is not true for movies (“customers gave Titanic an average rating of 3.8 out of 5”) or colleges. Hence the unstoppable demand for ever-finer measurement of schools, so that consumers can compare numerically the quality and cost of the aspects of interest to them rather than relying on mushy opinion surveys averaged across consumers or college presidents.</p>
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<p>The college prez’s should be thanking their lucky stars that these rankings fluctuate from year to year, disagree amongst each other, and have a subjective component. Their nightmare would be an invariable, objective and unassailable ordering. That US News results are disputable by other measures means that schools who rank high or move up can use it for advertising while schools that drop can fall back on the other measurements or the unreliability of the USNWR list.</p>
<p>This is no different from movies, where each ad quotes only from the positive reviews. If all critics agreed, only the top few movies would sell tickets (for those who buy tickets based on the reviews). Ratings diversity allows colleges room for marketing, and they should be very thankful to US News for operating as an unpaid sales force. Trying to kill those rankings is insane stupidity, because it accelerates the onset of more accurate rankings that colleges cannot gainsay or manipulate.</p>
<p>Recent media articles on the proposed boycott indicate that, so far, eight college presidents have agreed to sign up.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.flathatnews.com/news/826/colleges-criticize-rankings[/url]”>http://www.flathatnews.com/news/826/colleges-criticize-rankings</a></p>
<p>“USC: No plans to sign rankings petition” article is worth the read. Here is a short excerpt:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://media.www.dailytrojan.com/media/storage/paper679/news/2007/04/23/News/Usc-No.Plans.To.Sign.Rankings.Petition-2872910.shtml[/url]”>http://media.www.dailytrojan.com/media/storage/paper679/news/2007/04/23/News/Usc-No.Plans.To.Sign.Rankings.Petition-2872910.shtml</a></p>
<p>Rankings and the neurotic obsessions with same. I mean its ludicrous.</p>
<p>Why do we do it? Because many of us have these little gremlins inside of us that wants “status” in our lives, or for our children. Sure everyone has some rationalization for this or that status. </p>
<p>But really, its absurd.</p>
<p>Who can say an Education at Swarthmore is better or more valuable than Bucknell? Don’t say it is because the kids at Swarthmore have higher SAT scores and thus are objectively smarter and thus provide a better learning environment.</p>
<p>Baloney!</p>
<p>Its all about fit. That might include a student’s interest in sports, or a student’s interest in a particular program, or a student’s religion, or a student’s political views or disdain for politics and activist campuses, or it may be about geographical location: rural or urban or suburban. Or it may be about social fit: money and snobs, or a concern for the less well off. </p>
<p>Every school has a feel, an ambiance, a culture which is either fostered by the faculty and administration or has become so by the admissions process. Girls with pearls? Or boys with toys?</p>
<p>For every student in the United States there are a myriad of schools they would do well at, succeed, and go on to great things. Its often enough very capricious where and how they decide to go to college.</p>
<p>For some people publishing faculty are more important than teaching faculty. For some its the number of nobel laureates (as if their little “junior” will some how benefit from that).</p>
<p>My D picked a school base on HER definition of fit, which admittedly is not the same as someone else who may have picked Vanderbilt or Duke. She wanted to go away to school to a DIFFERENT part of the country where she was born and raised, meet different people, but not too different or so different as to feel an outsider and obscure. She did not want a radical activist school, but she didnt want an apolitical or apathetic school either. She didnt want one lilting too much to the left like Swarthmore or Brown, or too much to the right like Washington and Lee or Grove City College. She didnt want a preppy country club, but she didnt want NYU either.</p>
<p>She found what she wanted, she was graciously accepted and its programs are strong, deep, and the faculty warm and encouraging.</p>
<p>Asking if Tufts is better than Tulane, or if Duke is better than Davidson, or if Georgetown is better than George Washington is inane and absurd. Its all about the fit.</p>
<p>I wish you all the very best and a great fit!</p>
<p>I think people are being unfair…not only does Sarah Lawrence make fine baked goods but they also produce Jimmy Dean sausages and Ball Park franks…fine products all… so cut them a little slack.</p>
<p>marathon man,
I think you make an excellent point-that it is very, very difficult to come up with a single point calculation that estimates the quality of the undergrad education. However, I do think that more data from more interested parties is useful and would certainly be better than asking a variety of unnamed academics to rank schools, many of which they probably have scant knowledge of, and on criteria that we have no knowledge of. </p>
<p>As an alternative, consider a 360 degree performance evaluation that is commonly used among many businesses today. Reviews of an individual are done by managers, colleagues on the same level and subordinates. Some are in your department, some are not. Sometimes, even customers are consulted. This provides a more well rounded perspective and understanding and helps the company evaluate the employee and the employee to understand where he/she is strong and weak and where improvements can be made. I think some similar approach should be used for the Reputation part of the USNWR survey and allow others to weigh in on faculty and the educational quality of a school. Students should have a say, alumni should have a say, recruiters should have a say, faculty should have a say. Putting all of these together will almost certainly give a better picture of the quality of the education being dispensed and I suspect that the sensitivity of the school and the faculty to student needs would greatly improve. Ultimately, would this be a perfect system? No, it will never be perfect, but I strongly believe it would be a vast improvement over the clearly deficient PA system now in place. </p>
<p>theoddchild,
Education is a definitely a product and every college in the country knows this and is trying to figure out and establish their brand and how to best market it to consumers (students, alumni and recruiters). If you believe that college is not a business, then I think you are being na</p>
<p>It sounds like the boycott movement is fizzling out.</p>
<p>My sense is that this is just a moment of calm before the Annaopolis group meets in June. </p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.aacrao.org/transcript/index.cfm?fuseaction=show_view&doc_id=3525[/url]”>http://www.aacrao.org/transcript/index.cfm?fuseaction=show_view&doc_id=3525</a></p>
<p>There seem to be several misunderstandings out there about this initiative. First, it’s largely symbolic: the participants would refuse to supply the peer assessement, not refuse to send U. S. News other data; between 30 and 50% of schools (depending on whose figures you believe) already refuse to fill out the PA anyway, so this will hardly be earth-shaking.</p>
<p>Second, the movers and shakers are not 2nd-tier schools whining about performing poorly in U. S. News. Those at the meeting this summer where the movement seemed to gain some of its traction included the presidents of Amherst, Columbia, Swarthmore, Williams, and a representative from Harvard.</p>
<p>A few small points:</p>
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<li><p>That the rankings are “commercial” is not much of a criticism. Putting together any kind of comprehensive, good-faith ranking is an expensive, time-consuming process. No one would do it without getting paid. There are lots of very valuable commercial rankings out there: Morningstar, S&P, Gallup, sports bookmakers all over the world. Even rankings compiled by nonprofits have commercial motivation – you can bet Consumer Reports would stop spending money on its comparative assessments if that didn’t sell enough magazines to cover the cost.</p></li>
<li><p>Look at other big-ticket items on which people spend lots of money (and ego). Is there any accepted comprehensive ranking scheme for automobiles? Houses and neighborhoods? Vacation spots? People legitimately have different preferences on such things. There will never be a ranking system, no matter how sensitive and multi-factored, that will definitively settle whether a BMW is better than a Lexus, or Scarsdale better than Atherton, or St. Martin better than Cap d’Antibes.</p></li>
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<p>JHS,
Colleges foot the bill for most of the information. The amount of time US News spends is a drop in the bucket compared to the effort expended by the institutions to put together common datasets. By and large the effort expended by US News is on those areas that give it commercial viability: the peer assessment surveys. It is no irony that those same PA’s are the focus of criticism of USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>CC serves as an example that people are willing to collate and share information. Currently much of the data is anecdotal, but with a little organizational effort CC contributors could dwarf the efforts of USNWR.</p>
<p>“The Common Data Set (CDS) initiative is a collaborative effort among data providers in the higher education community and publishers as represented by the College Board, Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report.” </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.commondataset.org/default.asp[/url]”>http://www.commondataset.org/default.asp</a> </p>
<p>(The Web site appears to be hosted on Peterson’s servers.)</p>
<p>“They are very liberal, very activist, and therefore in turn very anti-commercialism and very pro-liberal arts and “the experience” of college.”</p>
<p>Yeah and so is George Soros but that doesn’t keep him from wrecking the economies of third world countries with his currency speculation in order to promote his disinterested liberality. Fact is if SL was as disinterested in commercialism as you claim then they should’t care about the rankings. But the thing is even liberals like to eat - they just prefer to do it on somebody else dime.</p>
<p>Michele Tolela Myers, the president of SL, was quite frank that she cares very much about the rankings:</p>
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<p>Her gripe was with a single data point, so while the SL dust-up over SAT score reporting gave ammunition to the U. S. News foes, it was largely a separate issue.</p>
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<p>The 3.8 figure was invented as an illustration.</p>
<p>The point was that an average of unknown people’s subjective quality ratings is not informative. The same is true for 1-to-10 ratings by students of the teaching, quality of life, or other elements of their college experience. You don’t know what those surveyed students like and dislike, or whether they are qualified to judge anything. Student opinions of teaching are especially unreliable; quality and popularity are not the same thing.</p>
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<p>Vagueness and unaccountability is also the case for opinion surveys of the customers, who are even less objective than college presidents and have less basis for comparison. Subjective queries are bound to produce low-quality data on this subject. What questions would you ask those “stakeholders” that could produce usable information? I think prospective customers would be interested in hearing of postgraduate outcomes in employment, salary, debt and grad school admission, but those are quantitative queries.</p>