CSM: College presidents plan 'U.S. News' rankings boycott

Parents Forum
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<p>There is a huge response bias to NSSE-style surveys, just as with course evaluations. The results are also hard to interpret for any given student interested in the university, as such a person has no way of knowing how typical he is compared to those surveyed. </p>

<p>What these surveys actually reveal is which objective parameters (endowment size, dormitory space per student, ATMs and restaurants near the campus, class size) are accurate predictors of student opinion. One can just gather that objective data directly and report it, rank it, and use it to produce quality-of-life indices that, in principle, could be tailored to any individual customer. That is, the customer can set the weight and have a personalized ranking of schools.</p>

<p>The data gathering needed for this is much cheaper than getting hundreds of people to answer surveys each year.</p>

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<p>siserune,
You make some very good points about the NSSE. There likely is a correlation as you suggest, but that does not mean that the responses are invalid. One could draw similar parallels between research activity and PA scores but should these technical activities drive the ranking for all schools. </p>

<p>I think that the response rate on the PA is around 50%. We don’t know who responded and we don’t even know how they reached their decisions. I don’t see how you or anyone can accept this. For all we know it was the President/Provost/Dean of Admission at schools like Mercy College or Regent University or Robert Morris College or Heritage University or wherever that responded. Do academics from these schools have the knowledge to make judgments about schools all over the country? Do academics from any school? And do we have any idea on what basis these judgments are being made? The PA needs to be either totally revamped or separated out. And above all, it must be made more transparent.</p>

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<p>Here we go again…discussing the minutiae of rankings and this or that school. Of course, I appreciate your commentary and its a free country…but really…all this college prestige and rankings stuff is beyond the pale…its rather neurotic. </p>

<p>Just yesterday I was waiting for a school bus return from a field trip (chorus) for my youngest D and was discussing college apps with a woman (of considerable means) …I have a senior D who was admitted (and will be going to a northeastern private school)…and this woman who only has one child in middle school was telling me…yes “telling” me that IB students were better than AP students and that IB students get to waive the SAT test and get into this or that school…and then added…“of course, my child is going to be fluent in this language because we lived in London for (an american company with a large international presence).” I almost puked and laughed at the same time. What a bimbo! She was TOTALLY wrong on all counts!</p>

<p>IB is NOT better than AP. Getting an IB diploma does NOT waive the SAT. Blah blah blah…its all about the prestige so the PARENTS can brag at the country club (or waiting on a chorus bus field trip!)</p>

<p>What is WRONG with people? </p>

<p>Yes, there are tiers in schools and some large segments in quality. Princeton is not Presbyterian College in South Carolina. But does that mean that Presbytrerian is a subpar education and the kids that graduate will not succeed or be less “qualified” citizens? What a bunch of baloney!</p>

<p>Princeton is an excellent school. But it has also produced some “whoppers” of credibility challenged people in politics in the last 100 years and some “whoppers” of arrogant jerks…some of whom are personally known to me…and I wouldnt hire if the President himself called and recommended them (and in one case he almost did! This arrogant jerk worked in the personnel office of the WH and I wouldnt hire him if they paid me a million dollars…he was a complete jerk).</p>

<p>So carry on, if you please, about this or that school and this or that statistic or this or that ranking or this or that prestige elite school. Its all bunk.</p>

<p>What is important? Fit and Character. Fit for the student and college. And character, as in integrity, of the student.</p>

<p>Nothing else matters. Not the parchment that Princeton prints their precious diplomas upon.</p>

<p>If you got into Princeton? Congratulations and good luck. But dont come knocking on my door expecting “special consideration” JUST because you went to Princeton. If you do, I will hire the kid from Presbyterian before you anyday.</p>

<p>Be well.</p>

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<p>I am sure that Chevy and Ford would love it if all these surveys that show Toyota and Honda make better cars would go away…More information is always better than less in the field of education since most of it is wrong anyway…if you are charging the same price for a Holy Cross education as you are for an Amherst education you certainly don’t appreciate someone pointing out that one is better than the other." Quoted from Windy.</p>

<p>What? Say WHAT? Did I misunderstand you Windy? Please disabuse me of the notion that you said that Toyota is better than an Chevy or Ford. Or that Amherst is “better” than Holy Cross.</p>

<p>Please tell me I am wrong.</p>

<p>Amherst is NOT Holy Cross. Thank Goodness. Students who would thrive at one would not necessarily thrive at the other, and Amherst is NOT a Jesuit School. And THAT is the difference. Again, its about fit and character.</p>

<p>Who the heck cares if Johnny B Goode or Suzy B Cutie got into Amherst? I don’t. If you got into Amherst and had a good time and did well, then I applaud you. Otherwise, it matters not to me.</p>

<p>Both schools offer a unique “experience” and its not for everyone.</p>

<p>Did ANY ONE ever notice that the faculty at most of these schools did their graduate work at Ivy League Schools, or Chicago, or Johns Hopkins, or Stanford, or UCLA or Michigan? As if the faculty at Holy Cross or BC or Furman or Elon or Maryland or wherever suddenly became insignificant because they werent teaching at Amherst or an Ivy…even though THEY DO have Ivy credentials? Look around at many schools…look at the faculty and MANY if not most have Ivy pedigrees either at the undergrad or graduate level… most of them graduate level…and a SUBSTANTIAL majority of whom earned undergraduate degrees at schools OTHER than Amherst or Harvard…i.e. the very schools that the elitists are snearing at.</p>

<p>Its bizarre. Look, the great graduate schools pump out PhD’s like toilet paper and want their graduates to get employed…whether its UCSD or USF or Santa Clara or Arizona State or BYU. Its a job. </p>

<p>Some are at obscure schools like Presbyterian College in South Carolina. They may be INCREDIBLE professors. And therein lies the rub…there are THOUSANDS of great teachers at less than “prestige” colleges…MANY of whom have Ivy pedigrees themselves.</p>

<p>So my bottom line? We need to STOP obsessing about rankings and prestige.</p>

<p>If you have kids looking or about to look, then focus on FIT. Focus on programs that your kid wants to pursue and examine the quality of the faculty there…it may or may not be an Ivy…it may be St. Louis University (which has some mighty good people on its faculty…I know, we looked…)</p>

<p>It may be Pepperdine. It may be Dickinson. It may be Temple. Or it may be MIT or Amherst. </p>

<p>But do it for the FIT, not the prestige.</p>

<p>Your kids will thank you.</p>

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<p>I think my term for PA was “mush” somewhere upward in the thread, so I don’t think there was any acceptance of its validity. My point was that student surveys are at least as mushy, no more valid, and uninformative — we don’t know who or how many people fill them out and by what criteria they choose their answers. College presidents will at least have years of exposure to multiple institutions as undergrads, grad students, professors, visitors, trustees, and administrators. They do have some basis for comparison across institutions and for assessing reputation and quality. Of course, they also have an incentive to help their friends and bury their enemies. It’s still mush, but I don’t see how student satisfaction surveys would be an improvement.</p>

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<p>I’d love to see an explanation of why anybody is impressed with the Revealed Preference study.</p>

<p>I don’t think that study can be run reliably even for the number of colleges they considered. To get enough cross-admit battles further down their list they would need data on (at a minimum) tens of thousands of applicants. The authors tried to short-cut the lack of data by a fancy indirect ranking and weighting approach, which produces all sorts of problems. Caltech ended up number 2 in the country based on between 7 and 12 students who matriculated, because it beat other schools that beat other schools, not because it is necessarily preferred in its own right over the schools at number 3 or 4 or 5.</p>

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<p>Do chess ratings have the same problem?</p>

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<p>If there is something about chess ratings (or whatever else) that leads you to be impressed with the Revealed Preferences study, what is it?</p>

<p>Certainly you are its current biggest cheerleader in CC, so that paper must have something going for it that you can identify. Ranking Harvard at #1 does not in and of itself validate the study.</p>

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<p>"Some are at obscure schools like Presbyterian College in South Carolina. "</p>

<p>I’ve been afraid to wear my Blue Hose t-shirt ever since Imus got in trouble.</p>

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<p>What I like about the revealed preferences study is that it looks at what students decide who are actually admitted to particular schools when it comes time to commit to one school or another. That’s the kind of information I would like to see gathered from students in high school class of 2007 all across the country.</p>

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<p>What information does the Revealed Preferences method provide that is not available from nationwide published data, such as the number of applications divided by the number of matriculants at each school? That ratio shares all the claimed virtues and lacks some notable disadvantages of the Harvard study. Other shortcuts are also possible. What is special about the Revealed Preferences approach?</p>

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<p>Well, if you have any disagreements with the revealed preferences study, why don’t you meet the authors and discuss how to improve it? The study </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf[/url]”>http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>speaks for itself about its methodology, the data set used, and how it compares with other approaches to ranking colleges. The authors themselves speak about issues they would like to explore in a future study, and I know from emailing one of the authors that they are willing to discuss issues with other scholars. Go ahead and publish a paper if you think you have some new insight about college comparisons that hasn’t been adequately explored in the existing literature.</p>

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<p>Why is deemed meaningful where someone who is often heavily influenced by other variables–such as US News Rankings, parents, and peer pressure–enrolls. In fact they have never attended the school and are going on reputation and other factors which may or may not be accurate. I might rate Ferrari over Lambo based on what I have read and seen in the showroom but I really have not driven either for very long. At best I got a 10 minute test drive under strict supervision. How much weight would you give to that?</p>

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<p>It’s a dozen and now a new letter is making the rounds:</p>

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<p><a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_College_Rankings_Protest.html[/url]”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_College_Rankings_Protest.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>This is why I wonder why I should care about this. By any sort of indicator I can find, I have no reason to prefer those colleges for any of my children over </p>

<p>a) the state university in my state </p>

<p>or </p>

<p>b) the “elite” private colleges that my children may have a chance to get into. </p>

<p>What do I learn, as a “stakeholder” (a parent who will have to sign tuition checks) about a college if I already know it is rather low-rated and then the college tells me it decries ratings? </p>

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<p>Hi, barrons, ordinarily you are very astute yourself in making arguments about economics, so I’ll simply reply that while I think (agreeing with the authors of the study themselves) that the revealed preferences study is not the last word even on the narrow issue of which colleges are most preferred by admitted applicants, it is an attempt to look at CONSUMER preference, and I would like to include consumer preference, along with other information, in the mix as I consider the differing characteristics of various colleges. I would not want to buy into the colleges’ apparent belief that only producer opinion matters when comparing producers. </p>

<p>The month of April has just passed, and there have been many, many threads on CC and elsewhere online asking for comparisons of colleges that admitted some particular applicant. An applicant who is admitted to more than one college and has to decide which of those colleges at which to enroll is highly motivated to gather relevant information–relevant to that applicant–to avoid the opportunity cost of passing up the most fitting offer of admission. </p>

<p>I would be the first to agree that one shouldn’t simply go from the top down on someone else’s list of good colleges and apply to all the top colleges and none of the lower colleges. I don’t advocate that for any applicant I know. But colleges have a whole bundle of characteristics that are experienced as a bundle by the admitted applicant who decides to enroll at each college. Geography matters–to this day, most students go to college within 500 miles of their family home. Cost matters–it’s still difficult to get families to see beyond list price to what the net price is after applying for financial aid. Reputation matters–the behavior of Marilee Jones is a recent illustration of this fact. </p>

<p>If presidents of “mostly smaller” institutions have some kind of plan for distinguishing their colleges from regional state comprehensive universities or community colleges, I would be glad to hear about it. If they have some new approach to explaining to stakeholders what better experience they offer a learner than other kinds of colleges (e.g., state research universities or private highly selective LACs or research universities), I would be glad to hear about that too. But merely to decry ratings without offering useful information to stakeholders is quite unconvincing to me.</p>

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<p>Has Consumer Reports ever rated the colleges? That I’d like to see!</p>

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<p>token:</p>

<p>I have no doubt that the authors of the RP study have gone to great lenghts to make their statistical math work well. But, IMO, it suffers (at least) two issues: 1) likely geographical bias in over-population of students from the NE (assumption on my part since the data in the article you posted do not show numbers by state); 2) assuming kids on need-based aid would make the exact same choice as those students who are full pay (their definition of the “average” applicant).</p>

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<p>bluebayou - your criticism is spot on. Still I think the revealed preference studies are useful and I can guarantee you all the schools who can afford to do them for there own admitted students and their closest competitors.</p>

<p>The small LAC’s signing on to this campaign are for the most part not household names even in their own regions though some are indeed interesting and very good schools. The operate in a very crowded and highly competitive environment where almost nothing is as advertised. I sympathize with their plight but USNWR is neither the source of their competitive problems nor the abolition of rankings the likely cure.</p>

<p>I’d advise them to use their scarce resources elsewhere to try and raise their profile and distinguish their offering in the marketplace. Their real problem is that they are mostly straight knock-offs of one another with nothing unique to offer. Maybe if they weren’t all trying to be Swarthmore or Oberlin or Reed someone would notice them.</p>

<p>Note: I do know a little about St John’s of Maryland (and Sante Fe, one shcool two camouses) and it actually does have something unique to offer. I don’t know how big the market is for it among those who are in the market for small LACs but more people probably should be aware of its existence.</p>

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What exactly are their competitive problems? Schools should compete for top students, but one problem is that some students are deciding based on these bogus rankings, such that eliminating one-size-fits-all rankings is indeed part of the cure.</p>

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<p>Check what the study says about each point. </p>

<p><a href=“http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf[/url]”>http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;