US News & World Report Ranking

dave72
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:22:36 +0000

Actually, Plainsman, the fact that Reed does not participate has hurt it pretty badly: most knowledgeable observers think Reed’s applications would be more robust (and thus its selectivity would be much enhanced) if it participated in the rankings. Most colleges simply don’t feel they have the luxury of declining to participate. Nor is Oberlin in the position of being able to “demand” anything of USNWR. Oberlin administrators have repeatedly tried to get USNWR editors to recognize how capricious and (from our perspective) ill-judged its methods are. They simply don’t care. What they care about is selling magazines.

Oberlin has not declined in any objectively measurable way since it was in the top 10 of the rankings–and in fact most of our numbers have improved over that time. What has changed is the way the rankings are calculated, which is arbitrary and unscientific. The largest factor in the rankings is a popularity poll conducted among college presidents and provosts and high school guidance counselors, most of whom have minimum knowledge of the institutions they are rating. (Seriously, who knows enough to compare the academic excellence of, say, Pomona, Macalester, Wesleyan, Oberlin, and Davidson, let alone all the other schools in the top 50? Yet that is the most important component of these ratings.)

It’s not as though Oberlin doesn’t care, because we know prospective students look at these ratings. And of course we believe we deserve to be in the very top echelon. But all we can do is try to educate people about what the ratings do–and do not–mean.

For further discussion of these issues, see the summer issue of the alumni magazine, which should be online soon.