The College Rankings Revolt

Col

lege presidents are a fairly unflappable lot, but nothing gets their goat quite like the issue of rankings. Take a complex institution, crunch it down into a single number, and the adjectives start flying: "Silly." "Snotty." "Scandalous." Echoing many of his peers, Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, blames the rank-ordering of diverse schools for much of the current college-admissions frenzy. "It's almost as though we've created a monster," he says. And yet, despite years of vituperation, most schools keep dutifully filling out the surveys that make these ratings possible. Why?

Because in the race for consumers — er, students— few colleges, no matter how well endowed, are willing to risk their prestige by dropping out of what has become a hugely influential beauty contest, U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings. Like many magazines — this one included — U.S. News compiles lists because, well, readers buy them, but lists can invite gamesmanship. This year, however, a small but growing number of schools are starting to fight back. Or preparing to fight back. O.K., contemplating fighting back. The heads of a dozen private colleges are waiting for the final draft of a letter they will probably sign and send within the next few weeks to their counterparts at 570 or so small to midsize schools asking whether they would be willing to pull out of the U.S. News survey, stop filling out part of it, stop advertising their ranking or, most important, help come up with more relevant data to provide as an alternative. Says an early draft: "By acting collectively, we intend to minimize institutional risk and maximize public benefit." Translation: We can't afford to go solo.

U.S. News has been grading colleges and universities since 1983, and while the magazine mostly uses hard data, the largest single component of the rankings — 25% of a school's overall score — comes from a survey that asks presidents, provosts and admissions directors to assess peer institutions. The reputational rating is "a very legitimate tool for getting at a certain level of knowledge about colleges," says U.S. News executive editor Brian Kelly. "Who better to ask to evaluate colleges than top college administrators?"

But schools complain that the surveys lock them into the same relative space on the list, often because of decades-old impressions. They also argue that the rankings' formula overemphasizes selective admissions data like low acceptance rates and high SAT scores for incoming freshmen while giving short shrift to what really matters but is much harder to measure: the education students receive once they get on campus.

Even more pernicious is what critics call "ranksteering," i.e., specifically tailoring administrative decisions to move higher up on the list. The rankings encourage more per-pupil spending, which makes up 10% of a school's score and certainly doesn't help keep tuition down. Indeed, Bowdoin College watched its ranking slip from fourth to eighth in the '90s as it balanced its budget rather than keep pace with peers' spending increases. "Evaluating education in a way that rewards institutions for building Jacuzzis and rock walls as much as for investing in what happens in the classroom is a system that is leading us in the wrong direction," says Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College. He and others warn of "hidden incentives," but sometimes they're in plain sight. Just this month, a compensation plan was approved for the head of Arizona State University explicitly tying a $10,000 bonus to a higher U.S. News ranking.

A few schools have tried to opt out of the list. When Reed College stopped complying in 1995, the magazine assigned the lowest possible value to the missing statistics; in one year, Reed fell from the second quartile to the fourth. (Since then, the iconoclastic school has suffered no shortage of qualified applicants.) U.S. News now plugs in whatever data it can find for nonparticipants. "They won't let you quit," Drew president Weisbuch says of the magazine's data collectors. "I would spell it U.S. N-O-O-S-E."

Weisbuch, who has asked his faculty to vote this spring on whether to continue filling out the survey ("If it were up to me, we'd quit"), is helping draft the letter urging his peers to take bolder steps collectively. More than one president in the liberal-arts sub-30 neighborhood — Drew this year is tied for 69th — has said higher-ups need to jump ship first. But even the élites are worried about taking the plunge. In recent years, a top-ranked school got a new president who wanted to skip the survey. "I was told we would drop 10 points and no one would know why," says the head honcho. "I'd have to be an idiot to do that."

Hence the need for what Lloyd Thacker, a former college guidance counselor and admissions officer, calls "benevolent collusion." Thacker, who started a nonprofit in 2004 with the cat-herding goal of returning sanity to the admissions process, is pushing the current letter-writing campaign with the fervor of an evangelist. And his flock of concerned college presidents gained a few more members after a recent publicity flap. U.S. News was revealed to have considered assigning in its next rankings an arbitrary SAT score to Sarah Lawrence College because the school no longer collects applicants' scores.

But no matter how many institutions join forces to take on the rankings, the question is, What can they offer as an alternative? As U.S. News can attest, more meaningful metrics are hard to come by. Says Kelly: "Whenever we can get better data, we use it." One way to compare educational quality would be if more colleges published the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which is administered by Indiana University and is already used internally by hundreds of schools to gauge such things as how much students feel challenged by the curriculum. Yes, student opinion is an imperfect measure, but, says Kent Chabotar, president of Guilford College, "if there's nothing else out there, why not? We all use it." Meanwhile, two groups of public universities are putting together comparable — and consumer-friendly — data on educational outcomes. The reporting system, expected to be finalized this fall, will be voluntary but could catch on if adopted by enough of the associations' members, which teach some 70% of all students pursuing four-year degrees in the U.S. Because as colleges well know, there's safety in numbers — and pressure too.