College Presidents Asked To Opt Out Of Rankings

Criticism of the U.S. News & World Reports college rankings has been building in recent months, and now college presidents are being urged to opt out.

According to an article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, a dozen college presidents sent a letter to other presidents last week criticizing the rankings and calling for them to refuse to complete the magazine's "reputational survey" and to stop promoting their rankings as an indication of institutional quality. Douglas Bennett, president of Earlham College and one of the co-authors of the letter is quoted in the Chronicle article as saying that the methodology behind the rankings is "crap, deep and deep through. The reputational survey is the passing along of rumors." The article also notes that several presidents have already stopped completing the reputational survey, and others are considering doing so next year.

I applaud colleges who are taking steps to break the rankings juggernaut. However, in my opinion, the colleges should go one step further to insure that prospective students will have access to the information they need to make informed decisions. Every college and university currently completes a form known as the Common Data Set. The Common Data Set details admission and other institutional data, and was created to provide standardized information to publishers, including U.S. News. Some colleges currently make their Common Data Set available on their websites, but many do not. If all colleges and universities agreed to make the Common Data Set easily available to prospective students, students would have much of the information they need to make informed decisions, without relying on rankings.

Here is a copy of the letter sent last week to college presidents:

Date
Name, President
College or University
Address
City State Zip
Dear [First name] [Last Name]
We are writing to seek your commitment (and the commitment of your institution)
to a new approach to rankings of colleges and universities such as those compiled by U.S.
News and World Report, Princeton Review, Washington Monthly and other publications.
We believe these rankings are misleading and do not serve well the interests of
prospective students in finding a college or university that is well suited to their education
beyond high school. Among other reasons, we believe this because such rankings
• imply a false precision and authority that is not warranted by the data they use;
• obscure important differences in educational mission in aligning institutions on a
single scale;
• say nothing or very little about whether students are actually learning at particular
colleges or universities;
• encourage wasteful spending, gamesmanship and fraud in institutions’ pursuing
improved rankings;
• overlook the importance of a student in making education happen and overweight
the importance of a university’s prestige in that process; and
• degrade the educational worth for students of the college search process itself.
While we believe colleges and universities may want to cooperate in providing data
to publications for the purposes of rankings, we believe such data provision should be
limited to data which is collected in accord with clear, shared professional standards (not the
idiosyncratic standards of any single publication), and to data which are required to be
reported to state or federal officials or which the institution believes (in accord with good
accountability) should routinely be made available to any member of the public who seeks it.
We ask you to make the following three commitments:
1. Refuse to fill out the U.S. News and World Report reputational survey or any
similar opinion survey of college quality.
2. Refuse to use the rankings in any promotional efforts on behalf of your
college or university
3. Refuse to refer to the rankings as an indication of the quality of your college
or university.
Each of us has already made these three commitments. We ask you to do the same.
In accord with these commitments, you may want to provide a link on your website
to information about how you are ranked, but to do this in a way that simply provides
information, not in a way that suggests you value the specific ranking or support the ranking
project. Similarly, in answering questions from students, parents, reporters, alumni, or
prospective students and parents, these commitments would lead you to answer such
questions factually, but not in a way that suggests you value how you are ranked or that
suggests support for the ranking project.
As we go forward, we will also be working with the Education Conservancy and with
other groups to develop clear explanations of what rankings of colleges and universities do
and do not mean, and to develop better approaches (including ones that assess student
learning) to helping prospective students find and evaluate colleges and universities that will
serve well their education beyond high school.
Will you join us in these endeavors?
Sincerely yours,
Names of a dozen Presidents