If choosing a college for yourself has brought more headaches than enjoyment – And if what Shirley Levin says hits home with you in any way – READ ON! We have collected the articles in this section with you in mind. There are hundreds of best-known, most sought-after colleges and universities ranked in publications such as U.S. News and World Report, but there are thousands of good colleges in the United States that do good work, provide students with a liberal arts education, and produce good citizens. Click on [More Information] to go to each complete article.
Ignore College Rankings – Become an Educated Consumer
Students and parents need to investigate colleges carefully in terms of their own needs and goals. The criteria that the magazines use to determine the rankings may not be relevant to your needs or desires. One of the variables used in the rankings, the size of the college’s endowment, may affect the difficulty of the president’s job but may have no direct effect on your child’s educational and social experiences. [ More Information ]
The Radicalism of the Liberal Arts Tradition
For some time now, critics of American higher education have depicted it as caught up in a cultural war between politically correct leftists inside the university and neoconservative curmudgeons outside it. According to this account, the curmudgeons argue that the pursuit of free intellectual inquiry—the traditional mission of the university—is under unprecedented attack from prissy speech codes and politicized professors unconcerned with older standards of objectivity. The leftists respond that curricula are more diverse, open, and vital than ever before. [ More Information ]
Dissension in the Rankings
Here’s the deal. Many educators say it’s absurd to think that the intangibles of a college education can be reduced to mere numbers, and they’re right. But for more than a decade now, U.S. News & World Report has been providing kids and their parents a way to assess the most important factor in choosing a college: academic excellence. Obviously, that’s not the only thing to think about when selecting a school. But millions of people find the magazine’s assessments useful. And it’s a measure of the seriousness with which they’re taken that deans and admissions officers compete fiercely to better their schools’ rankings from year to year. [ More Information ]
Cooking the School Books
Whatever their validity as measures of academic excellence, the annual rankings are a brilliant gimmick for U.S. News. But there's a problem. A successful feature like this requires surprise, which means volatility. Nobody's going to pay much attention if it's Harvard, Yale, and Princeton again and again, year after year. Yet the relative merits of America's top universities surely change slowly, if at all. Naturally, U.S. News does not just make up its ratings. It uses a weighted average of 16 numerical factors such as average class size, acceptance rate (fraction of applicants who are admitted), and amount of alumni giving. Trouble is, any combination of these factors just isn't going to change enough from year to year to keep things interesting. [ More Information ]
Quantifying Quality: What can the US News and World Report Rankings Tell Us About Higher Education?
The research presented here addresses two of the most common criticisms of the methodology used to produce these rankings. In particular, this study answers the following questions: What is the extent of change in U.S. News' ranking formulas across years and what are the implications for interpreting shifts in a school's rank over time? How precise is the overall score that U.S. News uses to rank schools and what are the implications for assigning schools to discrete ranks?
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College Rankings have become a Cottage Industry. Which One Should You Believe?
Be they whimsical or dead serious, assessments of colleges and universities are always controversial. The core criticism is that it’s impossible to quantify something as complicated as a university. Every September when U.S. News announces its results, a chorus of pundits weigh in with variations on the aphorism supposedly tacked to Einstein’s office wall: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." [ More Information ]
Broken Ranks: U.S. News' college rankings measure everything but what matters. And most universities do not seem to mind.
Without solid information on what they will learn, students must make choices based on geography, particular programs, or reputation. As Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, has noted: "Competition succeeds only to the extent that customers, judges, or other trusted sources can define success in some legitimate way in order to establish a standard and reward those who best achieve it. In education, at least at the university level, this ability is lacking." [ More Information ]