This past week, the U.S. News and World Report released its annual ranking of colleges — though as usual, little change is discernible between this edition and the last. The usual big players top the lists, with Princeton, Harvard and Yale leading the national universities, and Williams College, Amherst College and Swarthmore College heading the liberal arts colleges. These rankings do offer important guidance to high school students in their college search — a kind of starting point to narrow down the hundreds of undergraduate possibilities. But the hierarchy the rankings offer is problematic in itself, in terms of the methodology it uses and perpetuates.
The methodology the rankings employ is fundamentally flawed, particularly in its insistent focus upon selectivity and measures of incoming classes and superfluous spending. The rankings depend heavily upon high school class standing and test scores of incoming freshmen, variables which may indeed reflect the inherent intelligence of admitted students, but which fail to give any sort of picture of the institution itself. In fact, these factors reflect, more than anything, the wealth and background of an incoming class.
Instead, the report should look at factors more able to capture the quality of a student’s experience at said college, such as professor quality, classroom size, student happiness, research opportunities or any number of other potential possibilities. In addition, U.S. News fails to take post-graduation job placement into account, a factor that certainly should be considered when ranking these schools.
The rankings’ heavy dependence upon these and other factors encourage cheating by these schools in order to raise their rankings and hopefully increase the amount of applications they receive. In 2012, Claremont McKenna College announced it had been reporting falsely high SAT scores since 2005. Other schools such as the U.S. Naval Academy and Clemson University have also been discovered falsifying their numbers in recent years. U.S. News fails to account for the fact that not only are the factors upon which it bases its rankings inadequate, but also that they are open to corruption and exploitation.
This is not to say that college rankings have no purpose in the college search. Indeed, they can offer a jumping-off point for students to learn more about a school’s selectivity, test score range and other admissions-related qualities. But to market these rankings as holistic assessments upon which one can base their conception of a school is pure fabrication.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board: its editor, Rachel Occhiogrosso, and its members, Daniel Jeon, Hannah Loewentheil and Thomas Nath. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
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