Op-Ed ; Easy for Harvard to Make Grade

By MICHAEL LUCAS

The presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have stopped participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report. These schools think that the one-size-fits-all ranking misrepresents academic quality.

Even so, schools like Harvard and Princeton will continue to participate, and with good reason. I mean, they must have a good reason. After all, these schools are the leaders, engineers of social change.

U.S. News ranks colleges according to a weighted average ranking of 15 categories.

The biggest weight is given to “peer assessment.” U.S. News surveys faculty at colleges around the country to rank schools by reputation. Sure, this assumes each faculty member can assess the quality of hundreds of schools off the top his head. But even if the faculty member doesn’t know exactly what the campus, requirements, curriculum, faculty and other opportunities at a given school are like; even if he’s never been to the school (often the case), he must have some idea how to rank it. Or he’ll just remember what he saw in the last U.S. News ranking. Fine, maybe “peer assessment” isn’t the best way to rank colleges.

We’ll have to dig deeper. Top schools might be impressed by another part of the ranking: faculty compensation. As a Yankees fan, I wish baseball rankings were determined by a team’s salary.

Unfortunately, the $40 million the Yankees spent on Carl Pavano was about as useful as the $8 million Columbia spent on a townhouse for Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who teaches exactly one course (and a fluff course, at that). So we’re not there yet.

But there are plenty of other things built into the rankings that might attract Harvard’s attention, such as student selectivity. This appeals to the logic that better students should go to more selective colleges, which are more selective because better students go there. Dizzy yet?

I guess there is one other possibility. The big guns of higher education – including Harvard, Princeton and Yale – could be supporting an inexcusably random and uninformative ranking system just to maintain their perceived prestige without any work, even though they are the only schools with the power to change the system. Meanwhile, other schools continue to participate for fear of not being competitive if they withdraw from the rankings.

Further, U.S. News rejiggers its methodology each year just enough to make the top 10 look exciting, but not so much that there would be a huge upset. Parents and students then rely on U.S. News as the largest publication with the audacity to claim that there is one “best” overall college, especially considering “best” ignores curriculum, dining halls, social life, career placement, location, study abroad programs, crime rates, available majors, faculty involvement and so much else.

Surely, a powerhouse like Harvard would have noticed the inferiority of a one-size-fits-all ranking, especially since there are other rankings that provide a broader view of a college. The Princeton Review rankings separately rank things like food quality, professor availability, amount of teaching assistants and college town feel. This laid-back approach lets the student decide which aspects of college choice are vital, providing a sharp contrast to the U.S. News totalitarian ranking regime. But Harvard wouldn’t support this system just for personal gain, would it? After all, it is a top five school. . . at least according to U.S. News.

Michael Lucas is a Ph.D. student in economics at Boston University.

(c) 2007 Boston Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.