Copley News Service, September 8, 2006, Friday

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Copley News Service

September 8, 2006 Friday 4:14 AM EST

SECTION: THE ALERT CONSUMER

LENGTH: 1225 words

HEADLINE: Annual college rankings: more an art than a science

BYLINE: Eleanor Yang Su

BODY:
Eva Ostrum has seen it several times: a father, eager to find the best college for his teenager, would arrive at a counseling appointment armed with spreadsheets filled with schools and their rankings.
Ostrum would gingerly tell him to put aside the rankings before attempting a discussion about his child's passions and preferences.
"Parents need to keep in mind that rankings systems are very subjective," said Ostrum, a former assistant admissions director at Yale University and the author of "The Thinking Parent's Guide to College Admissions."
"They are more art than science."
As fall approaches, the college application process kicks into high gear.
In the past few weeks, publications grading colleges have filled the magazine stands of bookstores. The offerings range from the granddaddy of all rankings, U.S. News and World Report, which attempts to rate academic quality, to other publications that list best party and jock schools. In the past decade, the market for college guidebooks has ballooned, egged on by the competition to get into the "best" schools.
The market now includes dozens of guidebooks and rankings, catering to an ever-growing audience. Last year, an estimated 2.3 million students considered applying to college, said Robert Franek, the author of Princeton Review's "The Best 361 Colleges."
So what's a student to do with this explosion of information?
Some experts urge students to avoid rankings altogether, disparaging as "pseudo-scientific" a system that tries to reduce the college experience to a number. Others say the lists at least give students more information on colleges. Some say the rankings can be used, selectively, to broaden the search.
HOW RANKINGS WORK
For more than a century, people have tried to assess how the nation's colleges stack up. As early as 1870, the U.S. Bureau of Education ranked universities based on statistical information.
Rankings have grown increasingly popular in the past two decades, despite concern by academics that the assessments weigh the high school achievements of incoming freshmen instead of measuring what the college's graduates have learned.
U.S. News and World Report rankings give the greatest weight - 25 percent - to a school's reputation. The magazine sends surveys to 250 institutions, asking presidents, provosts or deans to rate their peers. The method has been widely criticized for giving so much clout to administrators who spend little, if any, time in the classroom.
Some have faulted the magazine for using criteria that they say favor wealthy private schools such as: faculty salaries (7 percent), incoming students' SAT or American College Test scores (7.5 percent), alumni giving rate (5 percent) and the six-year graduation rate (16 percent).
"Each of the individual components of information provided is useful and people should consider them," said Ronald Ehrenberg, a Cornell University professor who has studied rankings for more than 10 years. "But the formulas and weights are arbitrary."
U.S. News' Robert Morse, who has been in charge of compiling the rankings since 1987, said the magazine carefully considers its methodology.
"The reputation of a school is important because it's something graduates carry with them their whole life," Morse said. "It's something that's of vital importance when they go to look for their first job, or when they apply to graduate schools, since graduate schools are very status-oriented and have their own rating of schools."
Another top-seller, Princeton Review, bases its rankings almost entirely on student surveys. Last month, Princeton Review publicized 62 rankings culled from more than 115,000 self-selected student surveys.
Students attending what Princeton Review deems the nation's top 361 colleges are asked to fill out online surveys on topics ranging from "Professors Get High Marks" and "Class Discussions Encouraged" to "Reefer Madness" and "Most Beautiful Campus."
Critics say these rankings lack scientific controls. For example, even if several hundred students from one school fill out the survey, and only a handful participate from another school, each result is weighted the same.
Other criticism is rooted in the belief that colleges manipulate data to make themselves look better, by, for example, reporting what percentage of their alumni association's membership makes donations, instead of basing the figure on total living graduates.
"Are data being manipulated? I suspect they are," said Don Hossler, a professor at Indiana University who has researched rankings for 20 years. He estimates that up to one-quarter of four-year colleges participating in the rankings massage their data to look better.
"There's an over-obsession with rankings," he said.
PUBLICATIONS HOT SELLERS
Last year, U.S. News and World Report sold 45,000 newsstand copies of its "Best Colleges" edition, in addition to a paid subscriber list of 2 million. On top of that, it sold "several hundred thousand" copies of its 280-plus page "America's Best Colleges" newsstand guide, which includes a directory of 1,400 colleges.
The publications range in price from a $4 magazine to books and guides that sell for between $10 to $22. Limited rankings information is also available on publications' Web sites.
"College is growing more expensive, and the rankings give people some basis to judge whether they are making a good investment in themselves," said Marc Meredith, a Stanford University doctoral student who published a paper on the effects of rankings.
That said, academics estimate that less than 10 percent of students actually consider rankings in deciding what school to attend. Most students choose a school because it's close to home and affordable, said George Kuh, an Indiana University professor who directs the National Survey of Student Engagement.
Several students echoed that point.
"I didn't think about rankings when I was deciding which school to attend," said Shiraney Sim, a junior at San Diego State University studying business. "I wanted to stay in San Diego. I like the people here and the teachers are easy."
Many students rely on their friends' experiences.
"I have a lot of friends who came to USD and now they have great jobs," said Patrick Mahoney, a University of San Diego law student who graduated from the undergraduate program in May. "What are the rankings based on anyway? It's much better to get an insider's perspective."
Rankings have the most significance, academics said, to affluent and status-minded students, alumni, faculty, administrators and recruiters.
Employers in some fields put a premium on recruiting from highly ranked schools: investment banking, management consulting, engineering and software development.
"It matters most for students straight out of college who have less work experience and less of a track record," said John Mestepey, a vice president at Edward W Kelley and Partners, an executive search firm that was formerly known as A.T. Kearney Executive Search. "The better-ranked schools become quality screens."
Mestepey described a college's reputation as equal in importance to a recent graduate's grades, extracurricular activities, summer work experience or job interview.
Some companies, such as Qualcomm, have created their own rankings based on factors such as past hires, college curriculum and diversity.
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GRAPHIC: COLLEGE RANKINGS - The business of ranking colleges is growing. But many experts have doubts about objectivity. CNS Photo.