A Short History of US News College Rankings – Time for a Boycott?

Joie Jager-Hyman, author of the ‘Kidz Today’ column at Crucial Minutiae, says that for better or worse, kidz care about the US News College Rankings. She details briefly the genesis of the rankings:

In the early 1980s, there was a dip in the population of college-age students after the Baby Boomers finished college. To counteract this effect, colleges embarked on a marketing blitz, sending catalogs, newsletters, and videos into hundreds of thousands of homes. Good students now had a myriad of colleges from which to choose. Editors at U.S. News and World Report speculated that high achieving students needed a way to evaluate the relative value of the postsecondary institutions who were aggressively courting them.

In 1983, they published an issue of college rankings. Parents and students thoroughly bought into this hierarchy. A survey conducted in the early 1990s found that 79 percent of students attending the “highest selectivity college” and 59 percent of those attending “high selectivity colleges” said that rankings were at least “somewhat important in their choice of college.”

Some of these middle-tier schools are reaping what they’ve sown. Others are trying to manage the consequences of aggressive marketing by their competitors while the few in the top tier bask happily [and can you blame them?]. Many schools put their institutions out there for mass-consumption and now they have problems with the feedback, while those who missed the writing on the wall are seething. It’s a mess, but they aren’t victims.

Colleges and universities aren’t always masters of the long-view and they’re seldom unified in their missions. Even so, a popular ranking system could’ve been wrangled, defined and reformed had college administrators taken the lead in developing a process of evaluation and accountability. Now what do they do?

The only way for educators to take back the reigns and set their own standards for quality in higher education is for all colleges to boycott the magazine.

The annual rejection of the rankings continues. But a boycott isn’t enough, and I don’t believe it’s even the first step that should be taken. Colleges need to get together and provide a viable alternative, one that corrects a few of the ills in the current process and, hopefully, adds a few new and valuable dimensions. Then administrators can reject the US News rankings in favor of a better system – that’ll be paramount to a new system’s acceptance.

Idle whining not only makes administrators/colleges look bad, but it provides no value to the prospective student or their families – you know, those people who matter most in this process. They wouldn’t have to complain about the injustices of current rankings if they themselves offered a useful alternative.

You can check out Jager-Hyman’s weekly column “Kidz Today,” which appears Wednesdays on Crucial Minutiae. And I’d suggest checking out all the columns on CM – it’s good, fresh stuff.