May 17
The Problem with University Rankings
In researching universities in the United States, you’re likely to look at some lists or information about how the university is “ranked” in comparison with other universities. And you’ll probably want to go to a university that is ranked high on the list. This is natural. Everyone wants to go to the best university, and so when we read that University X is ranked #1, and University Y is ranked #100, we quite understandably would prefer to attend university X.
But is the ranking system accurate? Is the #1 ranked university really the #1 best university?
The most famous and influential ranking is U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of U.S. institutions of higher education. It ranks colleges and universities according to several different criteria, and it provides a simple list as a summary. Here, for example, are the top-five ranked universities according to U.S. News and World Report:
- Harvard
- Princeton
- Yale
- MIT
- Stanford
Not everyone believes that these rankings accurately reflect educational quality, however. In this article, Amy Graham and Nicholas Thompson lay out what they view as problems with U.S. News and World Report’s methodology:
Unfortunately, the highly influential U.S. News & World Report annual guide to “America’s Best Colleges” pays scant attention to measures of learning or good educational practices, even as it neatly ranks colleges in long lists of the sort that Americans love. It could be a major part of the solution; instead, it’s a problem.
U.S. News’ rankings primarily register a school’s wealth, reputation, and the achievement of the high-school students it admits. At one time, most academics believed in one simple equation: Good students plus good faculty equals good school. The rankings reflect this outlook, tabulating things such as percent of faculty with a doctorate (to measure the quality of the professors) and SAT scores of the freshman class (to get at quality of the students). That’s like measuring the quality of a restaurant by calculating how much it paid for silverware and food: not completely useless, but pretty far from ideal.
You could also ask if it’s a good idea to rank a university as if it were a single unit:
[E]ach institution is nothing more than a collection of local chapters of international intellectual fraternities. The quality of each chapter at each institution is more or less independent of the quality of any other chapter at the same institution, except to the extent that financial muscle can attract better quality across the board.
In other words, the quality of education is mostly dependent on individual professors and departments, which are not necessarily reflected in the rankings for their host institutions.
The individuals who do the rankings are well aware of the methodological difficulties, and even a well-known methodology like U.S. News and World Report’s is constantly refined. The struggle to arrive at a comprehensive and fair set of criteria for ranking programs and institutions has led to the formation of various national and international associations, for example The International Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence.
The bottom line is, remember that each ranking system has its own set of criteria, which may or may not apply to your own personal or professional goals. So when you see that University X is #1, that does not necessarily mean that University X is #1 for you.
The rankings that are most useful for you are going to be the ones you make yourself.
Posts in this Series
- Conclusion - How to Choose a U.S. University - 02 Jun
- Activities Around a University Campus - 01 Jun
- Check Out U.S. Universities on iTunes U - 26 May
- Extracurricular Activities - 25 May
- Get to Know Your Potential Professors - 21 May
- Don't Forget Your Life! - 20 May
- What Do You Want to See in the U.S.? - 19 May
- How Many International Students go to your Chosen University? - 18 May
- The Problem with University Rankings (This post)
- Using Facebook to Research Universities - 14 May
- Look at the Surrounding Neighborhoods When Looking at a U.S. University - 13 May
- How Weather Should Factor Into Your Search for a U.S. University - 12 May
- Looking for a University in the United States: Cost of Living - 11 May
- Looking for a University in the United States - 10 May
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Tags: America's best colleges and universities, research about study in the U.S., the problem with university rankings, U.S. universities, US news and world report university rankings
