Which one of these doesn’t belong: oil, coffee, rice or your education?
For some, higher education is becoming a commodity, something that can be rated, shopped for and bargained with.
You can hear it already: "Sale on a bachelor’s in computer science. Aisle three."
That is the impression of the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges nationwide, who recently have banned together to boycott U.S. News ‘ World Report’s annual college ranking survey.
Members of the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges, agreed in a meeting not to participate in the news magazine’s reputation survey, which critics often label a kind of glorified scholastic "beauty contest."
Instead, the group proposed implementing its own "alternative common format that presents information about their colleges for students and their families to use in the college search process," The Annapolis Group said in a statement released Tuesday.
The rejection is a move that has been building for a long time. The system U.S. News uses to rank colleges is seriously flawed and puts some colleges, such as UH, at a disadvantage.
"This increasing interest in measuring everything – these so-called science-based measures of (educational) outcomes and the like – it seems to me to be so misguided that it’s now captured the imagination of the leadership in higher education," Christopher Nelson, president of St. Johns College in Annapolis, Md., told the Christian Science Monitor in April. "This is a bad way of talking about education. (Students) aren’t customers shopping for a product."
Maybe they are. After all, if the public didn’t lend so much credence to U.S. News by buying their college ranking edition, highly ranked universities wouldn’t tout their status and lower-ranked universities wouldn’t find themselves in a reputation dilemma.
The main draw for customers – most of whom are kids and parents searching for what college to attend – is what they believe to be an accurate rundown of which of the nation’s many schools are "best."
U.S. News uses a number of factors to place colleges and universities. Among these are acceptance rate, reputation and faculty resources.
Andrew P. Manion, in a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review, criticizes the idea that acceptance rate is telling of a university’s quality.
U.S. News defines acceptance rate as "the ratio of the number of students admitted to the number of applicants."
"While many educators may believe that (a) high number of rejected applicants is a sign of selectivity and therefore good… it is neither an efficient use of resources nor an indication that the college delivers knowledge particularly well," Manions says. "It is hard to imagine another industry that would regard as a positive practice having the sales force woo prospective customers and process their paperwork, only to find such prospects unable to buy the company’s product."
UH’s own acceptance policy is quite liberal. Instead of rejecting every student who applies with a less-than-stellar high school career, it opts to give them a shot.
Moreover, many of us are the first generation in our families to go to college and lack the benefit of a college-grad parent, familiar with the ins and outs of the admissions process shepherding them through the ordeal.
By taking in a higher proportion of students relative to those who apply, UH’s ranking in the U.S. News list suffers, unjustifiably, since this has no real effect on the quality of education one can receive here. UH represents the democratization of higher education, not an Ivy League school.
Another important factor U.S. News uses is "faculty resources," which can range from faculty compensation to student-to-faculty ratio.
UH is a growing institution, and many of our classes are full to the brim. The ranking system the magazine uses places a premium on schools with an average of less than 20 students per class. Manion, again, puts it best:
"U.S. News would probably argue that this measure reflects a college’s commitment to spending money to maintain relatively small classes," Manion said. "But it could also mean that the institution’s enrollment figures are down, in which case that alleged measure of quality is actually an indicator of financial weaknesses."
More people in the seats of UH chairs means more money for the university, and thus better equipment, facilities and, eventually, more faculty.
While one university may languish with only 10 people in its Physics 101 class, barely generating any money at all yet benefiting from its cushy student-to-faculty ratio, U.S. News takes marks off for the 50-person class – teaching just as effectively – that is a breadwinner for the college, Manion said.
U.S. News doesn’t publicly disclose the money it generates from its college ranking issue. In terms of sales, the Chronicle of Higher Education says that it is on par with Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, People’s Sexiest Man Alive and Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans issues.Undoubtedly the magazine has an interest in maintaining the impression with the public that the list is the definitive, end-all answer when it comes to where to go to college, but hopefully the few dozen maverick college presidents’ idea will catch on, and a number of good, but lesser-known schools will finally get the credit they deserve.
Casey Wooten, the Opinion section editor, can be reached at [email protected]
