The presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.
From the NY Times. I commented earlier on the contradiction between how college presidents think students should be judged — they believe it is fine to judge all students according to one standard that usually has little to do with their strengths and goals — and how they wish to be their colleges to be judged.
“Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them?” said Judith P. Shapiro, the president of Barnard College.
Yes, exactly: Why help prospective students? Lest there be any doubt for whom colleges exist.
Yes, by “them” Shapiro meant the magazine. But the magazine was helping prospective students.
Mayor Bloomberg give a talk at Google in which he referred to the bureaucracy of the New York City public school system as serving itself, not students. As you say, other organizations act the same way. I suspect organizations we have to deal with — such as governments and schools — are worse in this regard.
The problems with how college students are taught relate to my ideas about human evolution; that is one reason I discuss them. My evolutionary ideas suggest why things have gone wrong and how to fix them. The other reason is that I am familiar with colleges — at least, compared to magazines. As I once blogged, I think it is better to offer advice about stuff you are familiar with.
No one is forced to buy U.S. News and World Report. But students are pretty much forced to go to college to get jobs above a certain level of prestige.
Interesting discussion –
My read of this is that schools are not saying they don’t want to be graded; they are saying they don’t want to be graded by US News & World Report. One, because no one thinks they have expertise in such evaluation. Two, because unlike student grades that are based on real assessment of course work related to a published syllabus, these college rankings are based on poorly executed surveys of self-interested parties and “objective” measures (like size of research budget) which have not been proven to be associated with quality of education.
What is wrong-headed about the school’s response is that they want to replace the US News ranking with a self-reported ranking. Instead, they should find a third party, preferably a non-profit research organization that has expertise in statistical methods, to execute an open ranking, with rules agreed upon by all schools.
Yes, that’s a good idea.