HIGHER EDUCATION ‘mdash; In a matter of weeks, most colleges and universities will begin sending out acceptance letters to all those high-school seniors who have endured the competitive application season. Students contemplating college careers will soon decide where they will spend the next four years of their lives.
Though guiding information is elsewhere available, a school’s prestige ‘mdash; as determined by the media ‘mdash; factors significantly into every student’s decision-making process. As it can seem unnecessarily expensive and exhaustive to visit college campuses or do in-depth research outside of pamphlets and Web sites, rankings systems such as U.S. News and World Report’s annual ‘America’s Best Colleges’ carry dangerous weight. But any prospective college kid ‘mdash; not to mention the general public ‘mdash; should take care to evaluate a publication’s methodology before letting those rankings affect their own opinion.
In 2008’s ‘America’s Best Colleges,’ UCSD ties for 35th place with four other schools, falling within tier one of all national universities with an aggregate score of 62. But what does this really mean? U.S. News ‘amp; World Report considers seven main factors when calculating scores, listed here in decreasing order of importance: peer assessment (25 percent), retention (20 percent), faculty resources (20 percent), student selectivity (15 percent), financial resources (10 percent), graduation rate performance (5 percent) and alumni donations (5 percent).
Although some of these statistics, such as a school’s retention rate, could reflect the quality of undergraduate education, other factors would not
necessarily indicate academic excellence.
For instance, peer assessment ‘mdash; the most heavily weighted factor in the aggregate score ‘mdash; is measured by surveys asking top academics, such as presidents and provosts, to rate academic programs offered at peer schools on a numerical scale. While peer assessment eliminates any personal bias that schools might have in assessing themselves, it is by no means impartial. Survey respondents can’t be expected to be experts on competing institutions, and varying degrees of knowledge could compromise their scoring. Also, because university officials maintain contact with many administrators at other schools, their own experiences with those specific representatives may be biased. Furthermore, fewer than half the people surveyed for the most recent publication of the college rankings actually responded, making for a largely incomplete evaluation.
Faculty and financial resources also factor significantly to calculating of college rankings, placing public schools such as UCSD at a continual disadvantage. The faculty-resources score is determined mainly by the ratio of small to large class sizes, faculty salary and faculty-to-student ratio ‘mdash; holding a collective weight of 80 percent. These numbers favor private institutions that charge exorbitant tuition rates nearly double what in-state UC students pay, which in turn allows for smaller class sizes with fewer students per faculty member. Institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale, which currently top the list, have financial endowments of $28.8 billion, $16.3 billion and $17 billion, respectively, compared to UCSD’s current endowment of $525 million. Although schools with greater financial means are generally better able to provide for their students, these rankings do not necessarily take into account the ways in which a public university could make up for larger class size ‘mdash; like more TAs, longer office hours or more widespread resources ‘mdash; or the satisfaction levels of students, especially in relation to how much they’re paying.
Despite the general comprehensiveness of U.S. News and World Report’s ranking system, the amount of consideration given to each factor is highly subjective, making them heavily biased towards elite, privately funded universities that will remain exclusive in order to maintain their prestige.
Worst part is, these lists and prizes are often superficially used by prospective students and their parents in choosing which school is right for them. Though UCSD’s current ranking within over 1,400 colleges places it in the top 5 percent of undergraduate schools in the nation, the same students who apply are most likely also applicants to other UC schools such as UCLA and UC Berkeley, whose higher rankings (25th and 21st, respectively) prompt students to choose the most prestigious college to which they’ve been accepted rather than considering which university might fit their individual needs.
In the wake of California’s budget crisis, the University of California’s funding losses may cause UC campuses to be ranked even lower, despite a disproportional decline in educational quality. An alternative might be to rate schools on their ability to foster success, further emphasizing statistics such as the graduation rate, acceptance rates to graduate/professional schools or even the percentage of employed alumni in a certain time period after graduation. These statistics would demonstrate each university’s utility for success in the job market and apply more directly to the real world. Current college rankings correlate prestige and financial resources with educational quality, likewise downplaying the importance of campus life and resources, leading students to make uninformed choices.
If perhaps the University of California system removed itself from consideration for college rankings, students would be less likely to compare individual campuses by magazine hype; it would also encourage students to make more informed decisions in respect their intended majors.
And hopefully, because the University of California is such a well-known and successful public college system, other state-run universities might follow suit, prompting students to research universities on their own and simultaneously lifting the weight of popularity from the process. Perhaps then, the university will not have to rely on unflattering monikers ‘mdash; say ‘Hottest School for Science’ ‘mdash; to assure students that they are in the right place.
Readers can contact Andrew Kim at [email protected].