Stanford Fourth in US News Rankings
Forward Article to a Friend
Print Article
Stanford moved to fourth in the 2007 edition of the U.S. News and World Report undergraduate college rankings, “America’s Best Colleges”, highlighting the Stanford Class of 2010, which, while not included in the rankings, set records for highest yield, lowest acceptance rate and highest numbers of applications to Stanford in its 115-year history.
Over the past ten years or so, college admissions grew into a multi-billion dollar industry of test-preparation, consulting and ranking as the competition for spots at the nation’s top colleges intensified. This growth has come in tandem with the rise of “helicopter parents,” who pre-program their children’s lives in order to attain acceptance at a highly prestigious university. The number of applicants is expected to reach its apex for the high school class of 2008, which represents the peak of the Baby Boom echo generation, the swell of children of baby boomers who are now coming of age. At the same time, colleges are fighting to attract the best applicants of a generation that is better informed of its choices than ever before.
This year’s rankings were highly anticipated, and several posters on college-admissions forums such as CollegeConfidential.com and Autoadmit.com claimed to have advance copies, and “leaked” the results ahead of the rankings’ publication date. While most of the leaks turned out to be incorrect, it is clear that many high school and college students care deeply about the relative rankings of schools. The listing has inspired a great deal of commotion and debate, as the University of Pennsylvania, previously and contentiously ranked fourth, dropped to seventh, and Harvard University dropped out of a first-place tie with Princeton into second place.
But these minute movements at the top of the fight between very elite institutions, which inspire so much debate over what school really is “number one” asks a larger question: do these rankings measure the right things when selecting a school? And should universities be ranked at all?
The U.S. News rankings, considered the oldest and most authoritative university rankings available, separately rank the undergraduate programs of liberal arts colleges and PhD granting institutions (i.e. universities like Stanford). Its basic criteria are an institution’s academic reputation, student selectivity, undergraduate retention, faculty resources, financial resources and alumni satisfaction. U.S. News then blends about fifteen different statistical measures, which it then separately weights, to give each school a numerical rank. The school with the highest overall score is then named the “Best College” in the country. It is important to note that while U.S. News claims to have “objective” rankings, mostly because the rankings are so data-heavy, its methodology has changed much over the last two decades, though the magazine has remained relatively consistent in the last few years.
Stanford has a long history with the rankings. In the 1990’s, then ASSU Vice-President Nicholas Thompson founded the Forget U.S. News Coalition (FUNC) and earned the sympathies of Stanford’s president at the time, Dr. Gerhard Casper. The ASSU Senate even passed a resolution condemning the rankings. In an interview with The Stanford Review, Thompson, who has also written on the rankings for Washington Monthly, and is now a fellow at the New American Century, said that he started FUNC because he concluded that Stanford was prioritizing increasing the number of donors over the total amount collected in order to look better in the U.S. News rankings. Thompson is referring to the criterion U.S. News uses to measure “alumni satisfaction,” the percentage of alumni donating money to their alma mater, rather than the sum total. For example, Stanford fundraised $603 million last year to Princeton’s $200 million, although more Princeton alums donated, which gave Princeton a higher “alumni satisfaction” score.
Though FUNC started at Stanford, it quickly spread to 30 other campuses, and received significant coverage in the national press. Thompson explained that, “in the beginning [he and his colleagues] thought that it wasn’t possible to rank colleges, and that U.S. News was trivializing the college experience.” Though FUNC did not in fact make people forget U.S. News, Thompson considered it a success: “The FUNC campaign had the effect of probably making some people take the rankings less seriously.”
Thompson’s appraisal of the rankings has, however, grown more favorable with time. He recognized that U.S. News’ clout helped it force colleges to yield more accurate and consistent data on acceptance rates, SAT scores, retention and other measures used by the magazine. He felt, however, that this clout is not being effectively used: “Whatever you do if you’re U.S. News is going to give the colleges an incentive to play to your rankings. The problem with U.S. News is that you do really well in the rankings by being rich, by having lots of professors with PhDs and by having students with high SAT scores. But college is about how much you can learn, how much you can get students to study and focus on their education, and how well they do after they leave.”
Alvin Sanoff, managing editor of the rankings at U.S. News from 1992 to 1998, agreed with Thompson’s assertion that the rankings needed to place a greater emphasis on measuring outcomes. Indeed, under Sanoff’s direction, U.S. News placed a greater weight on various measures of graduation rate and retention in the statistical formula used to generate the rankings. Still, Sanoff placed the blame for failing to yield better outcome-based measures squarely with universities: “The reason it’s difficult to measure outcomes is because the higher education community can’t agree on what constitutes a successful outcome,” he said.
As universities have stepped-up their marketing campaigns to attract ever-larger numbers of applications, the rankings remain one of the few ostensibly “objective” sources of information out there. They have become quite a business: at the same time U.S. News put out their undergraduate rankings, Newsweek came out with their own “international” rankings (see sidebar), and Time’s cover article that week was “Who Needs Harvard?” Despite the efforts of FUNC and other critics of the rankings, the rankings’ visibility has grown as the volume of applications increases every year. Nevertheless, Sanoff was adamant that during his time with U.S. News, commercial considerations never interfered with the substance of the rankings.
And most critically, this focus on the rankings has continued to force schools to bear them in mind when admitting students and conducting affairs. In spite of Thompson’s criticism, Stanford has increased its alumni-outreach efforts, which has brought the percentage of alums who donate to 39%, still far behind Princeton’s 61%, but still making Stanford the 8th best in the nation. Penn, in particular, has been accused of basing decisions of who to admit on the effect of these decisions on Penn’s place in the rankings. Penn rose to fourth last year in U.S. News, ahead of Stanford and MIT.
The rankings look like they are poised to stay. U.S. News has been joined by a cornucopia of competitors and complementary rankings, and the volume is only likely to increase as more data become more widely available. Nevertheless, there is room for an important discussion on specific methodology and, ultimately, how our societal values shape what traits we look for in a college in evaluating it.
