Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/09/30/dartmouth_ranked_tenth_best_college.php
Wednesday, September 30, 1998
This past August, Consumer Reports released its annual toaster ratings. The following month, U.S. News and World Report published its annual edition of America's Best Colleges, with its exclusive rankings of higher educational institutions.
Ranking colleges, like ranking major appliances, makes sense intuitively because it provides useful information for consumers who want to make prudent investments and purchases of the highest quality.
Yet, when a particular toaster's ranking drops, the consumer does not then become less attractive in the job market.
As the authors of the U.S. News methodology, Amy Graham and Robert Morse, maintain, 'a diploma from a distinguished college so clearly helps graduates get good jobs and gain admission to top-notch graduate programs.'
Considering the higher stakes involved, then, it is not astonishing that the U.S. News rankings attract more attention and fanfare than does Consumer Reports. Nor is it surprising that many colleges gear their academic and administrative programs to meet the U.S. News criteria.
This phenomenon is a good public relations strategy on the part of universities, but it is a pernicious force in academe as a whole. While objective criteria can be employed to evaluate appliances, the academy's quality is not so easily quantified.
Indeed, the U.S. News criteria represent subjective — and questionable — judgements about what is important in a university. Moreover, U.S. News employs statistical indicators that fail to describe their stated criteria.
Dartmouth College dropped three spots this year, to number 10, due to decreases in its faculty resources rank, which fell from 25th to 30th, in its financial resources rank, and in its reputation rank.
The faculty resources rank is supposed to measure 'the commitment a school has made to superb instruction and to student interaction with faculty.' Class size accounts for 40 percent of the faculty resources score while faculty salary accounts for 35 percent. The proportion of professors with the highest degree in their field, student-faculty ratio, and the proportion of faculty that is full-time, account for 15, 5, and 5 percent, respectively.
The faculty resources variable does not, in any way, evaluate the quality of professors or their teaching. The mere presence of highly-paid, well-educated faculty on campus does not, on its own, indicate a superior commitment 'to superb instruction.'
In a report released last June, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching concluded that 'Again and again, universities are guilty of an advertising practice they would condemn in the commercial world. Recruitment materials proudly display the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities, and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands of students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research.
'Some of their instructors are likely to be badly trained or even untrained teaching assistants who are groping their way toward a teaching technique; some others may be tenured drones who deliver set lectures from yellowed notes, making no effort to engage the bored minds of the students in front of them.'
At Dartmouth College, however, teaching assistants are rare, and they never teach classes. 'My own experience at Dartmouth,' says Classics Professor Jeremy Rutter, 'is that very few professors here neglect their students. The ethic of the place is that there is no one more important than an undergraduate student.'
Dartmouth's singular commitment to excellence in teaching is its principal strength. That strength is wholly unaccounted for in the U.S. News rankings.
Robert Morse concedes that the U.S. News rankings could be improved by measuring 'teaching quality, not faculty resources, which is what we're measuring.'
Yet, 'it is a major, major undertaking to do a quality job at assessing teacher quality,' he says. 'It is not something that U.S. News could do' because it involves conducting a survey at each college. U.S. News is working with the Education Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts to develop a comparative study of teaching assessment.
Until teaching quality is considered, the U.S. News rank remains a dubious distinction at best, for it is based on only half of the educational enterprise.
Dartmouth's focus on undergraduate teaching hurts its position in the rankings in other ways, too.
Academic reputation, which accounts for 25 percent of the overall score, is divined by surveying the presidents, provosts, and deans of admission at colleges and universities in the same category.
Since Dartmouth is ranked in the National Universities category, its reputation is evaluated by the leadership of research universities, rather than liberal arts colleges. Thus, Dartmouth's academic reputation score falls below that of large research universities, who have weaker undergraduate programs.
The University of Michigan — Ann Arbor, University of California — Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania all rank higher than Dartmouth in academic reputation. Dartmouth maintains a lower acceptance rate, higher graduation rate, higher test scores, and a higher alumni giving rate than all of them.
The academic reputation score, then, is based less on the quality of the undergraduate education a school offers, and more on the strength of its graduate programs and the productivity of its faculty.
On Wednesday, President James Wright declared Dartmouth 'a college in name and in its basic values and purposes.' For Dartmouth to be evaluated by institutions that do not share those values is inappropriate.
The National Universities rankings and the Liberal Arts College rankings are each adjusted separately by giving the top school an overall score of 100, and then by calculating the other scores as a percentage of that value. Thus, one cannot relate scores between categories.
Yet, 'it is probably better to be in the top ten of the national universities rankings than it is to be number one of the liberal arts colleges,' Morse says. 'Dartmouth would probably be first in the liberal arts rankings.'
Other U.S. News indicators are also inadequate. U.S. News measures financial
resources 'by the average spending per student on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services, institutional support, and operations and maintenance during the 1996 and 1997 fiscal years.'
There is no accounting for whether or not the money was used efficiently or constructively. The correlation between college spending per student and the graduation rate is, after all, statistically insignificant.
The extensive use of estimates also raises questions about the validity of the U.S. News numbers.
In some cases, estimates were used for some colleges, current data for others, and data from years past for still others. Moreover, there is a broad dependence on the colleges to provide accurate and honest information. Certainly, college administrations would be willing to fudge their numbers to win a higher rank.
Wright's program for Dartmouth as a research institution also promises to improve Dartmouth's standing in the U.S. News survey. But Dartmouth ought not let U.S. News and World Report dictate its pedagogical standards.
Dartmouth's values may differ from the research universities, but those values are eminently superior to the research ethic.
The Princeton Review ranks Dartmouth third for quality of life and sixth for 'Happy Students.' So, it appears that Dartmouth students are pleased with the college on the hill.
But we knew that already.