Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1999/08/26/dartmouth_slides_again.php
Thursday, August 26, 1999
You've probably heard the news. Whether from the newspapers, the television, from the college's spinmeisters, or out of the horse's mouth itself, you've heard that Dartmouth has slipped yet another ranking in the much vaunted, obsessively-watched US News and World Report college rankings. The number eleven, our new ranking, just doesn't capture the reality of the situation. The college would have you believe that eleven is quite an impressive ranking, and they're right—it is—for most schools.
The real story is in the slide, how Dartmouth has managed to slip four places in only two years. Has the competition really heated up that much? Hardly. Has the college gotten that much worse? Not really. Well, then it's got to be US News, then, right? Well, no.
What is it, man?!
It's complicated.
Nobody has ever accused the US News rankings of being anything other than eye-candy for the admissions departments of our country's finest colleges, Dartmouth included. Given the great discrepancies that exist between colleges, and even between departments within colleges, to assign anything other than the most broad rankings to colleges is ridiculous. In this sense the US News rankings have and will always be structurally flawed. How does the other eleventh best college (Cornell) compare to its counterpart? I doubt that even US News could answer that one. A slip of a point based on subjective, arbitrarily-applied criteria is hardly cause for alarm.
It should be said that this year's rankings are a bit worse than years past. Caltech somehow ended up on top, although English majors may beg to differ. Overlooked, of course, was the school's renowned numbing boredom, which explains its relatively-low graduation rate, and the famously suicide-filled Pasadena nights.
According to the editors, Caltech's leap in the standings is the result of a new ranking formula that emphasizes per-student spending, at which Caltech trumps all other contenders. Administrators, take note and spend that money; maybe you can unseat Caltech. Of course, the key question here for liberal arts colleges is, 'How many Shakespeare readers can be bought for, say, the cost of a particle accelerator?'
According to Robert Morse, one of the US News statisticians who designed the rankings, Dartmouth itself fared about the same in every category as it did last year. The College was knocked out of the top ten by the ascension of Johns Hopkins, whose per-student spending far exceeds Dartmouth's.
Morse claims, on the one hand, that the rankings are imprecise enough to only
be used as a general guide for high schoolers. He also contends, however, that the magazine justifiably ranks schools based on gradations that even he described as 'statistically insignificant and misleading.'
The same problems that have plagued the US News rankings in years past are evident this year as well. The calculation of academic reputation, the largest component of a school's overall ranking, is based on a mass survey across academic disciplines. Since Dartmouth is ranked in the 'National Universities' category, its reputation is evaluated by the leadership of large research universities. Unsurprisingly, the survey favors the larger research institutions, though they may tend to ignore undergraduates. Into this category could certainly be placed Johns Hopkins, The University of Chicago, and perhaps even Harvard. Each has a terrific reputation and name-recognition among academics, certainly, but the extent to which that translates into 'quality of education' is unknown. The reputation survey rates the impressions of professionals whose fields often aren't relevant in the context of many schools. Dartmouth, for example, may have lost ground because our high-energy physics research facilities aren't keeping up with Caltech's and Tulane's. Pity that.
What of the social aspects of college that are so glaringly lacking from Caltech's campus? To claim that a college's community and environment are inconsequential is surely a falsity, yet, by their rubric, this is the claim US News makes. The only relevant criterion is the freshman retention rate—the percentage of freshmen who stay for a sophomore year—which, again, hardly describes the reality of the situation.
In its zeal for statistical precision, US News has managed to divorce its rankings from reality, trading traditional notions of excellence for the perception of such. Many fear that the battle for top rankings has fallen out of the hands of professors and students and into the clutches of the least-desirable combatants, the marketroids. While perception may be reality in many instances, in higher education it is clearly not. Too many Harvard students complain about the inscalable mountains of graduate students between them and the superstar professors who fuel the Cambridge media machine. Yet, Harvard is ranked as one of the two premier universities in the country; it must be the library, right?
The scientific nature of the rankings points toward the editor's technology fetish, borne out in the rankings (in addition to Caltech, MIT is number three) and commentary, going so far as to equate our support of the sciences with Renaissance Italy's support of the arts. Before long, we should expect to see technical schools knocking outdated Ivies off the list.
How can the technicians of the emerging information age be more important than its leaders?
Ironically, though they did it for the wrong reasons, the US News editors could have justified docking Dartmouth far more points than they did. While our campus looks very much as it did last year, the social fabric of the College has changed. Our President has, in no uncertain terms, announced that he cares not a whit for the opinions of students, alumni, and all who care for the College but the elite group of sixteen Trustees, even while still describing Dartmouth as a liberal arts college, a contradiction that has yet to resolve itself. As Wright told the world through The New York Times that his students enjoy being ordered about, the campus largely sat still and took it, cementing our image as intellectual slaves. We've fallen, collectively, into the hands and whims of the Trustees whose agendas, although hidden, loom ominously in the minds of many students. Our campus' major social institutions may be torn up in the coming months and years for the inability of the student body to rise up and make itself felt. Even worse, though, the control of our own social lives is in the process of being wrested from us by an administration that knows better and may end up neutering thousands of potential leaders.
Further, the College has started down the slippery slope of actively sacrificing academic standards for increased diversity. The class of 2003, touted heavily as the most diverse ever, has evaded that label that each of the past five classes have held with pride: that of the smartest class ever at Dartmouth. The new class features lower SAT scores and fewer students in the top 10% of their class. But still, the class is more 'diverse' (progress!).
Watch for Dartmouth to advance in the US News rankings if the worst threats from the Trustees and our President are carried out.
Perhaps soon Dartmouth will rival the cream of national research universities as the foremost proving ground for the technicians of the next era. Number one, here we come.