Several Colleges and Universities Planning Boycott of US News Ranking System

The Christian Science Monitor and CBS News are reporting that several college and university presidents are refusing to participate in the US News ranking system. The system requires the presidents to fill out extensive surveys, which are then used to calculate specific ranks. The refusal of dozens college and university presidents to participate in the process has lead to the early attempts to organize a formal boycott of the system.

While both detractors and supporters of the current ranking system agree that there is a need for unbiased, third-party information with which to compare colleges and universities, the disagreement is centered around just how that should be done. "At the heart of the matter: A college degree is increasingly expensive, and students and parents want to make informed decisions. But educators worry that the rankings have made college a commodity, creating a false impression that schools can be easily compared and stressing out students who want only the 'best' schools." (CBS News) Detractors of the system state that it is impossible to compare various colleges and universities based mainly on SAT/ACT scores and reputation.

The methods used to collect the data used to formulate the rankings have come under fire in recent years. "Colleges have complained in the past about the rankings. But recent events have rallied opposition, including the tying of presidential pay to ranking at Arizona State University and accusations by the president of Sarah Lawrence College that the magazine threatened to use hocus-pocus data to stand in for average SAT scores at the school." (CBS News) In fact, it was the publicity surrounding the decision of Sarah Lawrence College to not consider SAT scores in the admissions process, and the subsequent decision of US News to use bogus data for the average SAT score, that led to several college and university presidents to opt out of the entire process.

Many college and university presidents, as well as educators, believe that the ranking process makes education a commodity. "'This increasing interest in measuring everything - these so-called science-based measures of [educational] outcomes and the like - seems to me to be so misguided that it's now captured the imagination of the leadership in higher education,' says Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., who heads an association of 124 prestigious liberal arts schools. 'This is a bad way of talking about an education. [Students] aren't consumers shopping for a product.'" (Christian Science Monitor) Some education watchers, such as Lloyd Thacker, lead author of the circulating letter and head of The Education Conservancy, a nonprofit in Portland, Ore., hope that high school students will look at the rankings differently as a result of the boycott.

Sources: CBS News, Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report