Universities Weblog

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features a section devoted to the U.S. News rankings and the controversies surrounding the magazine's practices. The Chronicle reveals that private institutions fare better in the rankings–and increasingly so.

Have a look:

A Chronicle analysis of U.S. News data from the past 24 years reveals that the rankings game does not provide a level playing field for all contestants. The magazine's criteria seem to overwhelmingly favor private institutions. While 10 of the top-25 national universities in 1989 were public, only three made the cut on the most recent list.

Conversely, every college that has managed to significantly improve its rank during that time is private. (The rankings of liberal-arts colleges, which have been evaluated in a separate category since 1983, have remained largely static.)

U.S. News's editor, Brian Kelly, defends the rankings, saying the statistics that are compiled are accepted measures of success. Ultimately, he says, the rankings are "a journalistic device." There has been much discussion of how much weight should be given to each measure, but the methodology "is what it is because we say it is," he says. "It's our best judgment of what is important."

That judgment, though, is coming under unprecedented attack. This spring 24 presidents of liberal-arts colleges, including Drew University and Lafayette College, signed a letter excoriating the magazine for providing misleading data that "degrade the educational worth … of the college search process."

In the letter, the presidents also said that they would no longer fill out the magazine's reputation survey, a central part of the rankings that asks academic leaders to evaluate hundreds of colleges. They also pledged to refrain from endorsing the rankings in any of their college publications or online materials. This month the man behind the letter, Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes commercial influences on higher education, sent copies to more than 600 other college presidents.

Read the rest of this piece here.

Also check out the article detailing the extent to which the rankings issue represents a cash cow for U.S. News. And follow your favorite university's ranking journey through the years.

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