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In higher education, college and university rankings are listings of educational institutions in an order determined by any combination of factors. Rankings can be based on subjectively perceived "quality," on some combination of empirical statistics, or on surveys of educators, scholars, students, prospective students, or others. Such rankings are often consulted by prospective students as they choose which schools they will apply to or which school they will attend. Among college and university rankings, there are rankings of undergraduate and graduate programs. This article deals primarily with rankings of undergraduate programs. For details on ranking of law programs, see Law School Rankings.
Rankings vary significantly from country to country. A Cornell University study found that the rankings in the United States significantly affected colleges' applications and admissions. In the United Kingdom, several newspapers publish league tables which rank universities.
International rankings
Several organizations provide worldwide rankings, including:
The much-publicized Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which was a large-scale Chinese project to provide independent rankings of Universities around the world on behalf of the Chinese government. Due to its relative objective methodology, the results have often been cited by The Economist magazine in ranking universities of the world *. As with all rankings, there are issues of methodology, and one of the primary criticisms of the ranking is its bias towards the natural sciences, over other subjects. This is evidenced by the inclusion of criteria such as the volume of articles published by Science or Nature (both Journals devoted to the natural sciences), or the number of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners (both of which are predominantly awarded to the physical sciences).
The Webometrics ranking of universities is based entirely on the web-presence of the University (a computerised assessment of the size and sophistication of the website). As such it is unlikely to accurately reflect the academic performance directly, but will reflect the internet based activities of the universities in a way which is free of national or language bias.
One refinement of the Webometrics approach is the G-Factor methodology, which counts the number of links only from other university websites. The G-Factor is an indicator of the popularity or importance of each university's website from the combined perspectives of the creators of many other university websites. It is therefore a kind of extensive and objective peer review of a university through its website - in social network theory terminology, the G-Factor measures the 'nodality' of each university's website in the 'network' of university websites.
The Times Higher Education Supplement, a British publication, annually publishes the Times Higher World University Rankings, a list of 200 ranked universities from around the world. However, when one compares THES ranking with that of others, one will note that there are many more non-American universities that populate the upper tier of the THES ranking.
Another University ranking using Google search engine is also provided by a Stanford student Stanford ranking. The results of this ranking appear to be an objective peer review assessment of universities around the world. A total of 1720 schools are ranked. The University of Washington, Seattle and many other well-known US universities are among the top of the list.
Some rankings include ones based on numbers of Nobel Prizes obtained by Universities.
Regional and national rankings
The U.S. News & World Report rankings of US universities
The best-known American college and university rankings have been compiled since 1983 by the magazine U.S. News & World Report based on a combination of statistics provided by institutional researchers and surveys of university faculty and staff members. The college rankings were not published in 1984, but were published in all years since. The precise methodology used by the U.S. News rankings has changed many times, and the data are not all available to the public, so peer review of the rankings is limited. As a result, many other rankings arose and seriously challenged the result and methodology of US News's ranking, as shown in other rankings of US universities section below.The U.S. News rankings, unlike some other such lists, create a strict hierarchy of colleges and universities in their "top tier," rather than ranking only groups or "tiers" of schools; the individual schools' order changes significantly every year the rankings are published. The most important factors in the rankings are:
- Peer assessment: a survey of the institution's reputation among presidents, provosts, and deans of admission of other institutions
- Retention: six-year graduation rate and first-year student retention rate
- Student selectivity: standardized test scores of admitted students, proportion of admitted students in upper percentiles of their high-school class, and proportion of applicants accepted
- Faculty resources: average class size, faculty salary, faculty degree level, student-faculty ratio, and proportion of full-time faculty
- Financial resources: per-student spending
- Graduation rate performance: difference between expected and actual graduation rate
- Alumni giving rate
All these factors are combined according to statistical weights determined by U.S. News. The weighting is often changed by U.S. News from year to year, and is not empirically determined (the National Opinion Research Center methodology review said that these weights "lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis"). The first four such factors account for the great majority of the U.S. News ranking (80%, according to U.S. News's 2005 methodology), and the "reputational measure" (which surveys high-level administrators at similar institutions about their perceived quality ranking of each college and university) is especially important to the final ranking (accounting by itself for 25% of the ranking according to the 2005 methodology).A review of US News ranking by NORC
A New York Times article reported that, given the U. S. News weighting methodology, "it's easy to guess who's going to end up on top: Harvard, Yale and Princeton round out the first three essentially every year. In fact, when asked how he knew his system was sound, Mel Elfin, the rankings' founder, often answered that he knew it because those three schools always landed on top. When a new lead statistician, Amy Graham, changed the formula in 1999 to what she considered more statistically valid, the California Institute of Technology jumped to first place. Ms. Graham soon left, and a slightly modified system pushed Princeton back to No. 1 the next year."Thompson, Nicholas (2003): "The Best, The Top, The Most;" The New York Times, August 3, 2003, Education Life Supplement, p. 24
Other rankings of US universities
A research ranking of American universities is researched and published in the Top American Research Universities by University of Florida TheCenter. The list has been published since 2000 and attempts to understand the research aspects of American universities better.A private 1997 review by the National Opinion Research Center, commissioned by U.S. News itself, was later published by the Washington Monthly. It appears to contain several serious criticisms of the US News' rankings' methodology. The 2005 result is published as The Washington Monthly College Guide.
Other organizations which compile general US annual college and university rankings include the Fiske Guide to Colleges and the Princeton Review. Many specialized rankings are available in guidebooks for undergraduate and graduate students, dealing with individual student interests, fields of study, and other concerns such as geographical location, financial aid, and affordability.
Among the best-known rankings dealing with individual fields of study is the Philosophical Gourmet Report or "Leiter Report" (after its founding author, Brian Leiter of the University of Texas at Austin), a ranking of departments of analytic philosophy. This report has been at least as controversial within its field as the general U.S. News rankings, attracting criticism from many different viewpoints, but it is also extremely popular and well regarded by many in the profession. Notably, practitioners of continental philosophy, who perceive the Leiter report as unfair to their field, have compiled alternative rankings.
Avery et al. recently published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research titled "A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities." Rather than ranking programs by traditional criteria, their analysis uses a statistical model based on applicant preferences. They based their data on the applications and outcome of 3,240 high school students. The authors feel that their ranking is less subject to manipulation compared to conventional rankings (see criticism below).
Rankings of Canadian Universities
Maclean's, a news magazine in Canada, ranks Canadian Universities on an annual basis known as the Maclean’s University Rankings. Their criteria are based on a number of factors, which includes characteristics of the student body, classes, faculty, finances, the library, and reputation. The criteria are described here. The rankings are split into three categories: primarily undergraduate (schools that focus on undergraduate studies with few to no graduate programs), comprehensive (schools that focus on undergraduate studies but have a healthy selection of graduate programs), and medical doctoral (schools that have a very wide selection of graduate programs). As the most prominent ranking of Canadian universities, these rankings have received much scrutiny and criticism from universities, especially those that receive unfavourable rankings. For example, the University of Calgary produced a formal study examining the methodology of the ranking, illuminating the factors that determined the university's rank, and criticizing certain aspects of the methodology*. Top-ranked schools, on the other hand, tend to embrace the results and refrain from criticising. A notable difference between US rankings and Maclean's rankings, however, is that Maclean's does not include privately-funded universities in its rankings. However, the vast majority and most well known universities in Canada are publicly funded.The primarily undergraduate rankings The Comprehensive University rankings The medical doctoral rankings
Rankings of UK universities
The Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) are attempts by the UK government to evaluate the quality of research undertaken by British Universities. Each subject, called a unit of assessment is given a ranking by a peer review panel. The rankings are used in the allocation of funding each university receives from the government. The last assessment was made in 2001. The RAE provides quality ratings for research across all disciplines. Panels use a standard scale to award a rating for each submission. Ratings range from 1 to 5*, according to how much of the work is judged to reach national or international levels of excellence. Higher education institutions (HEIs) which take part receive grants from one of the four higher education funding bodies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Standards of undergraduate teaching are assessed by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), an independent body established by the UK's universities and other higher education institutions in 1997. The QAA is under contract to the Higher Education Funding Council for England to assess quality for universities in England. This replaced a previous system of Teaching Quality Assessments (TQAs) which aimed to assess the administrative, policy and procedural framework within which teaching took place but did not directly assess teaching quality.
Criticisms of rankings
College and university rankings, especially the well-known U.S. News rankings, have drawn significant criticism from within and without higher education. Critics feel that the rankings are arbitrary and based on criteria unimportant to education itself (especially wealth and reputation); they also charge that, with little oversight, colleges and universities inflate their reported statistics. Beyond these criticisms, critics claim that the rankings impose ill-considered external priorities on college administrations, whose decisions are sometimes driven by the need to create the most desirable statistics for reporting to U.S. News rather than by sound educational goals. A study titled "Broken Ranks" by Washington Monthly supported this thinking. Broken Ranks Washington Monthly
Furthermore, some have suggested that the formulae and methodologies used to turn the various data into a ranking are arrived at specifically, if unconsciously, to keep a few key institutions at the top of the chart — not because of any undue partisanship among the editors; but simply due to a subconscious assumption that a system which flies in the face of conventional wisdom must somehow be faulty. Hence editorial decisions would tend to reinforce preconceptions. In other words, if the public, as it is argued, looks to ranking publications not so much for guidance as for confirmation of its own assumptions, then mightn't the editors of U.S. News (as proud as they are of the annual "fine-tuning" they give their methodology), have a predisposition to overlook methodologies which "rock the boat" to the extent of dropping Harvard (say) out of the top handful of schools?
Some of the specific data used for quantification are also frequently criticized. For instance, Rice University, with a top 5 per-student endowment and a generous Financial Aid department, is ranked in the mid-twenties for per-student "Financial Resources". As another example, the "Peer Assessment" equally weighs the opinions of administrators at less-known schools such as Florida Atlantic and North Dakota State with those of say, Harvard and Stanford. Students with their sights set on the best graduate schools may not be interested in knowing which programs the administrators of bottom schools have heard of, or vice versa.
Other critics, seeing the issue from students' and prospective students' points of view, claim that the quality of a college or university experience is not quantifiable, and that the ratings should thus not be weighed seriously in a decision about which school to attend. Individual, subjective, and random factors all influence the educational experience to such an overwhelming extent, they say, that no general ranking can provide useful information to an individual student.
Suppose, as these critics illustrate, that the difference between an "excellent" school and a "good" one is often that most of the departments in the excellent school are excellent, while only some of the departments in the good school are excellent. And the difference between an excellent department and a good one might be, similarly, that most of the professors in the excellent department are excellent, while only some in the good department are. For an individual student, depending on the student's choices of field of study and professors, this will often mean that there is no difference between an excellent college or university and a merely good one; the student will be able to find excellent departments and excellent faculty to work with even at an institution which might be ranked "second-tier" or lower. Statistically, the rankings are distributions with large variances and small differences between the individual universities' means (averages).
Complicating matters further, as most educators and students observe, individuals' opinions about the excellence of academic departments and, especially, of professors, exhibit a wide range of variation depending on personal preferences. And the quality of an individual student's education is most determined by whether or not the student happens to encounter a small number of professors that "click" with and inspire him or her. Similarly, the main difference between a "good" or "second-tier" large state university and an "excellent" or "top-tier" prestigious smaller institution, for the student, is often just that, at the larger school, the student needs to work a bit harder and be a bit more assertive and motivated in order to actively extract a good education. For many students this will not be difficult enough to justify a preference for the smaller institution, though some individuals do prefer a smaller school.
Additionally, if one looks at the criteria used by US News to make the ranking, one can easily see that most of the criteria are based on self-select attributes, that is attributes that are dependent on the quality of the students themselves and not on the quality of the school itself. One very good example of this is US News ranking for MBA. Based on US News, a good business school is one where the students have the highest GMAT, GPA, starting salary and others. As can be readily understood, these measurements have a lot to do with the students and little with the schools.
Moreover, the problem with this ranking is that most students are just taking the easy way out and do not bother to search why certain people go to certain schools. They just assume the ranking is the authority and hence it only increases the divide among the schools. This is simply the tragedy of the common. It is very possible that students love a location so much that they are willing to exchange salary for quality of life. Given this factor, the ranking of a school may not be as high as it should be in the following year. Consquently, the better students will try to avoid the said school because they are afraid that they will not be able to find good employments, which is absolutely not the case. After some years, a good school is then dubbed a bad school, without any change in the quality of the education itself - a proposition that is supported by a study done by Cornell. Cornell study: Ranking matters
What happens here is that the years of efforts to build a school to a reputable status is washed down the drain because of a simple numerical ranking. A catastrophe cannot even describe the potential outcome of this situation if people are not starting to become more discerning when it comes to ranking. It is also very sad to see that leading universities, which are supposed to be the beacons of light, are flaunting their rankings left, right and center without any due regards to what damage such a practice could do to the whole education system. For example, a good student from a small town in Georgia may need to go to a public university in Georgia because he or she needs to take care of the family. This does not mean that the person cannot go to a "better" or more well-known school. However, because of the ranking, people can label that person as an underachiever for not having gone to a good school.
Furthermore, throughout the history, we have seen time and again that what makes an entity great, be it a university, nation or society, is the integrity, character and quality of the people behind it. It is not the rank behind the name or which school he or she comes from. In fact some of the really outstanding people never even graduate from any school. The founding fathers of many great nations are a good example of this. George Washington only has the equivalent of an elementary education (http://www.americanpresident.org/history/GeorgeWashington/). He could not travel to England to study because his father passed away and his family life became more challenging. Yet, he became one of the greatest of all Americans. Bill Gates does not even have a bachelor degree. This is not to say that people should not go to college. However, there should be a limit and a sanity check to this. Rank chasing can be very dangerous. Educational life is too intricately beautiful and important to just be listed into rows and columns.
Lastly, criticism against ranking is not to be interpreted as criticism against certain schools. However, human tends to be short-sighted and the rankings will only reinforce such short-sightedness and deprive outstanding individuals to earn equitable opportunity just because they do not fit a typical molding.
Forget U.S. News Coalition
In the 1990s a coalition of student activists calling themselves the "Forget U.S. News Coalition" (and occasionally substituting "fuck" for "forget") arose, based initially at Stanford University. FUNC attempted to influence college and university administrations to reconsider their cooperation with the U.S. News rankings. They met with limited success, finding administrations encouraged the development of alternatives to the rankings, though most institutions (including Stanford) continued to cooperate with U.S. News. Critics of FUNC question its motives claiming that the organization is dissatisfied with the rankings not for principled objections to the ranking process, but rather because they are dissatisfied that Stanford has ranked below Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for the past 10 years. One school which has criticized US News, but also has held steady in the rankings is Emory University which generally ranks in the top 20 colleges nationwide. In general though, positions of Colleges will vary a great deal between rankings, and no one ranking is accepted as definitive, with some rankings applying more specifically to the needs of a prospective student than others on the basis of methodology or criteria.Colleges and criticism of U.S. News rankings
Reed College has not cooperated with the U.S. News rankings nor submitted any institutional data to U.S. News since 1994; its administration has been outspoken in its criticism of the rankings. Critics charge, and Rolling Stone magazine reported, that Reed's "second-tier" status in U.S. News's lists is artificially depressed by U.S. News as retribution for Reed's harsh criticism of the rankings.Similarly, Ohio Wesleyan University and St. John's College have not cooperated with the U.S. News rankings, and thus fell in the ratings. Conversely, for years, progressive Bard College did not cooperate with the U.S. News rankings, and thus saw its rankings artificially depressed; however, it now cooperates and consistently ranks numbers among the Top 40 liberal arts colleges.
References
See also
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Colleges and universities | Educational assessment and evaluation
Hochschulranking | Palmarès universitaire | การจัดอันดับสถาบันอุดมศึกษา | 大學排名
"College and university rankings"