What should students want in a college? Good teachers, intellectual stimulation, ample job opportunities, friends for life, a good value for the money. What do professors and administrators want? A large endowment, a big library, the smartest students, high faculty salaries and prestigious awards.
The interests of the kids and the grown-ups are rarely aligned on college campuses these days. And the US News & World Report Best College Rankings measures the things the professors and administrators care about — not the ones the students should.
Last month’s news that Emory University had sent US News falsified data raised old question on the rankings. How many other schools make up numbers? We know college officials rank other schools lower just to boost their own position. Admissions officers encourage kids who are not qualified to apply, because rejecting more students improves the school’s “selectivity” rating.
Universities cap some class sizes at 19 students to earn “small class” points in the survey. They add more volumes to their library and tell recent alums to give just $5 to boost their “participation” rate — all to climb the US News rankings, all to keep higher-ed insiders happy.
But last week, a new ranking hit the market. It ranks Harvard 37th in the country — and no, it’s not a Yalie plot.
The new company Alumni Factor used interviews with 42,000 graduates of 177 elite colleges to come up with its list. Washington & Lee topped it, with Yale, Princeton, Rice and the College of the Holy Cross close behind.
Alumni were asked about several ways in which their schools impacted their lives — how well college prepared them for a career and provided job opportunies; if it nurtured friendships; if it stimulated their intellectual, social and spiritual development; whether it was a good value for the money, and whether they’d choose it again.
As Monica McGurk, executive editor and CEO of Alumni Factor, told me, “Parents and kids want to find out about the kind of success they might expect in choosing one college over the other.” US News doesn’t offer that kind of information. Does the size of an endowment tell you how much contact you will have with professors? There may be an inverse relationship there.
And who cares what administrators at other schools think about the school you’re considering?
Alumni Factor joins other US News rivals. The Forbes ranking, done with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, looks at graduates’ starting salaries as well as information from the Web site Ratemyprofessors.com, to measure a college’s value. (Critics have rightly noted that students do tend to rate easier graders higher than tougher ones.)
But surveying alums has the added benefit of giving students some distance with which to evaluate how well their college years have prepared them for life afterward. You might not hold that C+ against your economics prof when you realized how much of what you learned in that class helped you in your job.
The slick marketing campaigns of the nation’s top colleges make them all look pretty much the same. Brochures with diverse groups of students sitting on shaded quads, thick catalogs of courses in every subject under the sun, gourmet cafeteria food, luxury gyms.
But McGurk notes that Alumni Factor got quite a large range in the rankings from its interviews — as much as 50 or 60 percentage points on certain questions, like access to job opportunities.
In other words, college choices do matter — but you have to ask the right questions.