College presidents plan 'U.S. News' rankings boycott
Deriding the ratings system as a 'beauty contest,' dozens of schools have refused to fill out surveys from the newsweekly.
from the April 12, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
When Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., stopped using SAT scores in its admissions process, U.S. News lost a key data point in its rankings formula. The school's president, Michele Tolela Myers, wrote a newspaper opinion piece saying that U.S. News told her it might be forced to create a number by taking the average of other schools' scores and then docking Sarah Lawrence by one standard deviation.
Kelly calls the incident a "miscommunication" and says his magazine will not use that method for the SAT score.
However, several presidents say the dust-up helped galvanize this year's opposition to the survey, a movement joined by Dr. Myers.
There's nothing wrong with sharing information, says Myers, but assigning weights to that information is "totally arbitrary." Students and parents may have different priorities, including location, diversity, and strength of a certain department – and their weights are bound to differ from those assigned by U.S. News.
Kelly says the magazine is working on employing technology that would allow users to select their own weights.
Colleges, meanwhile, are rethinking what metrics are useful and how to standardize them across higher education.
The US Department of Education, too, is pushing schools to provide more data on outputs, such as the number of students who go on to pass professional licensing exams or get advanced degrees.
"I'm hopeful that whatever comes out of this [boycott] sends different kinds of signals and messages to students, so they realize that when they are in high school, they can follow their curiosity," says Lloyd Thacker, lead author of the circulating letter and head of The Education Conservancy, a nonprofit in Portland, Ore.
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