A better way to rank America's colleges

Parents and students deserve a program to create their own rankings.

from the July 19, 2007 edition

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A one-size ranking does not fit all, because students and families care about different things. It would also allow families to tailor the rankings to their own particular concerns. US News has talked about making variable weights an option. But choosing variables and weights has to be central, not optional, to a useful ranking system for students and families.

Here is another way that one ranking system doesn't fit all colleges. What if a school doesn't use the SAT in making admissions decisions and therefore doesn't collect or report these data? In a new system, that school couldn't be ranked if a student chose a positive weight for the SATs. Students would know that the school doesn't value that piece of information. They could then run the rankings with other information (maybe class rank and other indicators of academic achievement), excluding the SAT, and see what those rankings look like. Alternatively, they could decide they actually do care about the average SATs of the student body and decide to look at other schools. Fair enough.

US News has some data that colleges don't. In particular, the magazine conducts a reputation survey of college presidents and deans, which many people in higher education find extremely problematic. One option would be for higher ed leaders collectively to stop filling the survey out, so that US News didn't have the data either. I suspect that US News would then turn to others, such as CEOs of profit and nonprofit organizations, leaders in the public sector, and other employers to fill out the survey. They could argue, after all, that they were surveying the "users" of our final product – college graduates.

Another option for higher ed leaders would be to continue to do the reputation survey in exchange for receiving the results. With these data also included in the new rankings software, users could then decide for themselves whether they think the reputation variable should play any role in their decision on a college. Reducing access to information seems counter to what we do. Demonstrating how to make good use of information seems a better strategy.

Rankings will always be limited in what they can tell consumers. Part of higher education's role about the rankings should be to remind students and their families that these are only one piece of information that they should take into account in deciding where to go to college. Intangibles will and should play a role in these decisions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also look at the tangibles.

• Catharine Bond Hill is a higher education economist, and the president of Vassar College.

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