Parsing college rankings raises questions about criteria for this high-school senior

DURING summer, prospective college-bound students can expect two things: college advertisements featuring flattering campus snapshots and the college-ranking edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Unfortunately, neither provides practical information. College rankings have gained popularity as baby boomers and their children search anxiously for their perfect shrine of postsecondary education. But is it possible to capture the various facets of collegiate life into a single numerical placement?

Consider the University of Washington. In 2008, The Washington Monthly College Rankings placed UW at 14th place, above Harvard and Duke. In contrast, U.S. News placed the Huskies in 41st place, while the other two placed in the top 10 spots.

In global rankings, the commendation, again, differed wildly, based on the criteria used. In 2008, Fortune Global 500 assigned UW to 209th place, a distinction shared with Mississippi State University. In contrast, the U.S. News World's Best Colleges ranking placed the UW in 59th place, just one spot below the University of California, San Diego.

Needless to say, controversy arises when we assign statistical rankings within a pool of vastly diverse institutions. Even though U.S. News revamped its grading policies to soothe many protests of its methodology, the magazine still keeps criteria such as student retention, admissions selectivity, financial and faculty resources, graduation rate, and alumni giving rate.

The peer reputation survey, completed by college presidents and admission deans, remains the most controversial criterion and comprises a quarter of the overall score, the highest value granted to a single category.

According to U.S. News director of data research Robert Morse, the peer-assessments survey measures the "intangibles" of a college. He also notes on usnews.com that the reputation of a school can help get that first job and or admission to a graduate school. Is this intangible name value over proven substance what we want to emphasize in society?

The most alarming trend in the college-ranking game, however, is how rankings influence the behaviors of colleges. For example, Catherine Watt, director of the Alliance for Research on Higher Education at Clemson University, unashamedly laid out how her institution manipulated statistics to ascend from 38th to 22nd among public research universities in less than a decade. Mainly, Clemson increased the number of classes it offered with fewer than 20 students, while pouring additional students into relatively larger classes. Clemson has also increased faculty salaries and raised its admission standards and increased its admissions selectivity, but what can it say about the quality of its education?

Clemson is not a unique case. Participating in the now mainstream U.S. News college-rank survey provides abundant publicity, but to climb the ranks, colleges may squander resources for changes that are little more than cosmetic or even detrimental to appeal to the imposed criteria.

Meanwhile, a college's refusal to participate in the survey may mean a wrongfully perceived lack of quality, leading to decreased numbers of student applicants. For example, Reed, a liberal-arts college in Oregon, has refused since 1995 to participate in the U.S. News rankings, questioning its methodologies. That year, according to Reed officials, the U.S. News survey arbitrarily assigned Reed the lowest possible ranking in several categories and relegated the college to the lowest tier in its category, despite the fact that Reed ranks fourth-highest in its category for graduates who go on to attain a Ph.D.

The obsession with collegiate ranking will lead to skewed values of college principles and decrease the ability of consumers to think for themselves. There are possible solutions to consider. Colleges can follow Reed's example by boycotting the reputational rankings altogether. But most important, college-bound students must realize that neither ranking nor names should matter. No criteria are more important than their own.