Number 9 or Number 11 or Number 47? Take your pick and let the rankings frenzy continue.
Every year, US News and World Report publishes its insanely popular rankings of colleges and universities around the country. Many here at Washington University (myself included) experienced a swell of excitement when we moved into the top 10-number 9 to be exact-where the University is tied with Dartmouth College.
These dreams of grandeur and national respect all came crashing down though. A few weeks ago Atlantic Monthly, which is entering the rankings game for the first time, booted the University out of the top ten, ranking us 11th in the nation. And don’t forget about a set of rankings issued by the Wall Street Journal in late September that rated a university’s ability to get its undergraduates into the top professional programs around the nation. The University barely made the top 50 in this list.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal article included a nice anecdote where a student recounted his decision not to come to Washington University, choosing Columbia instead, since he was aiming to get into a top graduate program immediately after college. His mother said, “That’s one reason we’re paying all this money. He should go to the best college he can so he can go to the best grad school.”
In the end, this student is entitled to his own decision, and in the end, maybe Columbia was the best fit for him. The only problem is that for many, rankings such as those published by the Wall Street Journal, US News, and Princeton Review, weigh heavily in decisions to apply to or even consider a certain school.
The Wall Street Journal ranking was particularly troubling, as it relied mostly on “face book” directories to gauge the number of students coming into the chosen law, medicine and business programs from a given undergraduate program. Furthermore, the data was only for one year’s worth of students, and in many cases, as the Journal admitted itself in a piece titled “Behind the Rankings,” it was difficult to verify because feeder rates are not monitored closely by all the colleges in the survey. Anyone who has taken a statistics course knows that a larger sample size and data are essential to determining the statistical significance of a test.
The schools the Wall Street Journal considered were also subjectively chosen. For medicine, they did not consider the Washington University School of Medicine, often regarded in other rankings as a top-two program; instead their “elite” sample medical schools were Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Francisco and Yale, a small sampling at that.
Another troubling concept is the fact that something such as a university’s so-called ability to get its students into top-tier graduate programs is worthy of a ranking at all. According to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, only about one-third of students in a graduating class head to a professional or graduate program immediately following their graduation from the University. Many choose to work for a few years or take part in programs like Teach for America before heading back to graduate school. In the long run, Admissions says that roughly two-thirds of students will get an advanced degree within seven years of graduation. Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal rankings don’t seem to be taking things like this into account.
In the end, these rankings are just numbers that change every year and can easily be manipulated by weighing certain criteria heavier from one year to another. No list can ever truly convey the spirit of a campus and the intellectual curiosity of its students. This is something that prospective students have to experience themselves though a visit or by actually engaging individuals who are intimately connected with the campus. These perspectives are honest, far more telling, and I hope, more important than any ranking will ever be.