A few days ago, I received an urgent text from a friend about the latest college ranking. “You’ll never guess how low U.Va. is,” he warned. The Wall Street Journal had ranked the University 56th overall. I scanned the entire list with dismay and felt the familiar heat of embarrassment rising into my face as I thought of what my friends at better-ranked schools would think when they saw the University’s ranking. I joked with a nearby friend about regretting my choice to come to the University, but there was a secret truth in the humor. After an hour of quiet panic and a phone conversation with my mom, my shame subsided, and all the reasons I chose the University over other schools came flooding back to me. Still, I marvel at the power of college rankings — a single bad ranking had made me seriously doubt my choice to attend the University.
The University was named the number two public university in the country in the latest ranking by U.S. News & World Report but was the 11th public school on the The Wall Street Journal’s list, behind schools such as the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Last month, Business Insider ranked the University first among public schools and ninth overall. Rankings rely on what former Stanford President Gerhard Casper called “false precision.” While rankings appear impartial and precise, they are often arbitrary and suggest distinctions that don’t really exist. And while it is tempting to cast aside rankings completely, college rankings like those of U.S. News have real and measurable effects on the country’s colleges and universities.
Michael Saunder, a sociologist at the University of Iowa, spent years studying the effects of U.S. News rankings on law schools. Saunder found “rankings can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for some schools, as the effects of rank described above alter the profile of their student bodies, affecting their future rank.” This is partly because rankings directly impact the number of applications a school receives; Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Jonathan Smith of College Board found that when explicit rankings of colleges are published in U.S. News, a one-rank improvement leads to a 1 percentage-point increase in the number of applications to that college. Saunder, along with fellow sociologist Wendy Espeland, also found that rankings “created pressure on law school administrators to redistribute resources in ways that maximize their scores on the criteria used by USN to create the rankings, even if they are skeptical that this is a productive use of these resources.” In other words, administrators “game” the system in order to increase the school’s rank. For example, schools actively encourage as many students to apply as possible so lower the acceptance rate, a metric often used when determining selectivity. Schools can also lie about their statistics; in 2012, Claremont McKenna College was found to have exaggerated the SAT scores of incoming freshmen to boost rankings.
While the University might not be “gaming” the system, the administration is certainly aware of how their actions will affect the University’s rank. In an interview with The Cavalier Daily, Teresa Sullivan commented on the University's No. 2 spot in U.S. News’s 2017 college ranking, saying, “I do believe one of the changes was the determined effort by the administration and the Board [of Visitors] to raise faculty salaries, because one place where we moved up was in resources per faculty member. I think that’s something that certainly helped us.”
There is little the administration can do to avoid the sport college rankings have become, nor should they. Rankings help hold schools accountable and allow prospective students to gain a general idea of the caliber of the schools to which they apply. But college rankings should be reformed to include important but often unmeasured metrics like student engagement, affordability and diversity of students and faculty. As a singular institution, the University has little power over the national (and even global) frenzy of college rankings, but it can help promote of culture of transparency in the way it reports its own successes and failures. Each year since 2012, the University has conducted the Student Experience in the Research University survey, which asks students about such things as academic engagement, finances and subjective experiences with race. While the data collected are available for research purposes, the University does not widely publicize the results of the survey. This should change — by being open and honest about the progress (or lack thereof) the University has made according to the survey results from year to year, the University can hold itself accountable on its own terms and begin to chip away at the preeminence of college rankings.
Jordan Arnold is a Viewpoint writer.
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