Education Sector, a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C., released a report this week proposing a new system for ranking colleges and universities as an alternative to those used by U.S. News & World Report.
The author of the report, Kevin Carey, proposes a student-based ranking system contrasting the peer-based ranking system of the U.S. News & World Report.
According to Carey, the current system is lacking.
"Universities change their behavior to move up ... in the rankings, and I think that is a problem," he said. "There is nothing that [mentions] quality teaching and [the ability of students] to find a job."
Carey's system would consist of four general categories: teaching, learning, graduation and success in life. A major part of the teaching and learning categories would consist of students' results on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).
Carey said the CLA, which is given to freshmen and seniors in college to access the improvement of their analytical skills, is a good indicator of the quality of education that a university can give.
"What the SAT tells you is how smart your students were in high school, I'd rather know how smart those students are when they're juniors or seniors in college," he said.
The University participates in the NSSE every three years and publishes the results on the University's Web site. However, the CLA is not used at the University.
According to George Stoval, University director of institutional surveys, the University has considered using the CLA but believes it would not inform them of any new information.
"We felt like it might not be quite useful to us because our students might do well on [the CLA] quite early on," he said.
The Education Sector's study classifies ninety-five percent of the U.S. News ranking categories under three major classes: fame, wealth and exclusivity. A low student/faculty ratio is placed under the category of wealth.
According to Stoval, small class size does not necessarily indicate wealth. He said many liberal arts colleges are not as wealthy as large universities but have smaller classes.
The University is ranked highly in the U.S. News Report for public universities and is also ranked as "public ivy."
When asked how the University would rank in the proposed system, Carey said, "Nobody knows. All you're left with is the academic reputation of the University. You know you're going to go to school with other bright students, [you know the professors] are distinguished, but you don't know if students will benefit from that," he said. "I think it [would] put U.Va. to the test".
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