ACCORDING TO U.S. News & World Report, the University of Virginia School of Law is the 10th best law school in the nation. This tidbit, and the unfortunate fact that we have slipped two positions from last year's eighth place ranking, was announced during my International Law lecture last month, to the general bemusement of the class and, perhaps, the consternation of several admitted students who were visiting that afternoon. For those who haven't heard, and there can't be many, the University ranked 24th this year on the list of best colleges.
Of all the developments in higher education over the past 25 years, the advent of the U.S. News & World Report rankings must be among the most significant. Rolled out in 1983 and spawning numerous copycat publications in subsequent years, the rankings purport to evaluate virtually every American college and university according to a set of objective criteria, much as Consumer Reports might rank appliances or automobiles. And, while nearly everybody realizes that the rankings are a moneymaking enterprise first and foremost, they have taken on an outsized significance with administrators and students alike, both of whom tend to aspire to the highest possible ranking whether setting long range policy or sending out applications.
The pressure on some institutions is intense, and it has contributed to some distinctly lowbrow behavior among administrators seeking an edge in the rankings race. According to news reports, some schools routinely split up financial contributions over several years so that a single donation boosts alumni giving rates in multiple periods. Others encourage unqualified students to apply in order to enhance their selectivity by summarily rejecting them, while still others boost their yield rate by accepting a large percentage of students via early decision, despite the pervasive criticism that early decision disadvantages poor applicants.
A step above such scheming is the more genteel competition of respectable public schools aspiring to elite status. The University of Florida used to offer lavish financial aid packages to National Merit Scholars in order to raise the academic qualifications of its incoming classes. But as President Bernard Machen told the New York Times, that policy was of little help to the university's peer reputation, another component of the rankings, because "they knew we were buying them."
Even our University of Virginia, which lures high school overachievers with its Jefferson and Echols Scholars programs, seems to fret over its U.S. News ranking. According to a recent "Goals Status Report" prepared by the Special Committee on Planning of the Board of Visitors, available online, the Committee has recently considered strategies for attaining top 15 status in the U.S. News rankings within 10 years. Sadly, the Committee seems to have concluded that the University would do better to protect its current ranking, given the financial demands of a run at the top tier.
In an e-mail, President Casteen told me that University administrators are not preoccupied with the rankings, noting that in the midst of their third decade, the rankings fail to induce the same "ecstasy or agony" as they might have in years past. Furthermore, he said, to the extent that we manage what we measure, the rankings may spur improvement in areas subject to easy measurement.
But the biggest problem with college rankings is that so many important aspects of higher education are not quantifiable. The U.S. News rankings may give us a look at who has the most money or the highest rejection rate or the lowest student to faculty ratio. But they have little to say about whether students like the teachers, whether townies like the students or whether anybody will regard their time at any particular school as having been worthwhile. When my dad, a University alumnus, was in Charlottesville last month, he had to visit the Lawn twice: once in the evening, when the view was most dramatic, and once in the morning, when the students were out and about. That didn't make it into the rankings, although his contributions might give a trifling boost to our ranking by way of the financial resources factor in the U.S. News equation.
Whatever the impact of college rankings, it is probably true that they force schools to act more strategically than they otherwise might by providing a ready yardstick by which institutional efforts can be evaluated. Under a worst case scenario, strategic behavior leads to outright scheming, which may be rare among high profile schools whatever its prevalence farther down the trough. The best case scenario, however, is an excessive focus on a few evaluation metrics that overlooks the myriad intangibles that make one school different from another. What gets measured may get done, but it's not always what's important.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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