There are some college presidents who have lots of sleepless nights in August waiting for the next year's U.S. News and World Report rankings to be released. An increase in rankings is greeted with glee, accompanied by a triumphal press release. A decrease in rankings is often greeted with protestations about what the rankings did not count, not infrequently accompanied by an action plan promising to do better in the future.
I know that I'm new in town as the incoming president at Defiance College, so most of you reading this column don't know me very well. So maybe it's as good an introduction as any for you to know that I react very differently. Just last week, the latest annual round of rankings came out, and Defiance College moved up significantly.
We're ranked in the top tier of Midwestern baccalaureate colleges, and even within that impressive group, we moved up by eight slots (from 43 to 35). I tell you this not to boast, but so that you know that what I am about to say is not a matter of sour grapes or trying to explain away a bad result.
Yes, we did well in the rankings -- but I really don't care -- and neither should you. The rankings do a really good job of selling publications for U.S. News, and, after all, that's their business, so I don't begrudge their doing it. But that's about all the rankings accomplish -- at least from my perspective.
Here's why: The rankings are based on a formula that includes peer assessment, selectivity, faculty resources (including items such as faculty compensation), graduation and retention rates, financial resources per student, average alumni giving rate and graduation rate performance.
I won't bore you by examining each of these, but let's look at just a few. Peer assessment, a full 25 percent of the total score, is measured by surveys sent to presidents, provosts and deans of admissions. As president of Defiance College, I get such a survey. Do you really think that I or any other college president knows so well what is going on in each of hundreds of individual colleges to truly assess their quality? Of course not.
The only thing most of us know about all these other colleges is how well they did in the rankings before. So the reputation measure becomes, I think, pretty much just a reflection of the reputational impact of the previous year's rankings.
Or consider selectivity. This is intended to measure both the quality of those admitted and what percent of those students who apply to a college get admitted (acceptance rate). Let's consider the latter. First, any college can easily game the system. If you want to increase your selectivity, you can just seek out lots of applications from students whom you know you are not going to admit (i.e., students whose scores are lower than your typical class). That doesn't help anyone -- but it does cause your acceptance rate to go up. More importantly, however, how selective a college is tells you nothing about the quality of the education that students receive when they get there.
And I think that, at its heart, might be the core of the rankings problem -- as measuring reputation (even if it were done accurately) or acceptance rate or the incoming test scores or a range of other things -- does not tell you anything about what goes on at the college, how well it trains its students, and how it might offer opportunities for students to reach their potential.
For example, rankings cannot tell you about the way that the faculty and administrators at Defiance College work one-on-one with students to help shape their educational experience in a way that fits the needs of each individual student. They don't tell you about the innovative majors and programs at Defiance, such as our path-breaking digital forensics major, or our nursing program, or restoration ecology major, or the myriad opportunities available for our education, criminal justice, business and so many other majors.
They don't tell you about the ways that student interactions with a single caring faculty member can change that student's life. They don't tell you about our renowned McMaster School for Advancing Humanity and the opportunities that school offers for students to serve in places like Cambodia, Belize and New Orleans. They don't tell you about the way our curriculum in the liberal arts tradition helps prepare students for a wide range of careers in changing and challenging economic times. They don't tell you about the community atmosphere here at Defiance College and the way that we work with our students every day to help them succeed.
I could go on and on. Defiance College is a special place, and I am honored to be the president here. Everyone here at Defiance College wants to do everything that we can to make the college better and better, but we're not going to play the rankings game. This year we went up; other years we'll go down. I'm really committed to helping Defiance students and the Defiance community, and that's where I am going to be devoting my time. If I had wanted to help U.S. News sell its magazines, I would have gone into a different line of work.
(Mark Gordon is president of Defiance College. He can be reached at mgordon@defiance.edu.)