{"id":4050,"date":"2022-05-19T21:49:05","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T01:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.centre.edu\/cento\/?p=4050"},"modified":"2022-05-19T21:49:05","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T01:49:05","slug":"should-we-trust-college-rankings-by-elke-coenders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/2022\/05\/19\/should-we-trust-college-rankings-by-elke-coenders\/","title":{"rendered":"Should We Trust College Rankings?, By Elke Coenders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, we confronted the intimidating decision of selecting a university\u2014a school to define our formative years growing into adulthood, a school to launch us into successful careers and meaningful pursuits, a school to help us find our direction in life. At that existential intersection, we are lost. We require a GPS to point us the right way. What do we turn to? College rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Centre College\u2019s ranking on the <\/span>Forbes<\/span><\/i> list took a recent nosedive from 209 in 2019 to 367 in 2021. The college fell from 43 to 59 on the <\/span>U.S. News and World Report<\/span><\/i> over the same time span. <\/span>Niche<\/span><\/i> also bumped Centre from 76 to 85. In the past three years, Centre College has somehow managed to deteriorate to extremes explainable only by some unknown seismic shift. Centre is not alone in this nominal upheaval; many universities\u2019 rankings have plummeted or skyrocketed with little actual change to show.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is nothing we trust more than a list; it has numbers, it has name recognition, so it must be legitimate. But what happens when the list changes its mind, and why? The surface-level explanation is simple. Centre ought to take the lower rankings as constructive feedback. Universities indeed change their quality for the better or worse over time. The keywords, however, are \u201cover time.\u201d Drastic climbs and falls are not normal.<\/span><\/p>\n

If colleges aren\u2019t rapidly evolving, the data certainly is. Columbia University professor Michael Thaddeus negated his institution\u2019s meteoric rise on the <\/span>U.S. News<\/span><\/i> list: \u201c…the key figures supporting Columbia\u2019s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Colin Diver, escaped the rankings rate race when he joined Reed College, one of the few institutions that do not participate: \u201cRankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one\u2019s score. Because the rankings depend heavily on unaudited, self-reported data, there is no way to ensure either the accuracy of the information or the reliability of the resulting rankings.\u201d When Reed asked to be omitted from <\/span>U.S. News<\/span><\/i>, the magazine instead replaced Reed\u2019s missing data with the lowest values, dropping the college from the second to the bottom quartile over one year.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the numbers change, evaluations of those numbers also constantly change. <\/span>Forbes<\/span><\/i> completely restructured its methodology during its gap year in 2020 to favor more affordable public universities. <\/span>U.S. News<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Niche <\/span><\/i>also revised their ranking systems. However, information about adjustments can only be found separately from the rankings. Responsible publications should evolve their methodology to better suit present needs, but extreme alterations without forthcomingness are akin to changing the rules of the game midway.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any minor adjustment could shift rankings in completely different directions, while readers remain ignorant of the gears moving behind the lists. Further, rankings from previous years have been erased from the internet, so it is nearly impossible to compare changes over time. If the data is this fickle and arbitrary, how can we base our decisions so confidently on it?<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether we like it or not, college rankings have become as real to the value of education as feelings about the market are to the value of stocks. The list determines prestige and desirability, which determine the variety and quality of student-faculty applicant pools, which determine the revenue and quality of the university. It affects name recognition when graduates apply for careers or graduate school. The list has real power\u2014more power than it should have.<\/span><\/p>\n

The list may be a faulty GPS, but it rightly points us to challenge how we evaluate ourselves. Although Centre\u2019s rankings remain high, we cannot rest on our laurels\u2014laurels wilt. How can Centre claim to be the best university in Kentucky when UK offers wider options and Berea offers more affordability? We confine ourselves to standardized greatness equivalent to \u201cbetter than\u201d or \u201calmost as good as,\u201d when instead, we should push beyond a number.<\/span><\/p>\n

We must look within, rather than define ourselves through capricious outward comparisons. After all, a college is only as good as its students. Let go of oppressive stats, rungs on the ladder we climb as we conform our way to the top. Let Centre compete with Centre. Let us renew the philosophy of higher education from before college rankings existed: think to think, learn to learn, and explore to explore.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, we confronted the intimidating decision of selecting a university\u2014a school to define our formative years growing into adulthood, a school to launch us into successful careers and meaningful pursuits, a school to help us find our direction in life. At that existential intersection, we are lost. We require a GPS to point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}