College guide a two-edged sword

By KATIE CONBOY

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

EASTON, Mass. — Students and parents across America flock to newsstands this time of year to snap up copies of the latest U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best Colleges” guide — hoping for a cutting-edge tool to help carve out the perfect set of educational choices. My honest advice to those using the guide is this: It can be useful, but wield it carefully, as it represents a double-edged sword that students, parents and education leaders use to their advantage or at their peril.

As a professor and an academic administrator, I know all the reasons colleges love to hate the rankings. But as the mother of two high-schoolers who recently watched their older sister slice and dice through the dense mass of rankings and guidebooks in making her college choice, I also understand their appeal. The college search can be such an uncertain time for everyone involved, and the apparent precision of scores, percentiles and ranks offers an aura of scientific authority.

Yet the information, which can be truly useful, is somewhat blunted by the formula that computes an institution’s final “score” and by an artificial categorization of institutions.

An example of how the formula can be tricky is the weight given to “acceptance rate.” An institution that admits a lower percentage of its applicants receives a higher score on this measure. Williams College, ranked No. 1 in the liberal-arts category, admits a mere 19 percent of its applicants. Yet there is another way to look at this statistic. Some institutions with higher acceptance rates may simply do a better job than others with finding the right kind of student to apply in the first place. Thus, a high acceptance rate in a small applicant pool could be an indicator of the degree of confidence that applicants have in the college as a top choice.

Wonderful experience

For instance, Grinnell College, in Iowa, where my eldest daughter is having a wonderful experience, ranks behind Williams at 11th, in part because of an acceptance rate of 45 percent. But we have discovered that there is a high degree of self-selection for students interested in attending a small school in rural Iowa.

The categories in which colleges and universities are placed prove problematic because there is no clear rationale for why liberal-arts colleges and large research universities are ranked in national groupings while smaller “master’s universities” and “comprehensive” colleges are in regional clusters. These distinctions separate comparable colleges, making comparison-shopping difficult.

For example, students interested in Catholic colleges in the Northeast will find Fairfield University, in Connecticut, St. Michael’s College, in Vermont, and Fordham University, in New York, in three different categories, despite the fact the institutions have similar student characteristics and quality of undergraduate education.

Sword of Damocles

If the rankings present a double-edged sword for students and parents, colleges and universities often treat them like the sword of Damocles, hanging over their heads by a thread, ready to drop if they make a “wrong” move. But what is a wrong move?

Every college has a specific mission, and strengthening that mission should drive decision-making. Each year, colleges move from one category to another, usually because of consistent mission-driven work. Some add or subtract a graduate program and suddenly find themselves in a new group. Does that college actually become a different kind of place?

Stonehill College moved this year from six years ranked No. 1 in the regional “comprehensive” category to the No. 106 position in the national “liberal-arts” category. So why are we untroubled? First, we think our new category matches our institutional identity, and we have made curricular choices over the last decade to strengthen that identity.

In a nod to the category we graduated from, we are also pleased to consider ourselves “liberal-arts plus” — a school that values and preserves the fields of knowledge offered in a liberal-arts setting but also puts that knowledge to work through practical applications. If we are recognized for our distinctive strengths in a new category, we will not judge the change to be the result of a falling sword. We won’t overvalue the importance of the rankings, and neither should student applicants.

College rankings can be a useful tool, but not one to brandish as irrefutable evidence of a school’s overall quality or as airtight testimony to its reputation. I would advise students to use the annual U.S. News college guide shrewdly, not to pull — or push — rank, but to pare down options in the process of making a truly educated college decision.

X Conboy is a professor of English and vice president for academic affairs at Stonehill College, in Easton, Mass. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service