The Hall Monitor

Rankled by College Rankings

November

Do college rankings offer a useful measure of accountability or do they just elevate anxiety levels? The editor of U.S. News & World Report faces off with top college presidents at the Hechinger Institute’s forum on higher education.

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(Scroll down for more video interviews from the Hechinger Institute seminar on higher education.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 1:17 am by Diana Costello.
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One Response to “Rankled by College Rankings”

Jack November 17th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Great to hear these different perspectives regarding college rankings. After listening to the college presidents, it’s pretty clear that an individual’s college research process has to dig deeper and reach farther than a mere glance at college rankings. Unfortunately, however, among high school students and their parents, college rankings provide a sort of “anchoring” mechanism that strongly, and perhaps somewhat unconsciously, influences the picture of a college’s academic reputation. When a college’s ranking is the first statistic available to all consumers, it becomes the de facto starting point for the college research process. It serves as the main “guidepost” against which subsequent evidence gathered in the research process is measured, and thereby distorts perceptions of the college’s strengths and weaknesses. I hope college administrators emphasize their colleges’ qualitative strengths to help offset the misleading influence upon consumers of over-reliance on quantitative rankings.

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