HOUSTON “”mdash; For some, higher education is becoming a commodity, something that can be rated, shopped for and bargained with.
You can hear it already: “Sale on a bachelor’s in computer science ““ aisle three.”
That is the impression of the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges nationwide, who recently have banded together to boycott U.S. News & World Report’s annual college ranking survey.
Members of the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges, agreed in a meeting not to participate in the news magazine’s reputation survey, which critics often label a kind of glorified scholastic “beauty contest.”
Instead, the group proposed implementing its own “alternative common format that presents information about their colleges for students and their families to use in the college search process,” The Annapolis Group said in a statement released Tuesday.
The rejection is a move that has been building for a long time. The system U.S. News uses to rank colleges is seriously flawed and puts some colleges at a disadvantage.
If the public didn’t lend so much credence to U.S. News by buying their college ranking edition, highly ranked universities wouldn’t tout their status, and lower-ranked universities wouldn’t find themselves in a reputation dilemma.
The main draw for customers ““ most of whom are kids and parents searching for what college to attend ““ is what they believe to be an accurate rundown of which of the nation’s many schools are best.
U.S. News uses a number of factors to place colleges and universities. Among these are acceptance rate, reputation and faculty resources.
U.S. News doesn’t publicly disclose the money it generates from its college ranking issue. In terms of sales, the Chronicle of Higher Education says that it is on par with Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, People’s Sexiest Man Alive issue, and Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans issue.
Undoubtedly the magazine has an interest in maintaining the impression with the public that the list is the definitive, end-all answer when it comes to where to go to college, but hopefully the few dozen maverick college presidents’ idea will catch on, and a number of good but lesser-known schools will finally get the credit they deserve.
Casey Wooten is the opinion editor of The Daily Cougar at the University of Houston.