Since the US News & World Report rankings came out last week, a number of people have asked me, “What do you make of this stuff?” To be frank, my attitude toward college rankings in general swings from mild amusement to seething frustration. Thankfully, I’m not alone in this opinion – Slate just published a particularly humorous dig at the whole rankings hubbub. Nonetheless, I thought it might be helpful to share a couple of observations from this year’s ranking of Augustana College by digging a little deeper into the mean and method behind this particular “madness.”
- US News & World Report continues to focus almost entirely on inputs and perception instead of outcomes. So factors like students’ incoming ACT/SAT scores, the proportion of applications accepted for admission, several measures of financial resources, and the opinion of other college presidents largely determine the final rankings. As a result, the wealthiest colleges tend to sit atop the rankings. US News has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on this approach, so don’t expect it to change any time soon.
- Even though the ranking number is the one that everyone seems to pay attention to, all of the ranks are derived from an absolute score that ranges from 0 to 100. With more than 250 colleges to rank in our category of national liberal arts colleges, you can imagine that there are a lot of ties. This year, Augustana’s absolute score (54) is exactly the same as it was last year. Despite the absence of change, our rank dropped from 97 last year to 100 this year on the list.
- Moreover, we sit within a cluster of 21 other colleges that scored within two points on either side of our absolute score (56-52). These schools range in ranking from 94 to 110. It’s a good group of colleges with several names that you’d recognize as institutions with which we often compare ourselves. And it makes sense to think that we would share a lot of similarities with some of these schools, after all we’ve been sitting within spitting distance of each other for almost 30 years.
But since the US News rankings were first conceived, a lot has changed. We have fundamentally altered the way that we assess ourselves, shifting from determining our self-worth based on the inputs that US News uses to assessing our educational effectiveness based upon the results or outcomes of an Augustana education. So is there anything from the US News rankings that might be worth noting?
There is one interesting tidbit that isn’t listed on the US News web site but is available to institutions upon request. US News creates rank scores for each of the eight sub-categories (peer assessment, financial resources, graduation and retention, student selectivity, faculty resources, alumni giving, graduation rate performance, and high school counselor opinion) that they combine to create a total score. Most (6 out of 8) sub-category rankings fall between 80 and 134. Our financial resources rank (160) is a bit lower than the rest. All this, especially our comparatively lower financial resource rank, makes the final sub-category ranking all that much more interesting and, dare I say, impressive.
The one sub-category left is called Graduation Rate Performance. This sub-category recognizes any potential difference between a schools’ predicted graduation rate (based on the characteristics of the incoming students and the financial where-with-all of the institution) and the actual graduation rate in a particular year. The larger the positive gap between the predicted and actual graduation rate, the higher the rank score – reflecting the degree to which the institution is making the most of its capacities to educate and graduate its students.
- What was our predicted graduation rate? 67%
- What was our actual graduation rate? 78%
Augustana’s graduation rate performance rank this year is 19. In other words, we took a decent, albeit imperfect, group of about 640 students and graduated about 70 more of them than would be expected given the average incoming academic preparation and family financial status of the group.
That seems to be worth celebrating.
Is there anything else worth noting in the US News rankings? Not really.
Make it a good day,
Mark