smf notes:
- The US NEWS & WORLD REPORTS college rankings are due this week.
- IN THE INTEREST OF FULL DISCLOSURE: the college search is underway at our house, we are making our own lists!
From the uncredited Education News column in the Dallas Morning News
Monday,
Mr. Thacker's sermon is that admissions should be about matching kids with the colleges that will make them happiest instead of a cutthroat race to get into the plummiest college possible.
When I wrote in March, Mr. Thacker, a former college admissions counselor, was urging schools to rethink their participation in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, because he thinks they push admissions toward commercialization and encourage kids and colleges to game the system.
I confess I labeled him a "voice-in-the-wilderness" type because, sincere as his mission is, the powerful rankings are a tough nut for one idealist to crack.
Boy, was I wrong.
As of last week, 61 college presidents had signed a letter sponsored by his nonprofit organization, The Education Conservancy, pledging to boycott part of the U.S. News process.
The colleges, mostly small liberal arts schools, include two from
The signers agreed to ignore a U.S. News request to rate other colleges, based on their reputation among peers. They also promised not to churn out press releases bragging about a high – or improved – ranking or claiming that a ranking really tells much about a school's quality.
College officials have long said they don't know many other schools well enough to comfortably assign a numeric grade – especially knowing those grades make up 25 percent of a college's total score.
These may seem like baby steps. The schools are still free to participate in most parts of the rankings (though several, including
U.S. News plans to release the next batch of rankings at the end of this week.
Defenders say the rankings provide a valuable service to students who want to make sure the dollars they spend on increasingly high tuition rates are well spent. Others say the rankings are here to stay, so colleges should get with the program.
Some skeptics say the 61 challengers are, well, voice-in-the-wilderness idealists. A handful of small colleges won't derail something as entrenched as the rankings, they say – especially not these colleges, since none are rated higher than 30th on U.S. News' list.I doubt U.S. News is deeply worried about the boycott – though it has attracted a fair amount of press attention, and the magazine did notify journalists recently that it has created a new blog run by its data guru, Robert Morse, called Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings. When I checked last week, activity was slow – probably because Mr. Morse was busy putting out the next rankings.
I've never been a big fan of the rankings. They encourage kids to focus on a few factors that can be represented by a single number instead of the rich range of opportunities offered by any school.
Choosing a college is a big decision, one that families should spend some real time researching and thinking through.
Yes, Harvard is a great university, and, yes, it's a great credential to have on your résumé. But a big part of its reputation is based on the quality of its graduate programs and research by its faculty. What do you know about its undergraduate classes, campus life and social scene? Does it even offer majors you're interested in? The only way to find out is to investigate – talk to alumni, read several guidebooks, troll the Web site thoroughly and, most important, visit the campus if possible.
U.S. News, to its credit, has improved its presentation over the years, adding things like a tuition planner, tips for handling admissions pressures and features about campus life. But the highlight is still the rankings, and those are scored in fewer than 20 categories.
It's silly to think you can boil a complex institution down to a few numbers, no matter how well chosen the categories are. I'd dismiss the whole process as silly if families – and even worse, colleges – didn't take the rankings so seriously.
The part of the pledge by the 61 presidents that impresses me most is the promise not to publicize their rankings, no matter how stunning. Colleges are notorious for moaning that the ratings are simplistic and misleading, then cranking out promotional materials hyping their performance. College A jumped from No. 65 to No. 58! Jumped? Jumped?? Colleges don't jump. They move glacially, especially when it comes to change. It takes years to add new majors, build a great faculty and substantially improve the student body.
Equally absurd is a claim that
My favorite send-up of the rankings was created by a former
His College_Ranking_Service is a Web page spoof that lets you choose among four "ranking methods" – The Classic, The Fairness, Love My Parents and Hate My Parents. I clicked on The Classic, and up popped Harvard, Stanford, Rice,
You come away having a hard time taking U.S. News' high tone about its statistical methodology seriously.
But the rankings have revealed a great public appetite for more information about how well colleges perform. Families want this information in a format that will let them compare several schools – a need that both Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have promised to address.
This gets me back to Mr. Thacker and the renegade presidents.
He and a group of college officials are meeting at Yale next month to talk about devising a data retrieval system that would allow parents, students and guidance counselors to compare colleges. One key would be settling on the right measures. Another would be getting colleges to go along – especially highly rated, expensive ones that fare well in the current system.
Ever the optimist, Mr. Thacker believes this next venture will succeed. Several influential higher-education organizations are already promoting similar ideas. And last week Mr. Thacker said he had heard from presidents of several top-ranked liberal arts schools who sympathized with his goals but couldn't join the movement without approval from their boards – or without assurance that other top-ranked colleges would take the plunge, too.
Mr. Thacker also believes many colleges are ready to ratchet down the admissions frenzy, because they think it will be healthier for students, parents, high schools and the colleges themselves.
"The Yale meeting is the logical thing. It's the next step," he said. "It's what they should be doing."
_________________
| |
| | This letter, signed initially by 12 college presidents, is being sent to hundreds of presidents.
While we believe colleges and universities may want to cooperate in providing data to publications for the purposes of rankings, we believe such data provision should be limited to data which is collected in accord with clear, shared professional standards (not the idiosyncratic standards of any single publication), and to data which is required to be reported to state or federal officials or which the institution believes (in accord with good accountability) should routinely be made available to any member of the public who seeks it. |
| Additional Signatories: | |
| William Bloodworth, Augusta State University | Ruth A. Knox, Wesleyan College |
ABOUT THE EDUCATION CONSERVANCY
WE ADMIT…GUIDANCE FROM THOSE WHO DO
Applying to college does not have to be overwhelming! The following principles and guidelines can help make the college admission process more manageable, more productive, and more educationally appropriate.
This guidance is offered by the Education Conservancy, a group of admission professionals committed to calming the commercial frenzy by affirming educational values in college admission.
Principles
These guiding principles are relevant for parents, students, counselors and admission deans:
• Education is a process, not a product. Students are learners, not customers.
• The benefits and predictors of good education are knowable yet virtually impossible to measure.
• Rankings oversimplify and mislead.
• A student’s intellectual skills and attitude about learning are more important than what college a student attends.
• Educational values are best served by admission practices that are consistent with these values.
• College admission should be part of an educational process directed toward student autonomy and intellectual maturity.
• Colleges can be assessed, but not ranked. Students can be evaluated, but not measured.
• Students’ thoughts, ideas and passions are worthy to be engaged and handled with utmost care.
Student Guidelines
An admission decision, test score, or GPA is not a measure of your self-worth. And, most students are admitted to colleges they want to attend. Knowing this, we encourage you to:
• Be confident! Take responsibility for your college admission process. The more you do for yourself, the better the results will be.
• Be deliberate! Applying to college involves thoughtful research to determine distinctions among colleges, as well as careful self-examination to identify your interests, learning style and other criteria.
Plan to make well-considered applications to the most suitable colleges. This is often referred to as “making good matches.”
• Be realistic and trust your instincts! Choosing a college is an important process, but not a life or death decision. Since there are limits to what you can know about colleges and about yourself, you should allow yourself to do educated guesswork.
• Be open-minded! Resist the notion that there is one perfect college. Great education happens in many places.
• Use a variety of resources for gathering information. Seek advice from those people who know you, care about you, and are willing to help.
• Be honest; be yourself! Do not try to game the system.
• Resist taking any standardized test numerous times (twice is usually sufficient).
• Limit your applications to a well-researched and reasonable number. No more than six should be sufficient, except in special cases.
• Know that what you do in college is a better predictor of future success and happiness than where you go to college.
Parent Guidelines
An admission decision, test score, or GPA is not a measure of a student’s worth. And, parents should always be mindful of the behavior they are modeling for their children. Knowing this, we encourage you to:
• Recognize that gaining admission to college is merely one step in a process of education that will include your student attending a college where she or he can maximize talents and growth. Emphasize the education.
• Resist doing for your students what they are capable of doing for themselves.
• Allow your child to take responsibility for his or her own part of the college application process. Be involved in the process, but do not try to control it.
• Resist relying on rankings and college selectivity to determine the most suitable colleges for your child.
• Realize that researching, selecting, and applying to colleges does not have to be an expensive process.
• Resist attempts to turn the process into a status competition. Develop a healthy, educationally based, and family-appropriate approach to college admissions.
• Consider that gaming the system may not only diminish your child’s self-confidence, it may also jeopardize desired admission outcomes.
• Listen to, encourage and believe in your child. Do not use the term “we” as in “we are applying to….”
• Discuss the idea of education as an ongoing process, and how selecting a college might be different from buying a product.
• Love them enough to let them demonstrate the independence you have instilled in them.
• Keep this process in perspective. Remember that student skills, self-confidence, curiosity, and desire to learn are some of the most important ingredients in quality education and successful college admissions.
Do not sacrifice these by overemphasizing getting into the “best” college.
THIS GUIDANCE IS OFFERED BY THE FOLLOWING VETERAN ADMISSION PROFESSIONALS:
Phillip Ballinger,
Michael Beseda, St. Mary’s
Jennifer Britz,
J. Antonio Cabasco,
Sean Callaway, Pace University
John Carroll,
Sidonia Dalby,
Doris Davis,
Will Dix,
Bill Fitzsimmons,
Karl Furstenberg,
Marilee Jones, MIT
Daniel Lundquist,
Brad MacGowan,
Bonnie Marcus,
Paul Marthers,
Robert Massa,
David McDonald,
Tom McWhertor,
Mark Moody, The
Marty O’Connell, Colleges That Change Lives
Ted O’Neill,
Bruce Poch,
Jon Reider,
Jeff Rickey,
Mike Sexton, Lewis and
Bill Shain,
Jim Sumner,
Steven Syverson,
Harold Wingood,
805 SW Broadway,
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