How not to rank universities

Abstract

Education Standards. xiv+ 178 pp., $24.95; $14.95 (paper).The United States has far more colleges and universities than any othernation in the world, and they vary immensely in quality. Its best institutions are about as good as those anywhere; its worst schools, even its worst fully accredited ones, are extremely bad. Also, 0018-1560/85/$03.30 9 1985 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. 102 even within the same institution, departments and programs often vary widely in quality. According to the recent, authoritative rankings published by the National Academy of Sciences (1982), almost all of America's most highly-regarded universities have some doctorate programs which are ranked far worse than the university as a whole would be if its programs' rankings were aggregated. These programs include, concerning the faculty's reputation for "scholarly competence and achievement," the French doctorate program at Harvard, 17th among such programs in U.S. universities; physiology at the University of California at Berkeley, ranked 31st; chemistry at the University of Michigan, 32nd; physiology at Stanford, 33rd; chemical engineering at Yale, 34th; anthropology at Princeton, 40th; botany at the University of Chicago, tied for 43rd; and chemical engineering at Columbia, tied for 51st.In addition, again according to the NAS' findings, a great many universities have one or more doctorate programs ranked far higher than their "average" doctorate program. These include statistics at Iowa State University, tied for the seventh best such program in the United States; chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, sixth; anthropology at the University of Arizona, fifth; English at the University of Virginia and philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, both third; geography at Pennsylvania State University, second; and art history at New York University and chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, both first.For these reasons, academic quality rankings of colleges, universities, and individual departments and professional fields of study at them have flourished in the United States as nowhere else in the world [I]. They have many uses here. Corporations consult them to decide at which campuses to recruit employees. Faculty members, in times of more mobility than at present, use them in deciding among job offers. Administrators use them in deciding how to allocate resources among departments and programs. Funding agencies, both private and public, use them in deciding where to award grants. And, of course, prospective students, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, use them to find good institutions and departments.While most academic quality rankings rate departments in only a single discipline or professional field, the few multi-disciplinary ones have become especially well-known and widely used. These include the two ratings of Ph.D. programs published by the American Council on Education (Cartter, 1966;Roose and Andersen, 1970). These rankings were based on faculty members' research reputation and gradu...

A good league table guide?

“…League tables are offered as frameworks for the guidance of potential students. Webster (1985), in a review of rankings produced by Jack Gourman over a number of years, pointed to the failure of overall rankings to represent adequately the specific conditions in particular academic units. O' Leary (1996) acknowledges the point when he indicates that potential students should build the ten quoted variables into their selection processes -but gives no consideration to the influence that the league table as a whole might have on student choice.…”

“…One can look at the validity of the table in terms of its power to inform student choice -in a way, its predictive validity. It was argued earlier, with reference to Webster's (1985) work, that student choice would not necessarily be assisted by an overall table because it gave little, if any, information about the specific academic unit of the university to which a student might be seeking entry: in other words, validity in these terms would be problematic. It would not be an adequate defence to say that the intending student should look elsewhere for information of this sort, since the seeking of that information may well be influenced by what has already been assimilated from the overall league table.…”

Disciplinary Competitiveness Analysis in International Stomatology Education

“…And, of course, prospective students, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, use them to find good institutions and departments. 7 …”