Tufts may have fallen this year in the U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) rankings from the 25th best National University to the 28th, but some experts have said that these and other rankings are becoming less and less relevant.
According to Bob Morse, Director of Data Research at USNWR, "rankings nationwide aren't that pivotal of a factor." His assessment takes into account the use of the rankings by parents, schools and prospective students.
According to Morse, parents use the rankings "since they're spending so much money, they want to make sure their kid is going to a good school."
Universities, on the other hand, use the rankings as a "validation of how good they are," he said. "An outside body says they're good, so it proves that they are."
These aspects are auxiliary, however, to the main utilization of the rankings by prospective students deciding where to apply and which school to attend
One of the fundamental criticisms of rankings like those put out by USNWR is that they do not capture some of the important assets that could factor into a student's decision.
"Certainly some of the things that are important in the decision to go to a school can't be measured, and that's been a weakness of the rankings from the beginning," Morse said. "We're measuring complex organizations that are way more complex than the available data."
The USNWR rankings are determined from data collected from surveys sent out to several hundred schools in the country. They take into account a peer assessment, which asks survey respondents to rate each school's "academic excellence" on a scale from one to five. They also include data on retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate performance and alumni giving rate.
Freshman Matthew Weinberg said he found that in his recent college search, the rankings mattered less than "finding the right fit." He said that the factors that truly determined his decision were the location, the size and the breadth of academic opportunities available - all things that cannot be easily quantified.
Students will tend to lean toward schools that are ranked at their academic level no matter what, he said.
"I wasn't that much of a slouch of a student, so the schools I applied to were at the top anyway," Weinberg said.
The more specific divisions of actual numbers within institutions that are generally considered prestigious are meaningless, he said.
The University's Dean of Admissions, Lee Coffin, also criticized the narrowness of the USNWR analysis. "Many important institutional qualities - like the intellectual climate in a classroom, for example - cannot be captured in a quantitative way, and that is one of the fundamental flaws of a survey like [USNWR]."
He also said that the survey outweighs factors such as "academic reputation," which is defined by a survey of university presidents, provosts and deans of admissions. Coffin said that this collection of administrators in higher education simply have a limited knowledge on the institutions they are evaluating. This peer assessment data, however, consists of 25 percent of the ranking, and is thus the most heavily weighted item.
According to Coffin, "too much emphasis is put on surveys like this." Like Weinberg, he said that "the caliber of an institution ranked [ninth], for example, is not fundamentally different than the place ranked [20th]," and that the so-called "tiers" of schools are the more valuable categorizations.
The Daily conducted a poll in April that asked students to name which institutions they thought were on par with Tufts. The top three choices were Georgetown, Washington University in St. Louis and Emory University. These schools are ranked 25th, 12th, and 20th, respectively, in the latest issue of USNWR.
Furthermore, the rankings have not affected the quality or quantity of students interested in Tufts, according to Coffin. Although the University's ranking may have slipped, the amount of applications rose this year by six percent - a new record.
In spite of the shortcomings of the rankings, they cannot be entirely dismissed. Morse acknowledged the flaws in rankings such as those of USNWR's. "But does the data measure something meaningful? Yes," he said.
Freshman Oleg Svet said that the rankings were "not the number one factor [in deciding between schools], but they were important."
"The actual number of the ranking takes into account a lot of important factors and a lot of experts have their input into the ranking," he said.
The most valuable aspect of the ranking is that it does in some way take into account the prestige of the institution. "The rankings indicate sort of how the school is looked upon," Svet said, "and that's important when you apply to a job."
But even for those who continue to track university rankings, Tufts is not a presence to be overlooked. Despite its small drop in position, Coffin said, "Tufts is essentially in the same rank position it has occupied for a while, and that position is an excellent one."
