Tufts rose to 28th place in this year's US News & World Report annual ranking of "America's Best Colleges," released last Thursday.
Tufts' rank began to decline in 1998, when it slipped from its highest position of 22. But in the latest list, the University advanced one place.
Tufts and the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill both received overall scores of 75 based on 18 criteria, including faculty resources, acceptance rate, and the SAT scores of last year's incoming freshmen. The magazine assigns the top-rated school a score of 100. For the second consecutive year, that slot went to Princeton.
Since US News published its first list in 1983, universities have disputed the magazine's ability to rank academic institutions according to their educational quality. This year, criticism heightened when several university officials spoke out against the rankings.
Amy Graham, former director of data research at US News, echoed administrators' concerns in an article co-authored with Nicholas Thompson, an editor of The Washington Monthly. Their article faults US News for ranking schools on the premise that intelligent incoming students, large expenditures, and a recognizable name amount to a quality education.
"Unfortunately, the highly influential US News & World Report annual guide to 'America's Best Colleges' pays scant attention to measures of learning or good educational practices," they wrote.
US News editors say the list provides a useful tool to prospective students, and college counselors credit the magazine for compiling statistical information and making it accessible to students.
According to a New York Times editorial, the rankings sometimes affect the institutions they attempt to measure. UNC and Ohio State have both implemented institution-wide strategies designed to boost their rankings.
Tufts' administrators say they will not cater to the rankings. And the University provost, Sol Gittleman, said he pays little attention to the list, which he says is designed to sell magazines. "We should tailor the intellectual experience here to a magazine?" he asked last Friday. "If you measure your agenda according to US News & World Report, you should get out of the business."
But for the last two years, Tufts has hosted conferences with US News editors and officials from other universities. At the meetings, Tufts critiqued the ranking system and sought ways to improve its score.
Attendees at last year's meeting resolved to take steps to restructure the financial aspect of the rankings. They recommended discounting certain research budgets that do not benefit undergraduates and gave research-intensive schools an advantage in the rankings.
This year, attendees discussed removing most of the money used for medical research and analyzed the formulas behind the graduation rate scores. Dawn Terkla, who organized the conferences as the University's executive director for Institutional Research, said she had not reviewed US News' methodology by last Friday, and did not know whether this year's ranks included Tufts' suggestions.
But she said that a school's wealth still heavily influences its ranking, since the richest institutions rank at the top.
The reputation component of the rankings constitutes another obstacle for Tufts. US News bases 25 percent of its score on a survey of university presidents, provosts, and deans of admission, who are asked to rate peer institutions' academic reputations on a scale of one through five. This category was one of Tufts' weaknesses; Tufts scored 3.6 points out of five, while UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, scored 4.2 on this measure. Harvard, Princeton and Yale all received 4.9.
"Tufts has only been a great university for 20 to 25 years," Gittleman said. "And academic reputations take time to change."
Gittleman, who was asked to rate more than 300 research universities, admitted that his ratings were based on anecdotal evidence that might not accurately represent the institution.
Despite the popularity of the ranking lists and their effect on applicants, college counselors say that advancing one spot does not significantly affect applicant numbers.
"A move from third or fourth to first might make a big difference," said James Maroney, a partner of First Choice College Placement, a college counseling service for high school students in Milford, CT. "But 50th to 47th, for example, that won't make any difference."
Many students, however, use the list as a general guide. Kristin Andreutis, a high school senior from Needham, MA, said she is limiting her college search to US News' top 50 schools. She printed the list soon after it was released on the US News website.
"Basically, I'm using it as a resource," Andreutis said. "Rank is more like a starting point to know which are the good schools."
One college counselor in Boston recalled meeting a parent whose daughter chose one college over another solely because US News ranked it one position higher.
Criticism like Gittleman's has spurred suggestions on improving the rankings. In the Washington Monthly article, Graham and Thompson suggested using evaluations by graduating students to determine educational quality.
But Terkla predicts that incorporating the data from once-internal surveys would further skew results. "If you do that, you are going to end up with a popularity contest," Terkla said. "People are always going to want their institution to look good."
The best option, she said, would be to use more precise output statistics on graduating students. US News' current scheme relies heavily on figures for incoming students, while output measures would better indicate a school's effectiveness, she said. But, she added, it is difficult to determine which statistics are fair because universities produce different kinds of graduates. "I think it is important to make the rankings better," Terkla said, "because they are not going to go away."
