A dozen college presidents are encouraging their peers to boycott the U.S. News and World Report's annual college ranking survey, denouncing a system they view as an arbitrary means of distinguishing between schools.
More than 1,900 schools are evaluated each year in the survey. In the most recent edition Tufts is tied for the 27th best university in the country with the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Pointing to the shortcomings they see in the survey, the presidents earlier this month signed and began circulating a letter to their colleagues at other institutions asking them to support them. The presidents of Dickenson College, Lafayette College and Heritage University are among the signers.
In particular, they are objecting to the "academic prestige" section of the survey in which school officials are asked to rank other institutions on a scale from "poor" to "excellent." This section is weighted to account for 25 percent of a school's ranking, outstripping considerations such as faculty resources and student retention rates.
William Durden, the president of Dickenson College and one of the signers, said that the academic prestige section causes the published rankings to reflect individual opinions where more substantive information, such as the test scores of students or the volume and quality of their research, is available.
"It's silly," he said. "It's totally subjective, and therefore I think it's a bogus form of information. There's no reason that academic institutions should lend themselves and their credibility to this U.S. News Survey."
Tufts President Lawrence Bacow, who is not one of the dozen presidents who have signed the letter, said he avoids this credibility gap by ranking only those schools in the survey that he is familiar with, responding "no opinion" to those he does not know well enough to judge.
"Unfortunately, there are no criteria to guide one in filling it out," Bacow wrote in an e-mail. "It is really a beauty contest."
The desire to claim a higher spot in the rankings engenders an unmerited level of competition between schools, which can encourage them to resort to disingenuous tactics to bolster their own showings, Durden said.
"You have an incredible amount of gamesmanship," he said. "You have people actually perverting information to look better."
As a result, Durden said his school now refuses to employ its rankings for self-promotion, purging them from places of display such as the university's Web site. He advocates putting more pertinent information such as data on student performance into the public sphere in a move towards greater transparency.
Matthew Hyde, the assistant director of admissions at Tufts, voiced similar reservations about the accuracy of the survey as a means of measuring school quality.
He said, however, that school rankings have assumed an irrevocably paramount role in the minds of prospective college students.
"[The] students out there take them very seriously," Hyde said. "Would we like them to be de-emphasized? Absolutely. But the fact is they have become a part of the game when it comes to looking at colleges."
Although Hyde said that the growing importance of college rankings leads Tufts to be cooperative with surveyors, people within the school do not see the ultimate ranking as representative of what Tufts has to offer to students.
"We give them the information that they need to adequately judge our institution, but in the end we don't look at that as a reflection of our success as university or an institution at all," he said. "When we present Tufts, we're not wearing any kind of ranking on our sleeve. We're presenting the university we've come to know."
Still, other universities may be reluctant to abandon much-hyped horse polls such as the U.S. News and World Report rankings because the statistics serve as a means of attracting students, Durden said.
But he thinks institutions have a higher obligation to give applicants a more holistic view of their options in the college search.
While Durden has "no illusions" that all schools will jump on the bandwagon, he thinks that "our responsibility is not to cooperate with something we think is misleading and not providing appropriate information, and to help the public understand the limitations of these documents."
