Kiplinger, a personal finance advice magazine, recently rated Tufts as the 22nd most valuable college in the nation, and once again high school students and their families are left wondering how accurate — or useful — these ratings actually are. Walk into the home of a high school senior and one is likely to find an array of college guidebooks, brochures and various charts printed from the Internet. US News and World Report's annual college ranking often sits at the top of this pile.
In 2007, an anti−college ranking movement began working to make many families aware that the success of a college's students during and after college cannot be determined by any rating system. There is simply too much that needs to be considered, and college experiences do not fit into the formula that these publications and companies use.
The resistance movement coincided with many colleges' advertising that they would be putting significantly less emphasis on SAT and ACT scores when making admissions decisions, some even going so far as to make the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional. Sarah Lawrence College led this charge with a loud statement, completely removing standardized test scores from its undergraduate application. The movement reflects a shift in the American college−student demographic. As the population of students attending college expands and crosses financial borders (in 2006 the number of college students was more than 60 percent higher than that of 1960), American families are also looking at a broader range of schools. Top universities and other schools are no longer inhabited as overwhelmingly by upper−middle−class whites. Tufts itself boasts a 25 percent ethnic minority population. Small schools like Colorado College and Hampshire College now offer alternative study models that attract students who might qualify for Ivy League schools but seek something more innovative. People are beginning to understand that a right fit for US News and Kiplinger isn't necessarily the right fit for them.
The point is that while the numbers offered by these companies are meant to facilitate the college selection process, they are too simple. This in itself is hardly news; but the magazines that tote college rankings still fly off the shelves, and the mystique of attending a so−called top−tier university remains potent.
In 2007, Lloyd Thacker, the executive director of the Education Conservancy, circulated a letter to presidents of liberal arts colleges. In it, Thacker urged them not to submit statistics to the US News college survey. Such a boycott is one way to undermine the role these rankings play in the college selection process, but most colleges will not withhold the statistics if it means receiving a bad ranking.
But such a decision can come at a price. According to Michele Tolela Myers, the former president of Sarah Lawrence, a US News researcher told her that when a college withholds information on its students' average SAT scores, the magazine assigns the college an arbitrary average score of about 200 points below its peer institutions' average.
If colleges around the country were to come together and take the large step of boycotting college−ranking lists, it would require prospective students and their families to look beyond such misleading numeric constructs. This is not to suggest that all of the information contained in college rankings should be disregarded; in fact, most of the objective details compiled by these surveys — like ethnic makeup and student−to−faculty ratio — are very useful. But families must keep in mind that college selection is a subjective process, one that requires a human being with her own values and ambitions to weigh all the components of a school, rather than relying on a formulaic chart. If Tufts and other major institutions took collective action, the entire admissions process could benefit.
