Illustration by Sarah Tretler

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this week, Columbia University announced that it will no longer submit data to U.S. News & World Report for its undergraduate rankings this year. 

The announcement read:  “We are convinced that synthesizing data into a single U.S. News submission for its Best Colleges rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional.”

Furthermore, “We remain concerned with the role that rankings have assumed in the undergraduate application process,” reads the announcement, “both in the outsize influence they may play with prospective students, and in how they distill a university’s profile into a composite of data categories. Much is lost in this approach.”

U.S. News leaders say the rankings provide valuable information to prospective students, and that they will continue to rank colleges, even if they don’t submit data. “Students rely on the rankings and information we provide to navigate the confusing and uncertain admissions process,” Eric J. Gertler, chief executive of U.S. News, said in an emailed statement. “Our critics tend to attribute every issue faced by academia” to rankings, he added.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

To inform applicants, Columbia is publishing Common Data Sets, which are data sets that many colleges post voluntarily and include many, but not all, of the numbers that U.S. News and other rankers use in their calculations. For example, the Common Data Set asks for class sizes, but not for “reputation” or percent of alumni who donate, all of which U.S. News historically collects for its rankings. “We are committed to sharing extensive information about our programs and hope that prospective applicants and their families will spend time looking at our Common Data Sets and the information that accompanies them,” reads the Columbia announcement, which was signed by Mary C. Boyce, the provost, and the deans of Columbia’s three undergraduate schools.

In an interview with The Chronicle in March 2022, Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia University, who opposes college rankings,  said he wished all of the Ivy League institutions would stop cooperating with U.S. News’ s undergraduate rankings, to send the message that they’re problematic. Columbia’s decision may be a start.

So be it!!

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.