BEST FEST: THE RANKINGS RECIPE
Look at it This Way | Risa McDonell | October 3, 2023
Every September, as we all unpack a fresh crop of U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, I am reminded of one of my earliest memories: the cake a kind elderly neighbor baked for my third birthday. A three-layer tower of the pinkest frosting, impossibly fluffy and covered in sparkly sugar, it looked like everything a cake should be for a pink-and-fluffy-obsessed little girl. Then I took a bite, gagged, and burst into tears.
That is how we all discovered my lifelong loathing of coconut.
Poor Mrs. Olson. She had a cake she knew to be delicious. She had a list of ingredients in just the right proportion. She had a target demographic—albeit of only one—who should, by every measure she had at her disposal, have eaten it up. Unfortunately, she didn't have the right measures at her disposal. So while Mrs. Olson thought she was baking a pink cake, it turned out that she was baking a coconut cake. The wrong cake for the wrong girl.
…it's a foolproof, double-layered recipe for monetizing the collective and very real human need to be the best at something.
It's much the same with rankings. Rankings organizations want us to think they're providers of information for students and families that lead to increased enrollment, but that pesky little word "best" keeps giving them away. Best National Universities. Best National Colleges. Best Undergraduate Programs in Fill in the Blank. Third Best School for Study Abroad, Second Best for Innovation, Tenth Best for Learning Communities, as if colleges and universities aren't all, by definition, learning communities. Category after category of bests, and if it's not a best it's a most or a top.
U.S. News may have pioneered the technique, but Forbes, Princeton Review, Money, and others have added their own variations over the years. Either way, it's a foolproof, double-layered recipe for monetizing the collective and very real human need to be the best at something. No matter how they tinker with the methodological ingredients from year to year, the same small coterie of usual suspects always comes out on top, thus perpetuating a mystique of exclusivity. At the same time, a dizzying array of subcategories appeals to the widest possible range of demographics by finding a way to sell them all a slice of prestige.
What does "prestige" look like, then, when the "Top Ten Dream Schools" identified by high school seniors and parents in Princeton Review's annual "Hopes and Worries" routinely include a mix of Ivy League institutions, along with Stanford, MIT and one or two of the most competitive public flagships, even though only a tiny percentage of all college students are actually enrolled at these institutions? Or when U.S. News Best Colleges tries to appeal to "good students" who are "not the head of [their] class" and "have less than stellar test scores" by labeling their options as "A-Plus Schools for B Students"? What does "access" look like when the top five U.S. News "Best Values" all have admissions rates of 5% or lower?
…the act of ranking presupposes a set of values and desired outcomes to be measured, thus positioning the one doing the ranking as the arbiter of what is important.
One might be forgiven for wondering who is baking which cake for whom.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with prestige. Nor with senior capstones or service learning or most of the other measures these companies have evaluated. In fact, there are a lot of critical programs, campus experiences, and educational outcomes buried in this Best Fest. Many are good data points to have at your disposal. But are they the right measures to focus on in order to advance your institution's particular strategic goals?
Rankings cannot answer that question because they are not designed to advance your goals. By definition, the act of ranking presupposes a set of values and desired outcomes to be measured, thus positioning the one doing the ranking as the arbiter of what is important. Yes, U.S. News Best Colleges has, in response to ongoing public discourse around access, adapted its formula to include measures such as retention and graduation rates, Pell Grant graduation rates, and graduate debt. Even so, when “Academic Reputation” as a single factor based on subjective peer assessment surveys accounts for 20% of the outcome, prestige clearly remains the key ingredient.
The bottom line is that when you peg your priorities and strategies to someone else's rankings, you're simply following someone else’s recipe. The only way to ensure that you have the right measures to make the right decisions and investments for your institution is to conduct the right kind of primary research with your own specific markets and stakeholders in order to:
Frame the questions most relevant to your institution's strategic objectives
Develop a robust empirical understanding of your institution's competitive landscape, where it stands on that landscape, and any challenges it must overcome
Quantify with predictive confidence the impact that various strategic initiatives might have on current enrollment and net revenues
Make tangible moves that align the student experience with external market forces in ways that strengthen the institution’s competitive position while maintaining if not strengthening its authenticity and culture
This is how an institution ensures that it has the right measures at its disposal to bake the right cake for the right market, whatever the driving force—prestige, value and affordability, a diverse and inclusive campus experience, an unusual commitment to global learning, or having the Best Folklore Club That Meets on Wednesdays—ends up having more potential to achieve the desired outcomes. The right cake, in turn, drives not only enrollment demand but also the lived student experience; alumni, donor, and other stakeholder engagement; alignment of internal values with external market dynamics; and, ultimately, the financial, human, and other resources available to help an institution pursue and achieve its mission.
The rest is just coconut.
