Figuring out what the College Rankings Rank
Using a Professor Rating website to your advantage
There might not be enough corn and oil to satisfy demand, but there sure seems to be more than enough college ranking lists available to satisfy just about any taste. The most famous, of course, is the US News and World Report ranking. US News has turned ranking colleges into a major profit center for its magazine, with 2,000,000 subscribers, 9,000 newsstand buyers, and over 20,000 of its college guide book users. If you don’t like US News and World Report’s perspective on admissions competitiveness, then you can always turn to: Barron’s, The College Prowler, Princeton Review, Kiplinger, Ordo Ludus College Ranking (which is Latin for “school ranking”) –you can find a fairly comprehensive listing of the college ranking services in Wikipedia, not only in the US, but worldwide,--by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_rankings.
A new ranking, however, warrants a look. It is from the Center for College Affordability & Productivity, (CCAP), a four-year old research institute located in Washington DC. It ranks colleges by how productive its students are: what do its students gain by attending the college in question for four years? This should not be a novel idea, but, for whatever reason, it seems to be. It ranks schools by: the percentage of students that graduate (and this is also done by US News), the number of students that win Fulbright Travel Grants and Rhodes Scholarships upon graduation, the number that succeed in their chosen profession (which it tracks through Who’s Who in America), the number that go on to gain graduate degrees and PhDs, and by student evaluations of the institution’s teachers posted on www.Ratemyprofessors.com.
This last criterion caught my interest, because, even in illustrious colleges with, supposedly, the most professional faculty, there are some teachers who perform below expectations. A recent example, Ms. Priya Venkatesan, an English composition instructor at Dartmouth, which is ranked #10 by the CCAP, sued her students and filed an ‘intellectual distress’ lawsuit against the college, when her lecture on ‘eco-feminism’ was not well received by her students. (Dartmouth Review, May 2008; Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece by Joseph Rago) Obviously, that would have been a class worth missing. Unfortunately, Ms. Venkatesan has transferred to Northwestern University as a Research Scholar, so she doesn’t appear in Ratemyprofessors.com. Ironically, another Priya Venkatesan can be found on the site; she teaches a nutrition class at Pasadena City College in California.
Another point worth mentioning about the Ratemyprofessors.com site, is that when you think about researching a school or a professor, it can give you extremely useful information. It gives you direct feedback from students, who are currently attending a school that you’re interested in possibly applying to, about a teacher in a department that might, possibly, be your major. Ratemyprofessors.com is an eleven year-old site with over 6.8 million student-generated evaluations. That, of course, does not mean that the student evaluations it displays are flawless, nothing is, but it will certainly give a sense about the teaching capabilities of teachers that might, in the future, have a direct impact on your education. When I visited the website, I did a search over the UCLA teacher list. I was looking for a teacher with at least six reviews, and who had received a ‘chili pepper’, meaning he or she is ‘hot’. I found Charles Batten, who is in the English Department, had 12 reviews; apparently he teaches very well, the students enjoy his discussions, though he seemed, to several of the student reviewers, a little ‘unapproachable.’
The actual rankings from the CCAP, are quite a bit different from the US News and World Report. You may take a look at them yourself at: http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/2010_Liberal_Arts.pdf. Where they really diverge is among the ‘liberal arts schools’, especially in the top 15. No matter how you choose to use these rankings, just keep in mind that what they measure might, or might not, be of interest to you. They’re only as useful as your understanding of them. Where they might prove useful, is in bringing to your attention schools that might never have been discovered elsewhere.