I was leafing through the new 2003 issue of USNews' 'America's Best Colleges' down at Borders this evening. As is my habit, I looked up some schools that I have attended or which interest me. One of them is Belmont's old College of Notre Dame. In recent years it has proudly been a "top tier" western masters-level university, with an academic reputation score of 2.9. Imagine my consternation to see that this year it's a second tier school with an academic reputation score of 2.4 (lower than my own CSUDH's 2.5)! What in the world could have happened? How could it have plummeted 0.5 reputation points? I follow this school pretty closely, and there hasn't been any big news out of there. Except one thing... They changed their name. College of Notre Dame is now Notre Dame de Namur University. The school is the same, the people are the same, the classes are the same. Only the name is different. What this tells me is that the academic reputation score is basically a name-recognition score. Give a well respected school a new name that many respondents aren't as familiar with, and they will tell you with a straight face that they know that it simply isn't very good. How could it possibly be good if they haven't even heard of it??
US News rankings "What this tells me is that the academic reputation score is basically a name-recognition score." Bill, I agree. One thing I have noticed about USNWR rankings is that they are largely based on the opinions of academics and administrators. I'm not sure that this is very helpful. When in a residential MA program several years back, I asked some professors about good doctoral programs. A few professors were very knowledgeable. Most had a rather limited perspective, i.e. "I went to UC Davis for my BA through my PhD. I've never been anywhere else, but I know Yale is a very prestigious school. For that matter, why don't you look at all the Ivy League schools ?" I think a better methodology for USNWR, at least for the business degrees, would be to interview major employers. At least they deal with a large cross-section of graduates, and have to evaluate them as to their performance. Personally, I think that if someone is interested, they need to seriously research the best schools, preferably by tracking down people with firsthand knowledge of the programs in question. I have not found USNWR rankings to be very helpful.
Ah, yes. Reputation, reputation. See http://www.geocities.com/ba_in_4_weeks/collegenamegame.html From The College Name Game "Institutions reputations are the result of two distinct processes: 1. The accumulation of its public successes and failures. 2. The aggregation of associations determined by the trigger words comprising the title of the institution, and the synergies those trigger words create determined by the contextual setting (or cultural space). This is an institution's VIRTUAL REPUTATION. In the end, all institutional reputations are, to a significant degree, virtual. Excepting the most prestigious, the vast majority of institutional reputations are entirely virtual outside their local space. That is, the accomplishments and the failures of an institution have no significant effect on its wider reputation except over glacial time spans. " Lawrie Miller BA in 4 Weeks http://geocities.com/ba_in_4_weeks .
The importance of "name recognition" is one of the biggest criticisms of law school ranking surveys. Nosborne, JD (Whose law school is largely unknown outside New Mexico)
My Alma Mater is better then yours... In my office, we’re always bantering back and forth about who has the best school. My two cohorts are attending St. Leo University and they were under the impression that it was a cream de la crem school. They always spoke ill of my alma mater: International College. Lo and behold, when I discovered that U.S. News & World Report indicated that St. Leo is a 4th tier school while International College is a 3rd tier school, I rubbed it in their faces for well over a week. As a 4th tier school, I told them that it was the bottom of the barrel. < evil smirk > We're just pulling eachothers chains. But I have to give U.S. News & World Report credit because... yadda yadda yadda
Yep....that and the fact that a rather large percentage of the surveys seem to get, almost immediately, deposited into the circular file.
My favorite reputation story is found in the first edition of Thomas E. Brennan's "Judging the Law Schools." He surveyed 100 lawyers and judges and asked them to rank 10 law schools that he listed. Penn State, one of the schools on the list, came in at about the halfway point. The problem was, Penn State had no law school at the time...
While the US News & World Report's America's Best College rankings are one of several useful tools for assessing colleges, it is certainly not without its problems. One is the subjective "reputation" rankings another is the lack of measures of alumni success. However, one of the most disturbing things that I have found is a lack of reliability. If a school's USNWR tier ranking fluctuates from year to year, this throws the ranking's reliability into serious question. Bill Dayson's concern about his school's fluctuation is a case in point. A much more obvious one is Albertson College in Idaho. For several years (upon to 2001) Albertson was constantly rated at the top of the "Regional Liberal Arts Colleges" for the West. In fact, it was usually rated No. 1 (which, of course would be considered "Tier 1"). In the 2002 Edition, however, Alberston had been re-classified as a "Liberal Arts-Bachelor" institution (following the new Carnegie classification system. The shocking thing is its drop from TIER 1 to TEIR 4! This appears to be based on its reputation ranking droppoing from 3.6 (2001) to 2.2 (2002). Unless something drastic happened at Albertson, this fluctuation calls USNWR' reliability into question (to put it mildly!) Tony Pina
