By Daniel Diermeier | Inquisitive
It’s time to ditch the college ranking system and replace it with something that more accurately assesses the quality of a higher education institution.
So writes Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University.
In an article this week in Inquisitive, a quarterly magazine of Heterodox Academy, Diermeier argues for a new measure – a ratings system that assesses data to determine every institution’s “academic quality and accessibility.”
Right now, Diermeier says the current college rankings, published by U.S. News and World Report and other publications, have little value.
“Almost no one thinks they’re valid. University leaders openly criticize them. A handful of universities and a number of leading law schools and medical schools refuse to even participate in them,” he writes.
“Yet most universities still go along with the process and use rankings to their advantage when they can. Collectively, we are at sea: far from the time when rankings had a veneer of credibility but not yet arrived at a post-rankings era.”
Diermeier continues:
“Last year, a report published by NORC at the University of Chicago and funded by Vanderbilt University assessed the construct validity of five prominent rankings systems, including that of U.S. News. Among the issues it found were subjective weights, proxy measures of questionable relevance, inconsistencies in data quality and a lack of transparency. Key data points were missing, while data for other important metrics, such as graduate outcomes, were incomplete. A major problem, the study found, is that there is no shared definition of what ‘good’ looks like for colleges. Each ranking creates a target and then purports to hold colleges to that subjective standard.”
He proposed a new system that rates all higher education institutions, both public and private, and is committed to transparency.
This system should be data-driven so that students can “personalize their list based on what matters to them, rather than relying on someone else’s subjective idea of what ‘good’ should look like,” he writes.
“Such a system would give students and their families the ability to make choices based on clear, accurate information about cost and quality, not on the self-interested, shifting methodologies of profit-driven rankings organizations,” Diermeier writes.
Vanderbilt and a few other universities are working on such a system, and they’re “funding NORC to develop and pilot such a system, collecting and analyzing data in a new way. Our goal is to provide richer and more usable information so that students can find the best college for them,” he writes.
