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Beyond The College Rankings

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Stanford University tops Forbes' Top Colleges ranking this year. We are both at Stanford, Ernestine Fu as a student and Tom Ehrlich as a faculty member. Stanford is an extraordinary place, and we feel blessed to be there. We are thrilled, of course, that Stanford is ranked #1. The slideshow below illustrates some of the main reasons we think Stanford excels.

Even the Best is Not Perfect

At the same, we both recognize that like other universities, Stanford faces challenges. Many students are criticized for struggling with the “duck syndrome”—they are calm and composed on the surface, but actually kicking hard to stay afloat. Faculty have noted that the rise of Silicon Valley around Stanford has brought extraordinary growth and has particularly enhanced engineering, sciences, and business. But the fact that no humanities field is in the top ten undergraduate majors is a serious concern.

We also are troubled by many systems of ranking academic institutions. Most of them provide little in terms of sound evidence for choosing which college a student should attend. We are particularly concerned by those systems that focus on inputs such as student test scores and grades, for they tell nothing about how much learning is going on. We also deplore systems that weigh the opinions of college and university presidents about institutions around the country, since none of those presidents can have a sound basis for judging more than a few of the institutions.

The Forbes system is among the best we have seen for ranking colleges. Wisely, Forbes uses a methodology that avoids a focus on inputs or on the opinions of campus presidents. But the system is still subject to multiple concerns. It uses student satisfaction, post-graduate success, and student debt as the three primary criteria. In our view, two of the three are subject to criticism.

Student satisfaction is based on ratings from RateMyProfessor, a site where students can, if they choose to do so, evaluate faculty. In our experience, students do not bother to rate their professors unless they think they are either terrible or terrific. As a result the ratings do not represent reasoned judgments about all or even most faculty on a campus.

Post-graduation success depends on two factors. First is how many graduates from a campus appear on various Forbes lists and lists of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners. But these lists capture only small segments of the extraordinary leaders in the full range of careers throughout the country. The second factor is post-college compensation as reported by Payscale.com. But using post-graduation financial success biases the ranking against schools that graduate large numbers of students who go into public-service positions like teaching.

College student debt is the third of the three Forbes’ criteria. We think this one is on the mark. Student debt is a serious national problem. The Forbes approach is a thoughtful way to analyze the relative affordability of attending a college and the ability of graduates to repay their student debts.

Choose the College that Feels Right for You Based on All The Features

More troublesome than our concerns about the approach of ranking academic institutions is our judgment that a student or parent should consider many more factors in deciding whether a college or university is the right fit. Is the campus, for example, the right size for the student? Stanford is #1 and Pomona is #2 in the Forbes ranking, even though Pomona with less than 1,600 students is tiny compared to Stanford with almost 19,000. Stanford has terrific graduate programs. Pomona offers the advantages of an intimate learning environment compared to the large scale of Stanford.

Prospective college students and parents, we urge you to look at the rankings, but recognize that even the best ones measure only a small set of features that should be considered when choosing what schools are right for students. Most important, there are literally hundreds of campuses where a student can gain a first-rate education, make lifelong friends, and have a superb time in the process.