Ranking the Rankings - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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George Mehaffy on 23 Dec 10"Ranking the Rankings August 23, 2010, 9:01 am By Richard Kahlenberg If it's back to school, it must be time for the publication of college Rankings. In recent days, U.S. News & World Report released its much-discussed Rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University declared its Ranking of world universities. As my Innovations Blog colleague Richard Vedder noted recently, Forbes has its own Rankings to compete with U.S. News, and Vedder (who helped Forbes come up with its methodology) argues that Forbes's is better-that is, ranks higher. My good friend Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at U.S. News, discusses the proliferation of Rankings in his fascinating new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Wildavsky devotes a lengthy chapter to global Rankings and compares and contrasts the two main international Rankings-the Shanghai Rankings, which look primarily at science research (counting factors such as the number of alumni and faculty who have Nobel Prizes and citations in science journals) with those of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which heavily weights academic peer evaluations. Despite their fundamental differences, Wildavsky notes, in 2008, the top 10 in the two lists had seven overlapping institutions. My own favorite in the Rankings game is The Washington Monthly, which today released the 2010 Rankings of "What Can Colleges Do for the Country." While other guides "help students and parents decide how to spend their tuition dollars wisely," the Monthly says its goal is "to tell citizens and policy makers which colleges [are] spending their tax dollars wisely." The Monthly ranks colleges and universities based on whether they promote social mobility; research, and service. As I've noted elsewhere, one of the intriguing findings of the Monthly's social mobility Ranking is that public universities systems where affirmative action by race has bee