Issue date: 8/18/07 Section: News

DePauw University will no longer participate in some aspects of the college rankings featured annually in U.S. News and World Report.

The University announced the change June 20 on its Web site, also stating it will no longer promote its U.S. News ranking through its media. This decision followed DePauw's participation in a June conference of 125 colleges, many of which took similar actions.

This year, President Robert G. Bottoms will not be filling out the part of U.S. News' survey requiring college presidents, deans or other officials to assess the reputation of other colleges and universities.

Bottoms said he does not feel qualified to assess other colleges, as he may not know enough about them to do so.

"Asking anybody to rank, on any kind of scale, 200 to 300 colleges is inappropriate," Bottoms said.

A school's reputation evaluation accounts for 25 percent of a college's final ranking, according to the U.S. News Web site.

Director of Media Relations Ken Owen likened the reputation survey to students evaluating the 400 to 500 people in their academic class - of whom they may only know a small percentage.

"You'd have to guess about the others," Owen said. "If a school is competing with us, are they going to be saying nasty things because they want to move up the list?"

The decision not to complete the reputation survey is not a major departure from the past, Bottoms said, since he hasn't filled out the reputation assessment for the past two years. But it was time to take an official stance, he added.

DePauw joins critics

DePauw officials are not alone. Lloyd Thacker of The Education Conservancy was one of the first voices to encourage colleges to boycott the reputation survey and avoid promoting U.S. News' rankings. He circulated a letter on May 10 to hundreds of school presidents outlining his objections, which received popular support at the June conference for the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges.

A majority of Annapolis Group members, including DePauw, characterized the magazine's rankings as broad and unfair approximations, referring specifically to the reputation survey. The general consensus, said Executive Vice President Neal Abraham, who represented DePauw at the conference, was that the rankings do little to accurately evaluate a school's success or to help prospective students understand the essence of a university.

About 30 schools have taken some public action to distance themselves from the rankings; all were in the top two tiers of U.S. News' 2006 rankings.

But a U.S. News spokesperson defended the "peer review survey" in an e-mail, writing that it is a necessary "qualitative" component to the rankings, which balances the dry statistics of SAT scores, endowment sizes and average class sizes.

"It helps account for each school's hard-to-measure aspects such as the quality of teaching and research - in other words, its character."

U.S. News also pointed out that those filling out the survey have the option to mark "don't know" next to each school they evaluate; that option was checked 44 percent of the time on last year's surveys, which he says is evidence that those filling out the survey are not simply "guessing."

New evaluation?

DePauw will continue to be ranked by U.S. News, Abraham said. The University will still provide data as requested by the news magazine, but it will only be data that has been made available to everyone; efforts will not be made to gather extra data solely for the use of U.S. News, Abraham said.

In addition, University media will no longer advertise their ranking in the magazine.

"There's a real ethical disconnect if you don't participate in something because you don't agree with it, and then you promote its findings," Owen said.

With the rejection of the U.S. News rating system, Owen said DePauw is open to a new evaluation. He said the University is in no way attempting to conceal information from prospective students.

"We want to be as transparent and as open to review as possible - this is not an attempt to dodge reality at all," he said.

Abraham said college presidents have been talking about the need for an improved system for years.

"We can think up a better way," Owen said. "And it's worth doing."

One such alternative is an evaluative system to be launched in September by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). The evaluative system, called the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) "is designed to give, in a common format, prospective students and their families concise, Web-based consumer-friendly information on individual private colleges and universities," according to the NAICU Web site.

U-CAN provides much of the same information already provided by the U.S. News service, but the NAICU claims it will make readily available some information that is more difficult to find, such as average amount of loans at graduation, undergraduate class-size breakdown and net tuition for hundreds of colleges.

U-CAN won't rank schools, allowing prospective students to decide based solely on the information provided.

Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, published an online statement refuting a claim that the Web-based alternative will provide a more valuable service to students. He wrote that the NAICU's survey provides nearly identical information while simultaneously making it more difficult to examine in comparison with other institutions.

"The NAICU templates will offer consumers far less than what U.S. News currently offers," Morse wrote.

Despite this criticism, Todd Wilson, director of communications at Sarah Lawrence College, said he supports the exploration of new evaluations. Sarah Lawrence College is not participating in the U.S. News rankings.

"Making the college search process easier and better for prospective students and their families is what we're trying to do," he said.

Admission implications

In past years, DePauw has utilized its top-tier U.S. News ranking to recruit students, said Stefanie Niles, vice president of admission and financial aid.

Niles said she has embraced the decision no longer to endorse the rankings but emphasized the importance of "external sources" for prospective students.

"Students don't want to hear just from us that DePauw is a strong institution, so we certainly recognize the importance of external [evaluations]," Niles said.

Niles said the U.S. News ranking has been particularly useful in recruiting international students, but said she doubted students would attribute their choice of college to a number in a magazine.

"For our domestic students, it may have provided a starting point in their research," she said. "But I don't believe you'd find many students here who came here solely because of our ranking."

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