Continua en EE.UU. la discusión sobre los resultados del ranking 2010 de universidades y colleges provisto por la revista US News & World Report.
Más abajo ofrecemos los análisis publicados sobre este tópico en The Chornicle of Higher Education:
— In the Latest ‘U.S. News’ Survey, a Higher Response Rate and the Usual Winners, By Elyse Ashburn, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009
— College Rankings and Dueling Mission Statements. By Christopher C. Morphew and Barrett J. Taylor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009

In the Latest ‘U.S. News’ Survey, a Higher Response Rate and the Usual Winners
Harvard and Princeton Universities again tied for the No. 1 spot among national universities in the annual rankings released by U.S. News. The two have traded the top rank or tied for it every year for the last 10 years
By Elyse Ashburn, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009
College participation in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings increased this year, after reaching its lowest level ever last year. Forty-eight percent of college leaders who were sent the peer-assessment survey responded this year, up from 46 percent.
The peer survey—the most controversial part of the rankings formula—asks presidents, provosts, and admissions deans to rate institutions on a scale of 1 to 5. The response rate has dropped from 68 percent in 1999, amid a steady drumbeat of anti-rankings rhetoric.
In 2007, the Education Conservancy, led by Lloyd Thacker, began pushing colleges to publicly boycott the survey. And a growing number of alternative rankings have cropped up in recent years. The latest, a grading system designed to measure what students will learn at a particular college, was released Wednesday by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (see related article).
Mr. Thacker, executive director of the conservancy and a prominent critic of the U.S. News rankings, does not put much stock in this year’s survey response rate. But, he said, “to the extent that this measures a real change in how institutions are viewing this, it’s disappointing news.”
College leaders, Mr. Thacker said, should be touting educational values to potential students, not participating in commercial rankings that don’t measure what students are learning.
Robert J. Morse, director of data research at U.S. News, was not sure what contributed to the uptick in this year’s survey-response rate. The rate also increased slightly between 2005 and 2006, before continuing to decline.
A controversy this year over how some public-college presidents filled out the peer survey might affect their participation in future years. Clemson University found itself on the wrong end of bad headlines in June after a staff member publicly accused it of gaming the rankings. In the aftermath, the college handed over its president’s survey responses to several newspapers. And a handful of other public colleges had to do likewise, after their local papers filed open-records requests.
The dust-up “happened after the results had come in for this year,” Mr. Morse said. “We’ll have to see next year to what degree it inhibits participation.”
The peer-assessment survey accounts for 25 percent of a college’s score in the formula used to calculate the overall “best colleges” rankings.
In the future, the magazine may add survey responses from high-school counselors into the mix. Last year, it introduced a separate ranking based solely on a survey of 1,600 high-school counselors. The counselors were not surveyed again this year, but Mr. Morse said the magazine plans to survey a larger group, perhaps 2,000, for next year’s college guide.
“We are going to consider the possibility of including high-school counselors as part of the rankings,” he said. “We’re definitely considering it.”
The Perennial Picks
As for the results of this year’s rankings, Harvard and Princeton Universities again tied for the No. 1 spot among national universities. The two have traded the top rank or tied for it every year for the last 10 years.
And rounding out the top national universities this year are several other of the usual suspects: Yale University (alone at No. 3) and the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania (clustered at No. 4).
Williams College got the top spot among liberal-arts colleges, and the University of California at Berkeley was the highest-ranked public institution.
U.S. News touts the consistency of the rankings as a sign of quality, while critics say the year-to-year similarities show that the list simply mirrors colleges’ longstanding reputations.
Some students, though, do find the U.S. News rankings useful. Trevor B. Burnham grew up in Missoula, Mont., and said he didn’t have the time or money to visit the distant liberal-arts colleges that interested him. So, as a high-school junior, he used the rankings to narrow down his selection.
“I applied to Carleton College, which I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, and it worked out wonderfully,” he said. Mr. Burnham graduated from Carleton in 2008 and is now working toward a Ph.D. in the School of Information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
New Additions
This year, U.S. News tried to more directly measure colleges’ commitment to undergraduate teaching. It added a ranking in this category based on the responses to a new question in the peer-assessment survey. The question asked respondents to list institutions that had an “unusual commitment to teaching,” said Mr. Morse, the magazine’s data-research director. A college had to receive at least seven mentions to make the list, which includes 80 colleges. Dartmouth College got the No. 1 spot among national universities, and Pomona College did for liberal-arts colleges.
The new category “was prompted by the fact that by just using raw statistical data, we were not capturing the entire picture of a school,” Mr. Morse said. “It was something we were not directly measuring.”
This year, U.S. News also tweaked its methodology for the overall rankings. In previous years, when factoring entrance-test scores into a college’s rank, the magazine included only the scores from either the ACT or SAT, whichever one was taken by a majority of applicants at a particular college. This year, however, the magazine combined the scores from both tests. Mr. Morse says the change happened for two reasons: “This is a better way to measure the entire class. And with the rise of the ACT, more and more schools are becoming mixed.”
For most colleges, he said, the change did not make a significant difference in their rank.
Eric Hoover contributed to this report.
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College Rankings and Dueling Mission Statements
By Christopher C. Morphew and Barrett J. Taylor
The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009
Selling the art collection because the endowment has lost value? Stealing another university’s statement on plagiarism and calling it your own? Signing a secret agreement with a tobacco company that allows them to deep-six your scientists’ research findings? Each of those recent, highly publicized administrative missteps serves as a reminder that, in higher education, an institution’s reputation is fundamental to its well-being. Such decisions demonstrate a misunderstanding of higher education’s norms and can be hazardous to an institution’s health.
More students can be recruited, faculty members can be replaced, and financial resources can be recouped. But once tarnished by acts that demonstrate its willingness to flaunt organizational mores, a college or university cannot easily reconstruct its reputation. In such cases, the legitimacy of the institution in question will take a substantial beating, from which it may take years to recover.
Higher education’s goals and outputs are notoriously difficult to quantify. Without bottom lines by which they may be measured, colleges tend to be evaluated by the extent to which they cohere with existing expectations of what a legitimate college ought to be. Maintaining your institutional status in higher education means doing the things you should do and not doing the things you should not do. Institutions should, for example, have formal policies on plagiarism, but they should not steal them from others. But what about the ways in which colleges communicate to different audiences?
We were reminded of those norms when, during a recent research project, we learned that many higher-education institutions use more than one mission statement—one on their Web page and another for the Web site of U.S. News & World Report, which is announcing its new college and university rankings Thursday. While some may view that practice as a minor transgression of the norms to which colleges should comply, we argue that publishing more than one mission statement undermines the symbolic value of such a statement, devalues the investment of people on the campus in the mission statement, and diminishes the authority of the administration that asked for that investment. In sum, it calls into question the legitimacy of the college or university, as well as its leaders.
Ostensibly, mission statements are sacred artifacts for colleges. Virtually every higher-education institution has gone through a well-considered process to produce a mission statement describing its distinct qualities and values, with the assumption that those documents will be the official and exclusive means of communicating organizational identity. Extraordinary amounts of time and resources are expended toward the construction of these documents. Working committees are convened and reconvened, drafts are considered and reconsidered, and word choices are painstakingly debated. Hundreds of hours are put into wordsmithing these formal descriptions of organizational purpose.
Given all the sweat equity invested in mission statements, we were surprised to learn that a majority of the 100 private nonprofit baccalaureate colleges that we sampled in a recent study of mission statements published at least two versions. Intrigued by those dueling statements, we compared the institutions’ USNews.com mission statements with their official ones. What we found was telling.
The institutions’ official mission statements tended to make claims consistent with prestige-conferring standards long associated with liberal-arts education. Colleges that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classified as “arts and sciences focus” often mentioned admission selectivity and liberal-arts commitments, and linked residential life with a holistic undergraduate education. Gettysburg College’s official mission statement, for example, describes “a national, residential, undergraduate college committed to a liberal education.” Institutions that offered professional programs also cautiously situated themselves in the “liberal-arts tradition” or as having a curriculum “based in the liberal arts.” Colleges such as Waldorf, which acknowledged its mission of providing “professional skills for careers,” typically did so with a nominal “liberal-arts foundation” tag.
By contrast, the mission statements of those same institutions on USNews.com were laden with the alluringly vague imagery and laundry lists of programs and extracurricular activities. William Penn University noted its “competitive NAIA athletics, … extracurricular activities, and … career-centered internships.” Very small colleges such as Virginia Intermont and Sweet Briar highlighted their location or small classes. Consistent use of recruitment language dominated the USNews.com statements of the institutions we studied.
One the one hand, we expected the information provided by colleges and universities at USNews.com to perform a recruitment function. After all, why else were the documents included in a fee-based online resource for prospective students? On the other hand, we did not expect to find wholly different descriptions of purpose labeled as “mission statements.” Yet that is precisely what we found. Only six of 100 colleges submitted an official mission statement to USNews.com, while 52 submitted a document that we classified as entirely dissimilar to the official mission statement.
Our finding lends itself to two different interpretations. We might simply conclude that mission statements do not matter. We would not be the first to conclude this. Richard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing in The Chronicle in 1979, expressed skepticism about the value of mission statements. There is appeal to this interpretation. Once we grant that mission statements do not matter very much, then the presence of multiple incarnations of the mission statement proves no more troubling than would inconsistencies in campus parking policies.
We concede that a mission statement may only rarely influence action on a campus. Nonetheless, we reject the suggestion that mission statements do not matter. Instead we posit that the 100 institutions we studied developed several mission statements precisely because those documents matter so much—they are on the frontlines of these institutions’ communication efforts. We found such documents on USNews.com after all, not in a campus administrator’s file cabinet. Mission statements are effective recruitment tools precisely because they carry connotations of institutional legitimacy. A prospective student assumes that a mission statement reflects the essential nature of the organization as a whole. Legitimacy is also the explanation given when faculty and staff members are asked to give their time to update the college’s mission statement.
Unlike technical efficiency, which may be achieved and applied far away from prying eyes, legitimacy exists only when conferred by others. The real significance of mission statements therefore lies not in what the mission statements actually do but in what everyone believes they are capable of doing. As John W. Meyer wrote in the American Journal of Sociology, “The Effects of Education as an Institution,” education provides a vital credential not because the person making the hiring decision believes that education fits people for success in modern society, but because he or she believes that everyone else believes in education. Just so, mission statements matter because of their normative value: Everyone believes that everyone else believes that these statements speak for the organization as a whole.
This is what Meyer and Brian Rowan, also termed the “logic of confidence.” Prospective students and their parents use the mission statements provided by USNews.com to learn more about colleges and universities. Faculty and staff members at those campuses devote a great deal of time to developing those documents. In both cases, each audience has confidence that the mission statement it sees reflects the values and realities of the organization in question. That confidence has great value, to both the audience members and the specific college or university.
The presence of two or more iterations of a mission statement could seriously undermine and devalue their role. Without the legitimacy conferred by the logic of confidence, mission statements look like any other cynical marketing technique, which suggests that colleges are no different from other companies that use questionable practices to sell their products.
If an institution espouses more than one mission statement, why should anyone—within or outside of the organization—believe in the significance of any one of those documents? We contend that institutions that ignore the investments of their community and the assumptions of their audience risk their legitimacy just as surely as do institutions that plagiarize others’ plagiarism policies.
Colleges and universities are not supposed to trade the academic freedom of their faculty for a grant from a tobacco company, and they are not supposed to represent their essential natures differently when communicating with different audiences. Each of those violations of normative guidelines suggests that the institution’s leaders value administrative expedience more highly than their role as educators and leaders.
Of course, that may not be the case. The fact that it appears to be the case, however, is ultimately our point. Because institutional legitimacy is conferred by others, perceptions of an organization’s behavior may prove far more significant than the realities that occur out of the public eye.
Christopher C. Morphew is a professor of educational policy and leadership studies at the University of Iowa. Barrett J. Taylor is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
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Group Offers Alternative Rankings Based on Curricula
By David Glenn, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009
Leaders of the University of Arkansas might or might not be pleased with how they fared in the new college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. But they can certainly take cheer from a report released on Wednesday by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an advocacy group with a traditionalist bent. The council rated 100 colleges according to the rigor of their course requirements for undergraduates—and Arkansas was one of only a handful of institutions to earn an A.
The report, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities,” gives colleges credit if they require all students to take courses in seven realms: composition, literature, foreign languages, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and natural or physical science.
Five institutions, including Arkansas, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and the United States Military Academy, earned A’s. A much larger group, including Amherst College, Williams College, and Yale University, earned F’s.
“There are a lot of rankings out there,” David Azerrad, a program officer at the council, said in an interview on Wednesday. “But nobody pays attention to what students are learning—to what’s actually taking place in the classroom. So we decided to prepare not only a report that would be useful to administrators, but also a Web site that can put parents in a better position when they’re looking at colleges for their kids.”
The Web site, also called “What Will They Learn?,” was unveiled on Wednesday. It now includes data for 127 colleges, and Mr. Azerrad said many more will be added.
Questioning the Criteria
Like the council’s previous reports, this one has drawn skepticism from some other curriculum advocates.
“As is often the case with ACTA, they have posed some very good questions,” said Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in an interview Wednesday. “But the methodology that they have used to explore those questions is extremely inadequate. They have basically just looked at the course catalogs of 100 colleges, and that’s it.”
It would be better, Ms. Humphreys said, to examine a wider range of colleges and to look more closely at the skills and substantive knowledge that students acquire in the classroom.
Ms. Humphreys also suggested that the council’s report used “extremely narrow criteria” for some of its seven categories.
For example, many of the colleges covered in the report do require all students to take courses in literature, but the report does not give colleges credit for those requirements if students can fulfill them by taking courses on specific authors. “Narrow, single-author, or esoteric courses do not count for this requirement,” the report says, “but introductions to broad subfields (such as British or Latin American literature) do.”
Those rules were necessary, Mr. Azerrad said, because narrow and esoteric courses do not give students a solid grounding in culture. “Colleges pay lip service to the idea of general education,” he said. “In practice, however, when you look at their actual requirements, they’ll have very broad distribution requirements. If you look at Dartmouth, for example, they have a literature requirement. So you might say, Why is ACTA complaining? Well, it’s because there are 300 courses that you can take to fulfill that requirement, including ‘Digital Game Studies.'” (The Chronicle could not immediately verify that point. In Dartmouth’s online course catalog, “Digital Game Studies” appears to be one of the few English courses that does not fulfill the literature requirement.)
The report applies similarly tight rules to composition requirements. Colleges get credit only if students are required to take courses taught by English or composition instructors. But “writing-intensive seminars” in history, political science, or psychology don’t count.
Clark G. Ross, vice president for academic affairs at Davidson College, believes that criterion is silly. Davidson earned a C in the council’s report; it did not get credit for its 11-year-old program that requires all first-year students to take a writing seminar.
“Reports like this do a disservice to the cause of curriculum reform,” Mr. Ross said in an interview on Wednesday. “Frankly, it seems like grandstanding.”
Mr. Ross said that Davidson’s writing seminars all require at least 40 pages of writing over the course of the semester. And the courses have common goals that cover many elements of writing, rhetoric, and composition.
But the council’s report did draw praise on Wednesday from one longtime observer of academe.
Murray A. Sperber, a visiting professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley who has written widely about college athletics and what he sees as the decline of the curriculum, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday that the council’s report “documents higher education’s dirty little secret: Schools are charging more each year and requiring many fewer traditional education courses. … This results in a legion of students with spotty educations and meaningless degrees.”