College Ratings Systems

I don't make it a secret that I'm opposed to college and university rankings lists.  One article that I hold to be sacred in the argument against ranking colleges and universities is a 2011 article from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called, "The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us." I think this article does an excellent job explaining why a "One Size Fits All" list doesn't actually lead a student to choose the best fit college for them.

I talk about ranking a lot in my job.  I live in Asia and counsel Asian students.  I have found that the high achieving, test driven culture in Korea jumps at the opportunity to rank things.  I have found two reasons for this:

1)  This is a culture of numbers, of ranking its students numerically to see who is the best.  In the public schools, earned grades are not necessarily given out.  Instead, the student's transcript actually reflects the grade earned in relation to the other students in the same class.  For example, the A+ (or numeric equivalent of that) can only be achieved by one person - the person who got the best score - and the grades are given from there.  You could have gotten almost every question on the test correct and received a low grade because lots of other students also did well.  This system also translates to the national university entrance exam.  Students with the top scores go to the top colleges.  There is no holistic review.  It's simply about the score on this one exam.  Many of my current students have told me that they left the Korean public school system because students didn't care about their everyday activities in school.  They only cared about the test.   

2) Most people in Korea attend college in Korea but there are many Korean students who are now receiving their college and graduate school educations in North America and Europe.  If these students return to Korea after graduation, prospective employers don't really know about the reputation of colleges in these far away countries.  Because of this, they turn to a simple rankings list in order to decide if a prospective employee received a good education or not.

Regardless of how I feel about rankings lists, I need to acknowledge their place in my role as a college counselor in Asia.  Still, in reading a recent New York Times article titled "Colleges Rattled As Obama Seeks Ratings System," I can't help but think of my students.  Obama is seeking to creating a rating system of colleges and universities in the United States in order to better inform students about what they will get for their tuition dollar.  This is in response to higher tuition rates and the government's need to know that the billions spent each year on financial aid are going toward helping and not hurting students.

I have mixed feelings about Obama's plan.  One one side, I do think that college has become far too expensive.  My son is five years old and I simply can't imagine how much college will cost when he is ready to go in thirteen years (or how I will pay for it!).  I think that colleges and universities should be examining ways to stop tuition inflation in order to make college a more affordable entity.  On the other side, Obama is simply looking for an easy answer to a difficult problem.  How will yet another one size fits all list really tell the whole story of what a college can give to its students?

I'm interested in hearing what you think!  Please leave a comment!