Magazine unveils new school ratings

Author: Derek Schlickeisen

Middlebury and its top-ranked NESCAC peers are overrated, according to a new guide to colleges released by The Washington Monthly.

The controversial rankings, whose editors purport to ask "not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country," place Middlebury 32nd among 201 liberal arts colleges measured.

The Monthly's rankings come at a time when more commonly-used guides such as U.S.News & World Report's are under fire from within the education world for their alleged over-simplification of what colleges have to offer. To coincide with the start of this academic year, 20 presidents of top liberal arts colleges - including Middlebury's Ronald D. Liebowitz - released on Sep. 7 a statement criticizing "the way in which rankings contribute to a frenzy and to a false sense that educational success or fit can be ranked in a single numerical list."

While conventional rankings measure factors like student-to-faculty ratio and endowment size, the alternative rankings measure three contributions schools make to the public good - the opportunities they offer under-privileged students for upward social mobility, the rate at which their graduates enter public service careers and their research output.

"There are other, equally important ways to judge colleges," the Monthly editors conclude in their introduction to the guide. "We believe that what colleges do matters not just to prospective applicants, but also to the rest of us. After all, America depends on its institutions of higher education for a variety of crucial public tasks."

The case of Rice University in Texas exemplifies the difference between conventional rankings and The Monthly's alternative. The 17th-ranked school on U.S.News' university scale, Rice comes in 103rd on the new scale due to low scores in the categories of social mobility and public service.

"The best little university in Texas has steadily climbed up the U.S.News rankings, all the way to seventeenth, by spending its resources on pursuing students with high SAT scores," the guide reads. "Rice, it appears, is in it for Rice."

Not surprisingly, however, The Monthly's own list has come under fire for reasons similar to its U.S.News counterpart.

"Reducing educational institutions to something that can be numerically compared is like producing Consumer Reports for colleges," said Dean of Admissions Robert Clagett. "The difficulty with any ranking attempt is in choosing the individual parameters that are used to measure schools, because they will invariably produce a biased picture."

Clagett, Liebowitz and other critics of the new rankings point to their narrow focus on what counts as "public service" or "social mobility." In rating a school's contribution to public service, for instance, The Monthly's guide counts participation in only two programs - the Peace Corps and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).

"There's Teach for America and hundreds of other public service programs that our graduates do," said Clagett. "Using just a few criteria does a lot of colleges a disservice."

"What the survey doesn't show is the type of public service that we do best - producing more English teachers and language teachers in the K-12 years than anywhere else on the planet," said Liebowitz. "How many M.A.'s come out of our language schools? How many Bread Loaf graduates teach English? I think those are powerful forms of public service."

The Monthly guide also had no measure for environmental programs or investment green initiatives on campus - forms of service frequently touted by the College's administration.

Whether or not the new rankings offer a better picture than their traditional counterparts, their impact on decision-making likely has yet to be felt - after interviewing a group of seven prospective students visiting the College's admissions office, The Campus found that none had heard of The Monthly's list.

"I guess it makes sense that people are fed up with Princeton Review and U.S.News," said Brianna Vera of New York. "But they're the only ones whose names are really out there."

Clagett emphasized that Middlebury does not use its ratings in any college guide as a selling point for the school - regardless of how high or low those rankings may be.

"It's ultimately a beauty contest," said Clagett. "I suppose it's nice to be considered beautiful, but it's not something we publicize in our literature. I think of rankings as one possible tool for families to use as part of a much larger picture."