I, and the other undersigned presidents, agree that prospective students benefit from having as complete information as possible in making their college choices.

At the same time, we are concerned about the inevitable biases in any single ranking formula, about the admissions frenzy, and the way in which rankings can contribute to that frenzy and to a false sense that educational success or fit can be ranked in a single numerical list.

Since college and ranking agencies should maintain a degree of distance to ensure objectivity, from now on data we make available to college guides will be made public via our Web sites rather than be distributed exclusively to a single entity. Doing so is true to our educational mission and will allow interested parties to use this information for their own benefit. If, for example, class size is their focus, they will have that information. If it is the graduation rate, that will be easy to find. We welcome suggestions for other information we might also provide publicly.

We commit not to mention U.S. News or similar rankings in any of our new publications, since such lists mislead the public into thinking that the complexities of American higher education can be reduced to one number.

Finally, we encourage all colleges and universities to participate in an effort to determine how information about our schools might be improved. As for rankings, we recognize that no degree of protest may make them soon disappear, and hope, therefore, that further discussion will help shape them in ways that will press us to move in ever more socially and educationally useful directions.

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Bates College

Also:

Anthony Marx, Amherst College
Barry Mills, Bowdoin College
Nancy Vickers, Bryn Mawr College
Robert Oden, Carleton College
William D. Adams, Colby College
Rebecca Chopp, Colgate University
Thomas W. Ross, Davidson College
Russell Osgood, Grinnell College
Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton College
Stephen Emerson, Haverford College
Ronald Liebowitz, Middlebury College
David Oxtoby, Pomona College
Alfred Bloom, Swarthmore College
James Jones, Trinity College
Catharine Hill, Vassar College
Kenneth Ruscio, Washington and Lee University
Kim Bottomly, Wellesley College
Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan University
Morton O. Schapiro, Williams College

In the U.S. News & World Report 2006 edition of America’s Best Colleges, Bates ranks 21st nationally among 215 liberal arts colleges. The magazine says its rankings are based on a mix of peer assessment, rates of student retention and graduation, faculty resources, admissions selectivity, financial resources and alumni giving.

Bates was ranked 22nd last year. Since 1987, with the exception of 1991, Bates’ rank has ranged from 18th to 23rd. Bates also was included in U.S. News lists of top 26 liberal arts colleges for “least debt” and “economic diversity.”

In April, Bates was named the nation’s No. 1 “best value” college by The Princeton Review. The New York-based education services company features the school in its “Top 10 Best Value Colleges” ranking list in the 2006 edition of its book, America’s Best Value Colleges.

According to a news release from The Princeton Review, the guide profiles 81 colleges with outstanding academics, generous financial aid packages and relatively low costs. It includes public and private colleges and universities in 35 states.

Bates also is among 81 unranked colleges designated “Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement” by The Princeton Review and Campus Compact.

The Princeton Review’s Best 361 Colleges guidebook, which came out Aug. 23, quotes student comments that Bates is for those seeking “a high-paced rigorous academic college with a low-key, laid-back and fun student body and campus life” and that the college “focuses on students becoming critically and creatively thinking citizens of the world.” The latest guidebook also lists Bates as No. 16 in the nation for “Best College Radio Station,” and No. 17 for “Best Campus Food.”

New to college-ranking publications this year is The Washington Monthly, which ranked Bates 22nd in a list of the nation’s top 30 liberal arts colleges. The Washington Monthly list uses the percentage of students in Army or Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps, the percentage of graduates in the Peace Corps, the percentage of federal work-study grants used for community service projects, the total amount of research spending, the number of doctorates granted in the hard sciences and, as a measure of social mobility, the percentage of students on Pell Grants. “Other guides ask what colleges can do for you,” the magazine announces in the September issue. “We ask what are colleges doing for the country.”

Although it is not a college guidebook, the Teagle Foundation included Bates this year in its list of 13 “overachieving” liberal arts colleges singled out for both high graduation rates and Ph.D. completion by graduates.

In the Sept. 26 story “Want to Go to Harvard Law?” correspondent Elizabeth Bernstein noted that graduate school officials told the Wall Street Journal that, along with the Ivy League schools, the “small liberal arts colleges tend to do a better job of advising their students in areas like picking courses that look good on an application. And when students work directly with professors in small classes, they tend to get better recommendation letters.”

Bates placed 40th in the list of so-called feeder schools, between CBB peers Bowdoin (19) and Colby (46). Topping the list were Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
In its ranking, the Journal considered graduate schools in medicine, business and law. The selected medical schools were Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Francisco and Yale. The business schools were Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Harvard, MIT’s Sloan School and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The law schools were Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and Yale.
The Wall Street Journal said its ranking compared the total number of a college’s 2003 graduates with the number attending the 15 graduate programs this fall. Of the 417 Bates graduates in May 2003, eight are attending the selected graduate schools.

In the most recent edition of The Hidden Ivies:Thirty Colleges of Excellence, Bates is praised for its service-learning opportunities and its consistent top-10 ranking for student participation in international study. It notes that about two-thirds of Bates graduates earn graduate degrees, and includes this summary comment from an administrator on alumni survey findings: “For a college with a long-standing reputation in the sciences, we were surprised to discover we had more graduates whose title was ‘entrepreneur,’ having founded their own businesses, than graduates who were M.D.s”

In the U.S. News & World Report 2003 edition of America’s Best Colleges, Bates is ranked 22nd among 217 liberal arts colleges. The factors the magazine considers include peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and graduation rate performance. This year, U.S. News introduced a new ranking of select schools with outstanding examples of academic programs that lead to student success. In a category called Senior Capstone, Bates ranked eighth: ” . . . these culminating experiences ask students nearing the end of their college years to create a project of some sort that integrates and synthesizes what they’ve learned.”

The only “cool” school from Maine to make the grade, Bates is ranked 45th among the nation’s 50 “coolest colleges” in the October 2002 issue of Seventeen magazine. The Seventeen list features “the 50 schools where girls can get the best college education. We want you to have the knowledge and insight to help make a choice that you can live with for four years—and that unlocks the power an education in the right environment can inspire.” Among those qualities defined as “cool” by the magazine’s editors: “level of professors’ involvement in undergrad work, campus security and easy access to great shopping.” Keeping the audience in mind, they also cited “easy access to great boys.”

The 29th edition of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges leads with this undergraduate’s remarks about Bates: “Batesies make Bates great.” Lauding the faculty, another student said, “You will never meet a more helpful or sincere group of concerned individuals.”

The 2003 Princeton Review: The Best 345 Colleges offers a variety of top-20 lists based on student responses to a series of surveys. The guide’s ratings for Bates include Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates (11th). “The happy students of Bates College agree that ‘Bates is the small academic atmosphere every liberal arts school brags about,’” says the guide, adding, “Students’ primary source of pride is the faculty, which is ‘exceptional. I’m taking introductory classes and my profs are all Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale and Tufts.’”

The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2003 notes that the Lewiston-Auburn area “provides plenty of internships and part-time jobs, a distinct vocational advantage not always found at such at such small colleges.” The guide’s listing concludes with these quotes from Bates students: “‘Bates has a strong sense of community, and students here look out for one another socially and academically,’ says a political science major. One freshman is sold. ‘It’s a fun place,’ the student says. ‘People just seem happy here.’”