The language of college rankings is everywhere. At a recent non-Bates NESCAC football game, a student made this joking comment to an official: \u201cC\u2019mon, ref. You gotta give us that call to make it fair. They\u2019re better in academics, and we\u2019re better only in dining services.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you get the joke, you can imagine how deeply the college-ranking mindset has influenced the way families compare prospective colleges. Which is no surprise, says Jim Fergerson, director of institutional planning and analysis. In a newspaper op-ed last summer, Fergerson noted that \u201ccollege rankings are an especially popular fixture of our society because they appear to offer simple answers to guide an increasingly complex, expensive, and life-changing investment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The public\u2019s embrace of the rankings \u2014 particularly the ones published by U.S. News & World Report<\/em> \u2014 frustrates colleges. For example, though the magazine claims a complex methodology, just one factor \u2014 instructional expenditures per student, really a proxy for institutional wealth \u2014 can explain up to 70 percent of the ranking score for the top 25 liberal arts colleges. \u201cWith college costs rising so rapidly, why should the rankings reward higher spending?\u201d asks Fergerson.<\/p>\n Bates and other colleges are now evaluating their participation in future USN&WR<\/em> rankings. At issue is not the flow of information to prospective students (in fact, Bates publishes far more information on its own Web pages than any of the guidebooks request). Rather, it\u2019s about combating the notion that a college experience can be reduced to a ranking number.<\/p>\n To that end, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen and 19 other peers signed a statement<\/a> in September saying that college rankings create \u201ca false sense that educational success or fit can be ranked in a single numerical list.\u201d The presidents agreed \u201cnot to mention U.S. News or similar rankings in any of our new publications.\u201d<\/p>\n Bates has also announced\u00a0its participation<\/a> in the U-CAN Network<\/a>, a Web site offering information on more than 600 colleges and universities. \u201cIt is a start at getting families the consistent information that they want and need as they compare colleges and universities,\u201d said Hansen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The language of college rankings is everywhere. At a recent non-Bates NESCAC…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":916,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-921","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11265,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921\/revisions\/11265"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}